Today marks the 36th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.

The 36th Center of Progress is Seville during Europe’s Age of Discovery, from the mid-15th to the mid-16th century, when the city was a major trade port at the forefront of progress in maritime navigation. In 1519, a five-ship expedition departed Seville on a quest to sail around the world. In 1522, only a single ship from that expedition returned, the galleon Victoria. And victorious she was, having sailed 42,000 miles to successfully circumnavigate the globe—a milestone in the history of navigation.

Today, Seville is the capital, as well as the most populous and richest city, in Andalusia, and its harbor remains busy as Spain’s only river port. The port handles exports such as wine, fruit (including oranges, which famously grow throughout and perfume the city of Seville), olives, and minerals. The port also handles imports, including oil and coal. Shipbuilding is a major part of the city’s economy, alongside the services industry and tourism. The city is known as the world capital of flamenco dancing, and throughout the city there are frequent performances of that dance form, which is likely a fusion of Asian and European dance forms brought about by a wave of immigration from northwest India to Andalusia between the 9th and 14th centuries. The city is also known among tourists for its bullfighting shows and its religiosity, with many believers thronging to the city during its Santa Semana (Easter Holy Week) festivities. The city is also the setting of several famous operas, including the Barber of Seville. 

Seville’s architectural wonders have been featured as backdrops in famous movies and television series, including Star Wars and Game of Thrones. While the city contains notable modernist buildings, such as the world’s largest timber-framed structure, the distinctive Las Setas (the Mushrooms), Seville remains best-known for its historic architecture. The city’s old town contains no less than three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. One is the Mudéjar-style Alcázar royal palace, which was largely built by Castilians in the 14th century on the site of an earlier Abbadid dynasty–era (1023–1091) fortress, incorporating some of the original structures, to house King Peter the Cruel (1334–1369). To this day, Spain’s royal family continues to occupy the Alcázar when visiting Seville, making it Europe’s oldest royal palace still in use.

Another World Heritage Site is the Seville Cathedral, which took more than a century to build. Completed in 1507, it presented an extravagant sight during Seville’s golden age of trade, just as it does today. It remains the world’s largest Gothic-style church, as well as the fourth-largest church of any kind. It is said that the original construction committee was tasked to create something “so beautiful and so magnificent that those who see it will think we are mad.” The surrounding orange trees delight the church’s visitors with Seville’s trademark scent.

The city’s final World Heritage Site is the General Archive of the Indies. It was commissioned in 1572 by King Philip the Prudent (1527–1598), who oversaw the peak of the Spanish Empire, to serve as the Merchants’ Exchange House (Casa Lonja de Mercaderes) for Seville’s tradespeople to conduct business related to their New World voyages. Throughout its history, different portions of the enormous Renaissance building have variously served such diverse functions as a painting academy, a grain storehouse, and a shelter for orphans and widows. As its current name suggests, the General Archive of the Indies now serves as a repository of archival documents illustrating the history of the Spanish Empire and its transatlantic trade.

According to mythology, Seville’s founder was none other than the famous demigod hero of classical literature, Hercules. A garden square called the Alameda de Hércules (Hercules mall), built in 1574, greets visitors to this day with a towering statue of the hero. More precisely, the city’s mythical founder was the Phoenician god Melqart, who later became identified with Hercules. The oldest part of Seville was likely constructed around the 8th century BC, on an island in the Guadalquivir River (derived from the Arabic al-wādī l-kabīr, meaning “the great river”). Seville was multicultural from its inception, defined by a mingling of the Tartessians, an indigenous Iberian people, and Phoenicians, who were lured by the city’s potential as a trade port.

Seville’s geography perhaps destined it to become a major port. The city marks the point on the 408-mile-long Guadalquivir beyond which ships are unable to travel farther inland. As Spain’s only major navigable river, the Guadalquivir has been used to transport goods since at least the 8th century BC when the ancient Phoenicians moved precious metals that were mined in Spain by boat, carrying them out to sea and delivering the cargo to the world’s first major port at Byblos, in what is today Lebanon, as well as to the Assyrians. The river was not only the main artery of trade traffic in and out of Andalusia, but it provided access to the Atlantic, which became critical for exploration of the New World and, ultimately, the achievement of circumnavigating the globe.

