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- PARIS (AFP) - When Bertrand
Piccard and Brian Jones won an international race last March to circle
the globe in a giant silver hot-air balloon, awed observers looked nostalgically
back to the prophetic French storyteller Jules Verne.
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- From Verne's imagination sprang tales of rockets in space,
balloons over the Nile and Captain Nemo down 20,000 leagues under the sea
-- not to mention "Around the World in 80 Days," Phileas Fogg's
round-the-world bid undertaken on a wager.
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- When Verne died in 1905, he could barely have guessed
to what extent his science fiction imaginings would become part of everyday
reality.
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- The first travel breakthrough came in 1903 when Americans
Orville and Wilbur Wright made four successful flights near Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina.
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- Then aircraft made for dropping bombs in the 1914-18
war were converted to carry mail and passengers, and by 1919 the first
airlines, notably the Dutch line KLM, were set up to offer scheduled commerical
services.
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- Meanwhile men like Henry Ford, Andre Citroen and General
Motors' French engineer Louis Chevrolet were tinkering with a late-19th
century invention that was at first considered a plaything for the rich:
the automobile.
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- In 1908, Ford unveiled the first assembly-line plant
to produce identical Model-Ts for the masses. Then the discovery of oil
in eastern Texas drove down the price of fuel, with the result that car
ownership in the United States soared from 78,000 in 1905 to 5.5 million
in 1918.
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- The motor car remained a luxury item in Europe until
the inter-war period when, as philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian
regimes pushed mass car production to trigger patriotism and foster a national
identity.
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- Adolf Hitler had Volkswagen -- literally "the people's
car" - build the ever-popular "Beetle" in 1936, the same
year that Fiat, in Mussolini's Italy, launched its Topolino.
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- In France, carmakers Citroen and Renault had been making
affordable cars as early as 1919.
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- The gradual rise in prosperity, allied to the improved
technologies of travel by train, road and air, spawned what has become,
in the words of the Economist magazine, the "largest industry in the
world": mass tourism.
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- Last century's tourists mainly consisted of a wealthy
elite, says Ellen Furlough, a history professor specialising in tourism.
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- "Back then you had intrepid travelers going by steamboats
and trains, making horrible connections in a mishmash of crazy-quilt routes,"
she notes. "Now, an infrastructure is in place for mass tourism."
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- With governments introducing paid vacations -- 14 countries
in Europe and Latin America had done so by 1935 -- workers for the first
time found themselves with time on their hands and an inclination to see
the world.
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- At first holiday-makers in Europe preferred to travel
by train, Furlough says. But it would not be long before airplanes would
dominate trans-Atlantic routes, replacing the luxury ocean-liners that
had had such allure in the early part of the century.
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- The fate of the "unsinkable" Titanic, which
sank in icy waters in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives, was an early warning
of the dangers of travel.
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- The 1950's ushered in the jet age as British, Soviet
and US engineers produced jet-powered airliners. Pan Am's Boeing 707 was
the first such jet plane to fly the New York to London route in 1958.
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- Luxury ocean-liners like the French Normandie or British
Queen Elizabeth could not compete with jets, which took less than eight
hours to link New York and London.
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- In 1952, North Atlantic sea traffic made up about 66
percent of the market. By 1965, its share was down to 16 percent.
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- Jet-powered aircraft coupled with deregulation brought
down prices and won over the traveling public. Between 1960 and 1990, the
percentage of Americans who had traveled by air jumped from 10 to 70. Sales
on the US rail operator Amtrak, by contrast, dwindled.
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- In Europe and Japan however the rail networks fought
back, building trains that could rival planes for speed.
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- Japan launched its first high-speed train, the Tokaido
Shinkansen, in 1964, providing transit between Tokyo and Osaka at 130 miles
(200 kilometres) an hour.
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- France led the way in Europe, inaugurating its Train
a Grande Vitessein 1981, linking Paris and Lyon at about 180 miles per
hour.
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- By 1994, the same technology was used to build the Eurostar
train linking London to Paris and Brussels via the "Chunnel",
the tunnel under the English channel that engineers had dreamt about since
the days of Napoleon.
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- Travel has now become the tedious part of the trip, frought
with the dangers of motorway traffic jams or airport strikes.
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- "Rather than travel for the sake of the travelling,
one now goes somewhere to be somewhere, such as lying on the beach or visiting
one's birthplace," Furlough says. "The destination becomes the
voyage."
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- Destinations have cropped up in the form of amusement
parks like Disneyland or village-style all-inclusives such as the Club
Mediterranee.
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- Where Club Med promotes "sand, sea, surf and sun,"
Disney has gone farther and provided destinations on site. "You don't
need to go to the country anymore. You just go to Disney. They've taken
the culture and made it ersatz."
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- It almost makes Jones and Piccard, in their shiny state-of-the-art
balloon, seem old-fashioned.
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