Pilsner: How the Beer of Kings Changed the World

By Tom Acitelli

Best Book at the North American Guild Beers Writers

"Effervescent and informative . . . This chronicle will intoxicate both beer nerds and history buffs." —Publishers Weekly

A book for both the beer geek and the foodie seeking a better understanding of modern food and drink

On the night of April 17, 1945, Allied planes dropped more than a hundred bombs on the Burghers' Brewery in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, destroying much of the birthplace of pilsner, the world's most popular beer style and the bestselling alcoholic beverage of all time.

Still, workers at the brewery would rally so they could have beer to toast their American, Canadian, and British liberators the following month. It was another twist in pilsner's remarkable story, one that started in a supernova of technological, political, and demographic shifts in the mid-1800s and that continues to unfold today anywhere alcohol is sold.

Tom Acitelli's Pilsner: How the Beer of Kings Changed the World tells that story, shattering myths about pilsner's very birth and about its immediate parentage.

A character-driven narrative that shows how pilsner influenced everything from modern-day advertising and marketing to immigration to today's craft beer movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641601856

Tom Acitelli

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops, Whiskey Business, and American Wine. He is a 2016 James Beard Award finalist who has written about alcohol for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg View, among many others.

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PART I

1

A DIVINE PLAN

Circa 820–1516 | St. Gall, Switzerland

The Plan of St. Gall is the only surviving full architectural drawing from the seven centuries between the western Roman Empire’s fall in the late 400s and the second century of the Middle Ages in the 1200s. It details how monks in the tradition of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe who died in 547, planned to enlarge a nearly century-old self-sustaining community in a mountainous area near Lake Constance in present-day Switzerland beginning around 820. As monks were among the few peoples who wrote much down in Europe in those centuries, the Plan of St. Gall is a particularly attractive document for historians and others wanting to know what was considered necessary and important at that time. It survived only because an unknown monk who saw it in the late twelfth century had the foresight to fold it just so and preserve it within the abbey’s library, where it remains, as one historian put it, a very detailed sketch of the ‘ideal monastery’ . . . where the whole world is reordered to the service of God.

Beer was apparently an important part of that divine order, right up there with the salvation to be found in the churches planned for the site, the knowledge to be gleaned from a proposed library, and the sustenance to be found via the animals of the stables. The Plan of St. Gall includes what are essentially blueprints for three separate breweries. It appears the monks never got these breweries up and running simultaneously, but their designs remain the oldest on record for larger-scale brewing in Europe, proof of beer’s prominence on the Continent and a foreshadowing of what was to come a thousand years later.

One of the breweries planned for St. Gall was for guests, one for monks, and one for the religious pilgrims and the poor. The Rule of St. Benedict, upon which this and other monasteries were built, required the monks to welcome the stranger, however indigent. Beer was the prime beverage offered to these and other arrivals, especially in areas of northern and central Europe where grain was more plentiful than grapes for wine—and primarily because it was not water. Water could be brackish, dangerous, difficult to deliver clean, and often unpleasant to drink. Beer was different—purer and, then as now, often delicious. It was the boiling that rendered it purer. The boiling destroyed bacteria that the monks could not see or understand, much like they could not see or understand the yeast or its role in fermentation. They just knew that beer invariably ended up a healthier, tastier alternative than water, and they needed it for their many guests. It was integral to monasteries. Monks throughout Europe became the most proficient brewers and were likely the first to pivot toward producing beer on a larger scale.

The beer the monks would have made—that anyone would have made, all the way back to the earliest brewers in the mountains of present-day Iran, four millennia before the common era—was dark, rich, and sometimes chunky, with the consistency of watery oatmeal. Filtration was nonexistent and malting, or roasting, of grains invariably produced dark varieties, which in turn produced dark beer. What’s more, the whole thing was poorly defined. Much of what brewers produced for millennia was ale because its yeast fermented at the top of the brewing vat rather than the bottom, producing a foamy, creamy layer during fermentation. The word ale to describe this subset of beer, though, did not come into vogue until the 1800s and even later in some parts of the world. Beer generally sufficed.