Over the years, Seville was ruled by Carthaginians, Romans (whose city walls remain partially intact), Visigoths, Moors, and Castilians. The city was always a prominent trade gateway and was progressively diversified by a constant influx of goods and people from different cultures. But it was during Spain’s Golden Age, at the height of the Spanish Empire’s transatlantic trade in the 16th century, that Seville grew to be one of the largest cities in Western Europe.

If you could visit Seville during its glory days, you would enter an intoxicating metropolis with eclectic architecture epitomizing centuries of cultural intermingling. As a Spanish rhyme goes, “Quien no ha visto Sevilla, no ha visto maravilla.” (He who has not seen Seville, has not seen wonder.) Walking amongst the crowds along the city’s intricately tiled pathways and mosaicked plazas, you would have seen a thriving cosmopolitan commercial center that housed merchants from across the continent, and you would have heard not only Spanish, but English, Flemish, and Italian, among other languages. While Islam was outlawed in 1502, there remained a significant Moorish, formerly Muslim minority, known as moriscos, some of whom continued to practice Islam in secret. Enslaved Africans also would have been present. The streets would be abuzz with talk of the latest groundbreaking maritime expeditions, as Europe’s great powers competed for mastery of oceanic trade avenues and raced to be the first to discover promising sea routes and uncharted lands.

In 1503, Spain granted Seville exclusive trading rights with the New World, and the city prospered. But, as the British historian Richard Cavendish has noted, “The idea that such a web of human activity could be controlled by a bureaucracy proved hopelessly unrealistic and for all the cascade of silver, Spain remained a poor country.” The weight that Seville’s monopoly and other policies limiting economic freedom put on the Spanish economy contributed to the government’s financial troubles, including nine eventual bankruptcies of the Spanish monarchy (in 1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1662, and 1666). Government-backed privileges enjoyed by the elites in areas ranging from trade to land management, monetary inflation from an influx of New World silver, and high government war spending were some of the factors that stymied economic development. Seville’s golden age was short-lived, ending when the crown transferred control of New World trade to Cádiz in 1717.

Among 16^th-century Seville’s crowds, you might have glimpsed the renowned novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), who studied at the Jesuit college in Seville in the 1560s and returned to the city in 1588 for a few years. Seville featured in several of his works, for example, by providing the setting for his novel about the city’s organized crime scene, Rinconete y Cortadillo. In one poem, Cervantes characterized the city this way: “O great Seville! Like Rome triumphant in spirit and nobility.” In Cervantes’s magnum opus, Don Quixote, the eponymous central character of that groundbreaking novel (first published in 1605), receives an invitation to visit Seville because “it was just the place to find adventure, for in every street and on every street corner there were more adventures than in any other place.” 

And a sense of adventure surely must have filled the air on the fateful day when an expedition departed Seville’s harbor on a quest to circumnavigate the globe. The achievement came at a cost: the expedition set out with some 260 people, but only 18 of them returned to Seville after circumnavigating. True to Seville’s multicultural reputation, the survivors who completed the voyage represented a number of nationalities. There were three Galicians, three Castilians, two Greeks, a Venetian supernumerary, a Genoese chief steward, a Portuguese mariner, a German gunner, and six Basque people, including the expedition’s ultimate captain, Juan Sebastián Elcano (c. 1486–1526). The Venetian, Antonio Pigafetta (c. 1491–c. 1531), kept precise journals chronicling the voyage, which many scholars consider the most reliable account of the expedition. Absent from the return was the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521), who had planned the Spanish expedition, but died en route in the Philippines. 

