New Technology In The Old West
I’m Susan Allen your host of Open Range. Technology can be overwhelming, just attempting to comprehend the speed that information travels causes me to feel left behind. It wasn’t much different in the old west, and just like instant messenger... means of communication could become out dated in a mere matter of months. Here’s a word from our sponsor. It is hard to imagine that tweets and twitter could oon go the way of instant messenger and become obsolete, it wasn’t much different in the rural West in the late 1800.’s Back then people were stunned by a revolutionary method of delivering mail that was also initiated by bold entrepreneurs, the Bill Gates of the cowboy era . While it took only a year and half to become obsolete unlike instant messenger or land lines the fame and mystique of the Pony Express continues even today to be immortalized in books and movies. Originally the pony express carried mail from St. Joseph Missouri to Sacramento. People were amazed that letters that once took months to arrive could reach their destination in ten days or less. The Pony Express became another yet another bleep in telecommunications history in October 1861 when the transcontinental telegraph replaced horses and riders. And I imagine like today there were some folks that quickly embraced new technology and other’s like me that yearned for the ponies .