Beer was and is understood to be fermented grain, whatever the grain might be, plus seasoning. That seasoning before modern times might have been as varied as tree bark, plant roots, and herbs such as rosemary and thyme. Hops, a crisply bitter flower, became standard only in the fifteenth century. Before then, hops would have been known mostly as a medicine, a reputation that continued even after their integration into beer. Lord Sidmouth, a British prime minister under George III, was said to have recommended a pillow full of hops to aid his sovereign’s sleep. Because of the lack of filtration and the conditions under which beer fermented—usually in open vessels—bits of these herbs, barks, roots, and hops showed up floating in the finished product, rendering it that much darker, that much less clear. Yeast’s role in converting the sugars of the grains into intoxicating ethanol wasn’t fully understood yet, but the detritus from that top-fermenting yeast would often show up too—slinky, slippery little gobs that looked not unlike mold spores.

For thousands upon thousands of years, this was beer, even as the monks’ largish ad hoc operations gave way to standardization and to the first hints of commercial brewing, by which designated brewers made beer for profit under this or that government license—and some did quite well given their preindustrial limitations. In 1610 in Munich, capital of the brewing juggernaut that was then the independent dukedom of Bavaria, nearly one in five commercial brewers belonged to the highest level of taxpayers. All thirty-two of Antwerp’s commercial breweries by the late 1660s belonged to that Dutch city’s wealthiest 5 percent. The beers they produced did gradually shed some of the herbs and barks, etcetera, settling on malted barley, water, and hops as the main ingredients—again, yeast was largely a mystery—and styles began to take shape, though all beer remained more or less inky and thick ales.

What’s more, ale seeped into culture, both popular and highbrow, becoming that much more synonymous with beer. Ale in central and northern Europe was a drink for both the commoner and the lord of the manor, a reassuringly everyday accoutrement to existences that were often nasty, brutish, and short. Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety, Shakespeare would have a character declare in act 3 of Henry V, written in the late 1590s. It is better to think of church in the alehouse than to think of the alehouse in church, went a quotation attributed to Protestant reformer Martin Luther, such a big imbiber that his friends nicknamed him the king of hops. Even if Shakespeare, who died in 1611, and Luther, who died in 1546, had somehow lived all the way into the early 1800s, they would still have been familiar with any beer they might have encountered in their native lands, for it changed little in the intervening two centuries. Then it changed a lot, and fast.

2

LAGER AND ITS RIVALS

1516–1818 | Ingolstadt, Bavaria

Wilhelm Wittelsbach was twenty-three when he ascended to the throne of the duchy of Bavaria in March 1508 upon the death of his father. A later print showed a stout man with a square jaw covered in a wiry brown beard. He looked intense and burdened. Maybe so, for Wilhelm’s family had controlled the statelet of Bavaria—which by the time of his ascension covered much of what would become southern Germany, including bits of the Tyrolean Alps in present-day Italy—since the late 1100s. Agriculture was the major industry, and hops were among the major crops. Not inconsequently, beer was a major part of the Bavarian economy and the duchy’s culture. But as beer made that transition from monastic by-product to commercial staple in the late Middle Ages, its quality had degraded. Brewers, even in beer-crazy Bavaria, were still tossing in herbs, roots, even soot to both pad out their recipes and hide defects as they hustled to meet demand. Duke Wilhelm IV, as he styled himself, sought to put a stop to such practices. He also wanted to prevent brewers from using wheat as a grain in beer—better to have that for bread to feed his subjects—and to stop what had become wild and wide fluctuations in the price of beer. Wilhelm also knew that narrowing what went into beer could help him in collecting taxes on the beverage and its ingredients.