Europe’s Age of Discovery saw competition between many countries, but Portugal and Spain led the way. At first, Portugal dominated, discovering and claiming the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and Azores in 1419 and 1427, respectively, and finding a game-changing sea route to India in 1498, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese focus on navigation even resulted in the unusual royal nickname of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). In 1501, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), while on a Portuguese expedition looking for another maritime route to Asia, discovered what he called the New World—and from his name we get the term “America.” Advances in shipbuilding, including the development of a stabler, faster, and more maneuverable kind of ship called the galleon toward the beginning of the 16th century further accelerated progress in navigation.

While the governments sponsoring the expeditions may have been rivals, major voyages tended to be enterprises of multicultural cooperation, with crew members hailing from many countries—including Spaniards serving on Portuguese expeditions and vice versa, as the Spanish and Portuguese crowns competed to hire the best talent. Spain began to challenge Portugal’s supremacy of the seas in part thanks to its openness to expertise from abroad. It was Spain that financed the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus’s (1451–1506) famous 1492 voyage to the Americas, which he mistook for the East Indies. (The West Indies owe their name to that mistake, and Columbia, derived from Columbus’s name, remains a poetic term for America). The Florence-born Vespucci died a Spanish citizen in Seville, with the title of Spain’s chief navigator, in 1512. The Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519) became the first European to cross the Americas to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, and in 1516 Juan Díaz de Solís (1470–1516), who may have been born in either Seville or Lisbon, became the first European to reach Uruguay, while on a Spanish expedition. 

Magellan dreamed of finding a direct trade route to the Spice Islands, in what is today Indonesia, that avoided having to go around Africa with its many rocky outcrops. The treacherous Cape of Good Hope route had become known as a ship graveyard. After repeated failed attempts to solicit funding for his voyage from Portugal’s monarch, Magellan went to Seville in 1517 to try his luck with the Spanish crown. Supportive of Magellan’s vision, but heavily in debt, Spain’s teenaged king (the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) was unable to fully fund the voyage. The private sector stepped in to make Magellan’s expedition possible. Cristóbal de Haro (d. 1541), a Burgos-born financier and merchant connected to the Fuggers, a prominent German banker family, provided the critical remaining funds that were needed for the voyage, as well as supplying goods for the crew to barter.

In 1519, Magellan departed Seville with a five-ship fleet consisting of the flagship Trinidad, the San Antonio, the carrack Concepción, the Santiago, and the Victoria. The Victoria was born as the Santa Maria in the shipyards of Ondarroa in Spain’s north, and was used for trade between Castile and England before the crown purchased the vessel in 1518. Magellan renamed her after his favorite chapel in Seville, the Santa María de la Victoria.

After a long journey across the Atlantic and travels along the South American coast in search of a route to the Pacific, the Santiago was wrecked in an Argentinian river in 1520 during a storm. Later that year, the expedition discovered a navigable sea route to cross the Americas to the Pacific through Chile, which was later given the name Strait of Magellan. Until the Panama Canal’s completion in 1914, the strait provided the only relatively safe maritime path between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. At the strait, the San Antonio deserted the expedition and returned to Spain. To justify their desertion, the crew described Magellan as a psychopath. His reputation in Seville suffered and his wife and child were sentenced to house arrest. It was only after Pigafetta disseminated his account of the voyage that Magellan’s reputation recovered. To this day, opinions of Magellan vary wildly.

After crossing the strait, Magellan named the body of water beyond it the Pacific Ocean because its waters were peaceful when he entered it. Unaware of the ocean’s vastness, the explorers expected to cross it in a few days, but it took months before they made landfall. By that point, the crew had eaten through their food supply and were reduced to devouring ship rats and sawdust. The majority developed scurvy, a condition caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, and many died of malnutrition.

