While browsing through my father’s cabinet, I came across an old book—a Geographical Historical Dictionary from 1862. It described all the countries of the world and their histories, including every municipality in the Netherlands. Naturally, I looked up Maastricht, the city where I grew up. Among the information provided, I found a fascinating note: “5 hours walking distance north of Liège.” A century and a half ago, distances were still measured by how long they took on foot! Today, that same 25 km journey can be driven in less than 30 minutes. But 5 hours!
This revelation offers some striking insights. First, it reminds us that neither cars nor even bicycles existed yet. A bicycle could cover that distance in just over an hour today. It’s remarkable how recent these modes of transportation really are. Moreover, it highlights how drastically life has accelerated. We now travel 10 times faster, reflecting how the pace of life has increased by a factor of 10. This is precisely why modern systems feel stretched to a breaking point. The UN’s Circularity Gap Report recently concluded that we’ve consumed as much resources in the last decade as we did throughout the entire 20th century—again, a factor of 10! (Interestingly, many will remember the call in the 1990s to utilize resources 10 times more efficiently.)
Motivated by this discovery, I delved deeper into the 1860s, uncovering a pivotal decade full of extraordinary changes. Consider the bicycle: though it became widely popular around 1900, it was actually invented in the 1860s. A striding bike already existed, but the addition of pedals was a breakthrough in 1864, credited primarily to Paris (although a German inventor may have devised it earlier). Initially, people struggled with cumbersome models like the penny-farthing. It would take another 25 years for chains to appear, and it wasn’t until around 1900 that bicycles start to resemble those we use today.
Unfortunately, around the same time, the automobile was also invented its quick development, pushed the bicycle aside. It’s an intriguing thought experiment to imagine what might have happened if bicycles had already existed 200 years before cars were invented. Would infrastructure have developed differently? Strangely enough, it all happened almost simultaneously: the Belgian Lenoir built the first car with an internal combustion engine in 1862. Like the bicycle, it took some time to catch on. There is a famous photo of New York in 1900—crowded streets, all with horse-drawn carriages, and only one car (and not a single bicycle!).
A third transformative invention emerged during this era: the elevator—vertical transportation. In 1857, Otis installed the first commercial elevator in New York’s E.V. Haughwout department store, and by the 1860s, others followed suit. This invention sparked the rise of ever taller buildings, forever changing urban landscapes and contributing to shifts in livability, resource consumption, and profit-driven development. A marvel of engineering, but with far-reaching, unintended consequences.
During this same decade, slavery was abolished in the Netherlands. While a moral victory, it also marked the beginning of large-scale industrialization, as labor was no longer “free,” and fossil fuels were becoming more readily available. The implications went far beyond labor. In England, for instance, traditional resources like wood were depleted, the land capital, was ‘empty’.
By the mid-19th century, England was already dependent on imported wood from the United States. When the US started using more and more wood itself (for ststeamboats among others), the supplies rapidly dwindled. Fossil fuels provided the much needed escape route. The British government, facing a shortage of wood, switched to iron for the production of ships from now on, enabled by abundant coal by the introduction of steam engines in mines. This decision was pivotal, signifying the shift from biomass to fossil fuels a marked step up in industrialization. If one moment can be identified as the breakthrough for the fossil revolution, it is this.
It’s bitterly ironic that in the same period, John Tyndall first explained the greenhouse effect in 1864 during his lecture On Radiation Through the Earth’s Atmosphere (later published in Contributions to Molecular Physics in 1872). Later in the century, Svante Arrhenius would be the first to warn about the long-term consequences of this phenomenon.
Meanwhile, land was still essential for food production. Tragically, concerns about the consequences of land exploitation were already being raised 150 years ago. Henry George working on “Our Land and Land Policy”, argued that land was a form of capital essential for the common person’s livelihood. He noted that the surplus value of land and labor was not being reinvested but skimmed off, leading to profound societal consequences. This would later culminate in his more famous work, Progress and Poverty, published in 1879.
Tragic was the fate of Edo-period Japan, the only society at the time still thriving without fossil fuels. For 250 years (1600–1868), Japan had functioned in isolation, achieving remarkable efficiency in recycling, resource management, and sustainable forestry. The iconic Japanese woodblock prints depicting forested mountainsides symbolize this equilibrium. However, in 1868, the United States forced Japan to open its borders. Lacking steel and modern weaponry, Japan was compelled to follow the same path as the rest of the industrializing world—a path that, on hindsight, proved disastrous.
In my view, the 1860s were perhaps the most crucial decade of the past few centuries—a monumental turning point in humanity’s relationship with the planet. Closing my father’s book, I wondered: what if we had stuck with bicycles? A trip to Liège in two hours—2.5 times faster than walking – who knows what the world might have been like…
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Note: There was much more happening, of course. Mendeleev published the first periodic table, and Maxwell introduced his famous equations. Nobel invented dynamite, and the first transatlantic communication cable was laid—during the American Civil War, no less. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, and the first modern typewriter was introduced in 1868.
The world’s first metro system was completed in London, running from Paddington to Farringdon. In England, the Football Association was established, making it the oldest football governing body in the world. Meanwhile, in Geneva, the Red Cross was founded by representatives from various countries under the leadership of Henri Dunant.
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[1] factor 10 : https://www.ronaldrovers.com/plus-or-minus-factor-20-is-factor-400/
[2] the bicycle fiets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle
[3] Read more at the ANSI Blog: A Brief History of Elevators https://blog.ansi.org/?p=7069
[4] highrise: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/how-to-avoid-highrise-buildings/
[6] book: Post fossil Livingcurrently in dutch, soon in English
[7] Tyndall: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0016003264902583
[8] Arrhenius: https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
[9] George https://ronaldrovers.nl/het-nieuwe-vermogen-is-land-als-kapitaal/
[10] see 6 and: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/the-real-capital-is-land/