So on April 23, 1516, before a gathering of noblemen and other gentry in the courtyard of Ingolstadt’s New Castle (so named because the castle dated only from the previous century) on the banks of the Danube River, Wilhelm decreed that all beers made in Bavaria would be made only from water, hops, and barley (he, like everyone else, did not understand, much less fully comprehend, the role of yeast). What came to be called the Reinheitsgebot was the world’s first known food purity law, a landmark of autocratic legislation whose influence would fan out from Ingolstadt to the rest of the Germanic states in the coming four centuries—and then to the world. It would especially ride the rise of lager.

Lager, the other big subset of beer besides ale, was born of a hybrid yeast strain, part of which might have been born and raised in South America—for yeast is a living organism—before decamping for Europe aboard one or more boats plying the Atlantic. The yeast ferments on the bottom of the kettle rather than on the top as with ales, leaving behind a cleaner, clearer beer generally lighter in taste and lower in alcoholic kick. Lager also tends to crackle with carbonation more than ales, which develop deeper, thicker, stiller heads when poured, while lagers’ might be wispily thin and shorter lived. Lager only hit its stride in the nineteenth century. Until then, beer usually became a lager or an ale by accident. Ale yeast grows faster than lager yeast and can ferment at warmer temperatures. The slower-growing lager yeast can only really ferment at a sustained cooler temperature. So a mash of grains and hops left out tended to ferment into an ale because invariably the temperature around it was warmer—and, besides, the ale yeast got to the sugars in the grains more quickly.

But brewers in central and northern Europe, in present-day Bavaria, in particular, eventually discovered that storing mashes in cooler caves and caverns fostered the growth of the yeast that produced lagers. The practice was common by the start of the nineteenth century—lager comes from the German lagern, meaning to store—even if the yeasts themselves had yet to be isolated for easy replication and despite the length of time and the amount of labor it took to store the beer for fermentation and aging. Ale’s relatively fast fermentation and its resiliency at nearly all temperatures had aided its march out of the Middle East millennia before and had sustained its dominance before the dawn of mechanical refrigeration in the late nineteenth century. But lager was a presence by the early 1800s, especially in what became southern Germany. Part of this had to do with geography. There were copious caverns and caves to choose from in the Alps. Another part was Duke Wilhelm’s decree, which had the almost immediate effect of slamming the brakes on any innovation in beer style in southern Germany.

The Reinheitsgebot shoehorned brewers in Bavaria into using only certain ingredients and proportions of those ingredients. While the beers they produced became some of the most popular and imitated in central and northern Europe, they were more remarkable for their uniformity than for their individuality. It was beer streamlined, boiled down—literally and figuratively—to its basics. But that was fine for Wilhelm and his subjects. The most popular type of Bavarian beer post–purity decree was a relatively simple lager called dunkel. For many years [it] was the everyday beer of Bavaria, according to the brewmaster and critic Garrett Oliver. When the Reinheitsgebot first came into force in 1516, he explained, most of the beer made in Bavaria was an early form of dunkel.

It only grew in reach after the purity law. Dunkel was dark in color (hence the name, from the German for dark), mildly heavy in mouthfeel, lower in alcohol than most ales, and easy to drink one after the other—perfect for a society in which beer was an ordinary foodstuff and the year revolved around the procession of Catholic feast days. In fact, that original decree from Wilhelm referenced brewing from St. Michael’s Day on September 29 to St. George’s Day on April 23—in other words, the coolest days of the Bavarian calendar, and therefore the choicest months for brewing lagers that depended on cooler temperatures. Wilhelm’s son—Albrecht V, an avid beer fan like his father and one of the world’s great coin collectors, to boot—went on to ban brewing altogether during the warmer months between these saintly feast days. It was another way to ensure quality in beer. It worked. It enhanced the reputation of southern Germany’s beers for clarity and uniformity and that of its brewers for their technical prowess for making it so. Yet, taken together, the dukes’ decrees ensured that southern Germany would not be an incubator of change in brewing, which in these centuries of ignorance of yeast strains and bacteria nonetheless remained more of an art than a science anyway.