But their troubles did not end when they finally reached Guam and the Philippines. An enslaved crew member and native speaker of Malay, Enrique of Malacca (1495–after 1522), conversed successfully with the locals, proving that they had indeed reached Asia. He may have been the first person to circumnavigate the world. The expedition soon became embroiled in conflict—the Battle of Mactan. Magellan led a contingent of his crew to fight for a local ruler, Humabon of Cebu, against the warriors of Lapulapu, who was the chieftain of Mactan, an island located about a mile east of Cebu. While Magellan’s crew was better armed, Lapulapu’s men outnumbered them, and they killed Magellan with a poisoned arrow. Today, Indonesians celebrate a holiday honoring Lapulapu for defeating the foreign force, and a prominent shrine in Mactan features a statue of Lapulapu and a mural painting of Magellan and Lapulapu in combat. According to Pigafetta, after the crew refused to free Enrique upon Magellan’s death, as specified in the latter’s will, Enrique successfully conspired with Humabon to arrange their extermination and his own freedom. Humabon invited part of the expedition, including the crew astrologer, San Martin of Seville, to a feast and had them massacred. The expedition’s survivors scuttled (deliberately sunk) the Concepción in 1521 because they no longer had enough men to crew three ships, and the Trinidad later broke down in the Spice Islands.

When the Victoria finally docked in Seville’s harbor three years after her departure, loaded with spices, she fired off salutes with the expedition’s remaining gunpowder. Pale and emaciated, the crew slowly disembarked, forever scarred by the memory of mutinies, disease, starvation, war, and storms at sea. Their leader Elcano called them “the skinniest men there ever were.” The cheering multitudes of Sevillians that greeted them handed out candles and applauded as the expedition members walked shakily and wordlessly to their ship’s namesake, the shrine of Santa María de la Victoria, to give thanks for their survival. Today, a slab in the cathedral honors them. Throughout their ordeal, the first circumnavigators of the earth contributed profoundly to humanity’s navigational understanding: they found the Strait of Magellan, learned of the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, and confirmed that the world was round. The spices they transported to Seville were valuable, but the greatest treasure they brought home was their hard-won navigational knowledge. 

Bursting with mercantile activity and adventure-seekers from across Europe, 16th-century Seville gave humanity the first expedition to circle the world, which was arguably “the greatest sea voyage in the Age of Discovery.” That age ushered in a new phase of sea-based globalization that expanded humanity’s horizons, allowing the mapping of the world. As distant civilizations came into contact, brutal conflict often occurred, including the transatlantic slave trade and colonial power struggles. But the global interconnectedness enabled by mankind’s newfound navigational expertise ultimately helped create modern society, with far-reaching exchange of scientific knowledge and the prosperity generated by worldwide trade. Financed by both kings and merchants, the expeditions that departed Seville’s harbor undoubtedly changed the world. It is for those reasons that Seville has found its way to being our 36th Center of Progress.

Today marks the twenty-fifth installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.

Our twenty-fifth Center of Progress is Chicago during the Age of Steam. Chicago played a central role in the popularization of rail transportation and is the most important railroad center in North America today.

With around 2.7 million inhabitants, Chicago is the third most populous city in the United States. It is a major hub of commerce, boasting a diverse economy. As the city that erected the first modern skyscraper in 1885, Chicago is well-known for its distinctive buildings and other contributions to architecture. For example, the so-called Windy City is home to the 1,450-foot-tall Willis Tower, previously called the Sears Tower. That structure was the tallest building in the world for almost a quarter century. It is still the third-tallest building in the United States, and its observation deck now serves as a tourist attraction.

The city is also famous for its music, food (such as the city’s signature deep-dish pizza), arts scene, sports (particularly the storied Chicago Cubs baseball team), and research universities. Those include Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. The latter gave the world the influential Chicago school of economics. Chicago is a cultural mixing bowl with large Italian-, Polish- and Irish-American populations, among others. Every year, during the St. Patrick’s Day celebration, which honors the patron saint of Ireland, the Chicago River that flows through the city is dyed green.

Even putting railroads aside, Chicago is an important transportation center. The city’s O’Hare International Airport ranks as the sixth busiest in the world and the third busiest in the country. And the area surrounding Chicago has the largest number of federal highways in the United States.

The site where Chicago now stands was first inhabited by various native tribes. Chicago’s attractive location between the Great Lakes and navigable Mississippi River waterways made it a transportation center even then. The first non-native settlers of the area spoke French. The name “Chicago” comes from the French pronunciation of a word used by the local indigenous people for a kind of wild garlic that grew abundantly in the area. (In fact, the vegetable still abounds and can be found in many Chicago restaurant dishes and artisan grocery stores).

