Commodore Vanderbilt saw the coming demise of steamships, sold out his newly built boats and got into railroads early on.

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Art Deco in France was the last great era of "luxe, " sailing calmly into history like the fabled steamships it produced.

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By 1900, steamships had shrunk the Atlantic even more, while railroads and the telegraph had eaten up the vastness of America's plains.

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Steamships, canals and railways slashed the price of shifting goods.

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The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) Foreignness was a means of escape physical, psychological and moral.

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Railways, fast steamships and then the telegraph made it possible to expand, police and govern a vast, sprawling empire in ways that had previously been impossible with a relatively small army and administrative class.

ECONOMIST: The British empire