Change instead would fall to brewers farther north—in particular, the United Kingdom and what became Belgium. In these places, multiple styles flourished that had little in common with the Bavarians’ clean, smooth dunkel. The United Kingdom, which then included Ireland, became especially well known for two ales that were pretty much opaque in appearance, with a richness that bordered on creaminess in taste. Porter was a brownish- to black-colored style dating from the 1700s and born in England of the darker malt roasts so common in the era. For a time, it was probably the world’s bestselling beer, given the ballooning reach of the British Empire and its business allies, such as the East India Company, which would come to control a sizable chunk of the Indian subcontinent. A September 1759 request to a London merchant from a country squire in the English colony of Virginia read, 1 Hogshead best Porter. George Washington’s request was one of several times the future Founding Father would order, or simply praise, porter. Stout, an equally brownish-black though sweeter cousin of porter, also came into its own in the eighteenth century, not least behind the growth of St. James’s Gate Brewery (home of Guinness), which started in Dublin the same year Washington requested his hogshead, or sixty-four-gallon cask.

Meanwhile, in what became Belgium in 1830, brewers experimented with fruit in beer, crafting styles such as the cherry-infused kriek or the raspberry-flavored framboise, both of which were versions of a sour wheat-based beer subset called lambic. Then there were the more esoteric Germanic styles beyond Bavaria, including gose out of the town of Goslar. It had a salty taste via the water from the Gose River and a sourness that some found pleasing but that virtually assured its anonymity beyond northern Europe until American craft beer fans discovered it. There was Berliner weisse, too, a lower-alcohol beer from the North Sea port of Hamburg that was also sour as well as bubbly and that became a particular favorite of Napoleon’s invading French soldiers, who likened it to champagne. None of these would enjoy the popularity of porter or stout, the leading ales of the day by the 1800s, and none would enjoy even the localized popularity of dunkel in Bavaria, probably the most referenced lager of the day, if for nothing more than its clarity and uniformity.

But none of these, in turn, would prove as popular or as influential as a style that arose in the United Kingdom during the same period. It caused a sensation, particularly among brewers in Germanic lands such as Austria and Bavaria because it was unlike anything anyone had seen in beer’s long, long history. So . . . pale.

3

THIEVES ABROAD

1818–1833 | Burton-upon-Trent, England;

Schwechat, Austrian Empire; Munich

The young Austrian visitor casually dipped his specially designed walking stick into the fermenting beer in the English brewery, waited a few seconds, and then removed it just as casually. Anton Dreher had gotten what he wanted: some of that internationally famous English pale ale in the making to take back to his lodgings and analyze.

Dreher was twenty-three years old in 1833, and three years away from taking over the Schwechat brewery that his father had acquired near Vienna in 1796 after emigrating from the Lake Constance area bordering Bavaria, Switzerland, and the Austrian Empire. A lithograph of the younger Dreher thirty years later would show a tall, pear-shaped man with a thin, drooping mustache and a similarly lean spool of brown hair above a high forehead, large ears, and a particularly prominent, beaked nose. His eyes were sharp and vacant, as if Dreher were staring off into a distance few others could see. As it was, he was in England as part of a long fact-finding mission on behalf of his father’s brewery. He and his companions had visited breweries in Munich (then the capital of an independent Bavarian kingdom), Scotland, and London—and the English countryside. This was how research in brewing was done then, with sometimes surreptitious visits to competitors that often involved months on the road.

In particular, Dreher and company had made their way in sailboats, carriages, and on foot to Burton-upon-Trent, then and now one of the most famous brewing locales in the beer-quaffing world. It was there that Dreher’s specially designed walking sticks got their true workout. The sticks were born of the necessity for samples, samples that could not be had because Dreher and his traveling companions from central Europe were never left unsupervised around the fermenting beer they saw. By the time they got to Burton-upon-Trent, Dreher and company realized that the flasks they had originally brought were simply not going to cut it. The flasks were too obvious. Our art of stealing, which we became especially masterly in, furnished us already with an almost complete fermentation, a companion of Dreher’s wrote in a letter home. The companion went on, Nevertheless, I feel daily a shiver running down my spine when we enter the brewery and I count myself fortunate to come out of it without getting a beating. In order to avoid it in the future, we are now having walking sticks made of steel, lacquered, with a valve at the lower end, so that when the stick is dipped, it fills. When taken out, the valve closes and we have the beer in the stick and that way we can steal more safely.