The first non-indigenous Chicagoan was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (before 1750–1818), a frontiersman of African descent who married a native woman and settled in the area. He made a living as a trader and is widely considered to be “Chicago’s founder.” Point du Sable’s business flourished and made him into a wealthy man. The small settlement he began at the mouth of the Chicago River would one day help to enrich humanity.

Chicago was rural at first. The town was officially incorporated in 1833 with a modest population of just 350 residents. However, the settlement was surrounded by rich farmland and well-situated to transport food by boat throughout the Great Lakes region. As early as the 1830s, entrepreneurs saw Chicago’s potential as a transportation hub and began buying land in a flurry of speculation. By 1840, the little “boom town” boasted four thousand inhabitants. By 1850 it had almost thirty thousand people.

Then the trains started arriving, and the city was never the same. Chicago’s inaugural railroad was the Galena and Chicago Union. It welcomed its first locomotive, “The Pioneer,” on October 10, 1848. Nearly overnight, the city became a major commercial center. In 1852, one Chicagoan asked, “Can it be wondered at, that our city doubles its population within three years; that men who were trading in small seven-by-nine tenements, now find splendid brick or marble stores scarcely large enough to accommodate their customers?”

A stunned British visitor to Chicago during the 1850s wrote, “The growth of this city is one of the most amazing things in the history of modern civilization.” He referred to Chicago as “the lightning city.” Starting in 1857, durable steel rails—still the standard around the globe—replaced cast-iron rails. That innovation allowed trains to move twice as fast as before, greatly improving trains’ practicality and further boosting steam transportation.

Chicago’s rapidly rising population brought new public health challenges. An insufficient waste-drainage system allowed pathogens to infect the water supply and caused outbreaks of illnesses such as typhoid and dysentery. One 1854 bout of cholera killed six percent of the city’s population. Recognizing the problem, private property owners and city leaders cooperated to improve the city’s drainage system in the late 1850s and 1860s. To make room for new sewers, they lifted the city fourteen feet in a Herculean feat of engineering. The “Raising of Chicago,” as the endeavor came to be known, was accomplished piecemeal by lifting the city’s massive brick buildings, streets, and sidewalks using large jackscrews operated by hundreds of men. If that is difficult to imagine, here is a visual. It was perhaps the most striking event of the modern sanitation movement that Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton partly credits with the dramatic rise in human life expectancy.

By 1870, Chicago’s population had grown to almost 300,000 souls. Then tragedy struck. On a series of dry October days in 1871, a fire swept through Chicago. The flames claimed some 300 lives, destroyed around 17,500 buildings, and left more than 100,000 Chicagoans (i.e., over a third of the city’s people) homeless. According to legend, the Great Chicago Fire was sparked by a lantern kicked over by a cow belonging to Catherine O’Leary (1827–1895), an Irish immigrant. The fire’s true origin remains a mystery. But the tale of “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow” has entered popular culture, appearing in numerous songs and films. Regrettably, the story was fueled by anti-Irish sentiment. Chicago’s city council officially exonerated the O’Leary family and the infamous cow in 1997, to the relief of Mrs. O’Leary’s great-great-grandchildren.

Chicago rose from the ashes like a mythic phoenix to make its greatest contributions to human progress. After the Great Chicago Fire, the city was rebuilt around the rail industry. Chicago’s central location helped the city to contribute to the meteoric rise of rail-based commercial transportation. Recognizing Chicago’s prime location, most railroad companies building westward chose the city for their headquarters. The city thus also became a major manufacturing center for railroad equipment.

The roar of passenger and freight trains soon filled the air around the city’s six bustling inter-city terminals. Municipal and regional commuter trains also appeared and redefined intracity transport. Chicago’s Union Station still looks as it did during the Golden Age of rail and is today the United States’ third busiest train station.

