1522: Around the world
43K miles/5mph Ferdinand Magellan started the first trip around the globe but died en route. Juan Sebastián del Cano took charge, completing the circumnavigation—which tacked on mileage to curve around continents—in 37 months.
1848: A mile a minute
26 miles/60 mph Speed gains can be slow; sailboats, for one, top horses by only a mile or so per hour. But trains far outpaced every other mode of their era. “The Antelope” supposedly covered a mile in a minute chugging from Boston to Lawrence, Mass.
1903: The first flight
0.02 miles/7 mph Our aerial debut didn’t get us far: The Wright Flyer managed the pace of a brisk jog for just 12 seconds. But the trip set off a ferocious international race. By the ’20s, aviators were pushing into the 200 and 300 mph range.
1904: Speeding to triple digits
0.62 miles/103 mph It took decades for jets to reach the masses. Cars got travelers off the rails in the meantime. Our species hit the century mark when driver Louis Rigolly screamed down a beach in Belgium in his signature French racer.
1919: Trans-Atlantic triumph
1890 miles/118 mph British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the inaugural nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in a modified WWI bomber plane. They managed to beat the earliest rigid airship crossing (picture a Zeppelin) by a month. RELATED VIDEO:
1961: Spin through space
25K miles/17K mph When Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history by visiting space, he swiftly orbited the planet—doing in 108 minutes what took del Cano three years by ship. Astronauts on ISS now do it 16 times a day. This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 Transportation issue of Popular Science.