And so it went. When Dreher’s party arrived in Burton-upon-Trent in 1833, the town was just on the cusp of a phenomenal late-nineteenth-century growth spurt that would see its population grow from around seven thousand to more than thirty thousand by 1900. Much of that growth would be thanks to twin revolutions in transportation—in particular the railroad, but also improvements in England’s already-vaunted canal system—and in industrialization, which brought workers and their families in from the country to toil in manufacturing plants. Some of Burton-upon-Trent’s most robust manufacturers were its breweries. Prominent names such as Bass and Allsopp had been churning out ales since the late 1700s, employing first dozens and then thousands, and exporting their wares to the far corners of the United Kingdom and even to the Continent. This was no small feat in an age when goods moved at the speed of wind or horses and ale in general did not travel well, bacteria a specific—and then anonymous—menace as the drink sloshed along in barrels. Ale was best drunk nearest its source. But the successful exportation of the Burton-upon-Trent brews meant that all the way over in central Austria Dreher had come upon the beer and had hatched his reconnaissance mission.

Burton-upon-Trent was the high point of that mission. Brewing in the enclave dated from at least the eleventh century, when monks built a Benedictine abbey beside the River Trent in the then-lush forestland about halfway between Birmingham and Nottingham. By the end of the century, the abbey’s beer had obtained at least a little dash of fame. Verse said to be from 1295 by an unknown poet went:

The Abbot of Burton brewed good ale,

On Fridays when they fasted.

But the Abbot of Burton never tasted his own

As long as his neighbor’s lasted.

An inventory of rental properties in the town of eighteen hundred a quarter century later found no brewers among the tradespeople—only the abbey produced any sort of beer for wider consumption. That reality held for at least another 220 years or so, changing only in 1540, when Henry VIII in establishing the Church of England dissolved Catholic monasteries. The abbey at Burton-upon-Trent ceased to exist, its land and resources appropriated. Smaller brewers gradually took over its brewing trade, and by the early eighteenth century the renown of the beers of Burton-upon-Trent stretched all the way to London more than two days’ travel south. At Lichfield, the ale is incomparable, as it is all over this county of Stafford, Daniel Defoe, a writer most famous for the novel Robinson Crusoe, noted at the time. Burton is the most famous town for it, he claimed, going on to remark that the best character you can give to ale in London is calling it Burton Ale, and that they brew, in London, some that goes by that denomination.

It was probably initially the water supply that made Burton’s beers so sought after. Wells provided water particularly high in calcium and magnesium sulfates. Such hard water, then as now, was freakishly ideal for brewing ales. By the time Anton Dreher rolled in a century and a half after Defoe wrote, a technical innovation had enhanced not only the taste of Burton beers from places such as Bass and Allsopp but, crucially for the future of food and drink worldwide, the appearance, too. Breweries in Burton, most famously Bass, were using a wood-barrel, gravity-powered fermentation system that clumsily yet steadily separated out the yeast. That separation left behind unusually pellucid beer, the best example yet of what came to be called pale ale.

The style name said it all: it was the clearest, most detritus-free beer anyone had ever seen, even though it still looked reddish, or like amber at its lightest. Breweries in northern Europe and the United Kingdom had been producing pale ale since the 1700s, primarily through roasting malts to a lighter color. That practice took a giant leap forward in 1818, when an English engineer named Daniel Wheeler patented an invention for more uniformly roasting the malts used in brewing. Before, brewers generally spread the malt on a perforated floor and lit a fire underneath from wood, coal, or coke. The result was not only an unevenness in the roasting—with some malts roasted faster and more deeply than others—but a general darkness and smokiness. Some would get scorched, in fact. The resulting beer could be unappetizingly smoky-tasting and opaque. Wheeler’s invention replaced the floor kiln with a revolving metal drum that never exposed the grain directly to the fire. Now, for the first time, brewers could easily adjust the darkness or lightness of their malts. Paler ales—and pale ale—became that much more common in the United Kingdom.