Recent research suggests that the development of a nationwide transportation system, particularly railroads, helped the United States urbanize and industrialize in the 19th century. The “transportation revolution” made it easier for rural workers to relocate to urban locations and take up manufacturing work. Trains also let goods flow more quickly across the country, allowing for greater regional economic specialization. As the country’s Northeast region industrialized, the Midwest earned its nickname, “America’s Breadbasket,” by producing wheat to support the country’s swelling population.

Freight trains loaded with goods from other cities arrived at the central yards of Chicago. There, workers classified the goods. They then transferred the arrivals to massive sorting yards on the city’s outskirts.

As Chicago prospered, the city became a center of culture and innovation, with particularly notable contributions to transportation technology. As host of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Chicago gave humanity several new inventions. Those included the Ferris Wheel (also called the Chicago Wheel), the moving walkway, and the first third rail.

By 1900, Chicago was the fifth most populous city in the world and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. If you could visit Chicago during the Age of Steam, you would enter a city jam-packed with pedestrians, horse-drawn carts, streetcars, and, of course, trains. Around two thousand trains, including freight trains, arrived and departed the city each day. Rail transport had come a long way from the days when people doubted whether steam-locomotives could outrace horses.

Steam transportation helped create the modern world, and no city was more central to the so-called rail revolution than Chicago. It was once commonly said that “all roads lead to Rome.” That city’s groundbreaking road system earned Rome its place as our ninth Center of Progress. Today, it could as easily be said that “all railways lead to Chicago.” For lending steam to urbanization, industrialization, and ultimately the Great Enrichment, Chicago during the Golden Age of train travel is rightly our 25th Center of Progress.

In a January 4 article in The Telegraph, Anne Hanley reminisced about her recent trip to Venice. “Venice’s inhabitants were outnumbered by visitors,” she observed. “Around 54,000 under-pressure locals shared their city with just over 62,000 incomers … [and] that, for La Serenissima, is a ‘quiet’ day,” she continued. The city, she concluded, is being “killed” by tourism and will not be saved by new taxes levied on visitors.

As disposable incomes in previously underdeveloped countries increase and transport costs decline, global tourism will continue to expand. Overcrowding in major tourist spots, like Venice, can be unpleasant. I know. I have seen and experienced it firsthand. But, democratisation of travel has an upside. Millions of people are getting the opportunity to see the world for the first time and that is something worth celebrating.

As with so much else in the past, travelling was difficult and often dangerous.

Roads, where they existed, were rutted. Sailing was hazardous. Highwaymen and pirates were ubiquitous. Moreover, a great many people were not free to travel. Serfs and slaves could not journey without their masters’ permission. Similarly, women were discouraged from travelling unaccompanied. Most people could not afford to buy or rent a horse and had to walk long distances. Travel was also limited to daylight hours, meaning the window of opportunity was much smaller, especially in winter.  And when on their journey, travellers were often preyed upon by unscrupulous innkeepers.

That said, a small percentage of the population did get to travel – for trade, on pilgrimages, and into war.

Travel for pleasure or out of curiosity is a relatively modern phenomenon. It was popularised, at least in the European context, by wealthy young noblemen who, beginning in the 17th century, started to undertake “The Grand Tour” of European cities, including Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome, to take in the ancient monuments and works of art. These educational rites of passage were expensive and time-consuming. Consequently, they were restricted to rich “gentlemen of leisure.”

The cost and convenience of travel dramatically improved with the advent of the steam engine. In the 19th century, trains enabled unprecedented numbers of people to travel within countries, while steamships sped up international travel. Early steamships cut the sailing time from London to New York from about six weeks to about 15 days. By the middle of the 20th century, ocean liners like the SS United States could make the trip in less than four days. Today, an aeroplane can fly between the two cities in 8 hours. Commercial air travel took off between the world wars, but flying remained expensive for decades to come. In 1955, for example, a one-way ticket from London to New York cost over $2,737 in today’s money. Economy class didn’t exist, so only the very rich got to fly. Today, it is possible to get from New York to London for as little as $200.

The quality of travel has changed as well. In his 1998 book, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, Michael Ignatieff notes that in the spring of 1944, the British philosopher “found himself on an interminable transatlantic flight [from Washington, D.C.] to London. In those days the cabins were not pressurised and travellers had to spend the long hours in the dark, breathing through an oxygen tube. Unable to sleep – for fear that the tube would slip out of his mouth – Isaiah remained awake throughout the night in a dark, cold, droning aircraft, with nothing to else to do but think.” What Berlin lost in discomfort, the world gained in philosophy.

Today, those of us stuck at the back of planes often bemoan the discomfort of long-haul flying. But, compared to mid-20th century air travel, flights today are positively blissful. Unsurprisingly, the numbers of international passengers keep rising.

According to The World Tourism Organisation, 524 million people got to travel to a foreign country in 1995. That number grew to 1.245 billion in 2016, a 138 per cent increase. Over the same time period, the share of global travel undertaken by residents of high income countries declined from 72 to 60 per cent. The share of travellers from upper middle income countries rose from 8.5 to 27 per cent. Residents of lower middle income countries increased their share of global travel from 2.5 percent to 11 percent. As in so many areas of modern capitalism, a luxury that was once reserved for a tiny sliver of society is now available to an ever-increasing number of people throughout the world.

This first appeared in CapX.

August 3 will mark the 526^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 departure from Spain to the West Indies. The occasion is a reminder of just how dramatically transoceanic travel has improved in terms of lower cost, safer conditions and quicker travel times.

First, consider the cost. Columbus had to petition King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain for two years for the exorbitant funds needed to make his voyage. The voyage cost approximately 2 million Spanish maravedis. According to physics professor Harry Shipman at the University of Delaware, 1 maravedi would be about 50 cents today, which would mean Columbus’s voyage cost a million current U.S. dollars.

Such trips are no longer limited to those with access to a royal treasury. In fact, more people than ever are able to afford international travel, including across the Atlantic. Competition that followed deregulation of U.S. airlines in 1978 slashed the price of tickets to make flying more accessible to more people, and progress is ongoing. A record 3.7 billion people flew in 2016.

As Marian Tupy has written, “Between 1990 and 2013, the average international round-trip airfare fell from $1,248 to $1,175 (in 2013 U.S. dollars).” A trip tracing Columbus’s journey from Madrid to San Salvador Island would cost slightly more than $1,000 in 2018. And flights from Madrid to India, which is where Columbus had originally wanted to go, are even cheaper.

By the time that the pilgrims on the Mayflower made their journey from England to the New World, the cost of crossing the Atlantic had fallen to around five pounds or $1,000 current U.S. dollars. But it is difficult for those accustomed to modern transatlantic travel to comprehend the danger and length of that rocky voyage by sea.

One passenger wrote that the Mayflower “encountered many times with cross winds, and met with many fierce storms, with which the ship was shrewdly shaken, and her upper works made very leaky.”

Another passenger died on the ship – a normal occurrence during transatlantic journeys of the era, just as many of Columbus’s crew died from scurvy, a disease caused by poor nutrition, a century earlier. Sea voyages entailed cramped living quarters, a diet of hard biscuits and beer, and the existential threat of storms that could wreck the ship. For most people, the most dangerous part of the trip nowadays is the possibility of leg cramps on a long flight.

And let us not forget that transatlantic journeys have shortened from several months to a matter of hours. For his first voyage in 1492, Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, and landed somewhere in the Bahamas. His journey took a grueling two months and nine days. The first steamship to cross the Atlantic did so in 207 hours in 1819. Today, a flight from Madrid to Nassau in the Bahamas would take an average of 9 hours on an air-conditioned plane with fresh food at the ready, proper restrooms, and most likely televisions with the latest movies.

Some may groan about the inconveniences of transatlantic flights. But they are nothing compared to the horrors of crossing the Atlantic in years past. The very first journeys were prohibitively costly, took months and involved tremendous risk. We can thank technological progress, competition and increasing prosperity for making the trip more affordable, safer and faster.