It was the rudimentary filtration system, however—the gravity powered contraptions that cleared out much of the yeast and left behind a clearer beer—that made Burton brews the finest examples yet of pale ale. What’s more, Burton’s brewing triumph was a great example of how a regional beer style could spread from its hometown to well beyond. Not every style could or would. Taste held some back. Some just weren’t the sort of beer one drank one after the other. The inability to reproduce for audiences farther from the brewery stymied the spread of others. Then there were those styles such as porter and stout in the United Kingdom that leaped upon a larger commercial stage only because of the growing fortunes of their home countries. For instance, by 1833, the year Anton Dreher visited Burton-upon-Trent, Guinness was shipping its stout as far afield as South Carolina, West Africa, and Barbados—each in the political and/or the commercial orbits of the United Kingdom.

One of Dreher’s traveling companions—the one who wrote home about his gratitude over not getting beaten for stealing samples—would have known or have learned about all this, for he was steeped in brewing as much as Dreher, if not more so. Blond-haired, with a blond mustache below a low, prominent nose, Gabriel Sedlmayr was barely past his twentieth birthday when he journeyed from Munich to England and elsewhere with his older colleague Dreher. Like Dreher, Sedlmayr was on a bit of a reconnaissance mission for his father. In Sedlmayr’s case, his father, also named Gabriel Sedlmayr, owned the Spaten brewery, which was the third largest in Munich. The elder Sedlmayr had purchased it through a brewmaster at the Bavarian royal court in 1807, four years before the birth of his firstborn son and namesake. It already had had quite a history by then, having started life as a brewpub—a brewery that made and sold its wares on the same site—in 1397, adapting to centuries of evolution in beer and brewing as the beverage wended its way from monastic mainstay to commercial juggernaut in central Europe. By the time the Späth family acquired the brewery in 1622—and named it after itself, Spaten, which means spade in German—it was best known for turning out those deceptively simple yet popular lagers called dunkel for a Bavarian market that expected consistency.

The more than three-hundred-year-old Reinheitsgebot had shoehorned the brewers into using but a handful of ingredients, but there was nothing that said that brewers could not play within those constraints. Government imposition and that tradition—long tradition—demanded only that certain ingredients be used to make beer in Bavaria and other southern German states. Neither dictated much about techniques. And were not brewers in England using techniques to craft beers that no one alive had seen or tasted before? Now it was the Germans’ turn.

4

OVER THE HORIZON

1838–1848 | New York City; Munich; Schwechat, Austria

The stars shone upon New York City on a crystal clear night as the crowds gathered at the Battery wharf in Lower Manhattan. It was April 22, 1838, a Sunday, the only day of the week that most laborers and civil servants had off. All day and for several days prior, news had been rippling through New York about the impending arrival of two ships over the horizon: the Sirius and the Great Western. Each had left the United Kingdom at least a couple of weeks before—the newspapers said different things—with the 703-ton Sirius leaving from Cork on Ireland’s southern shore and the 1,320-ton Great Western via England’s River Severn. They were racing to New York.

Both the Sirius and the Great Western were top-of-the-line steamships. This was important. For as long as anyone alive could remember, crossing the Atlantic involved sailing, and sailing ships took anywhere from a few weeks to nearly three months to traverse the Atlantic, with speed and even navigation hostage to the weather. The first steamships had begun plying the ocean between the Old and New Worlds in 1819, cutting the crossing time first by days and then by weeks. But none until the Sirius and the Great Western had really been designed to make the crossing at a particularly brisk pace. Nor were potential customers quite sold on steamships traveling that fast on the open waters. Disastrous steamship explosions were depressingly common. The gawkers at Manhattan’s Battery on April 22 almost certainly did not know yet, but the day before a collapsed flue caused the explosion of a steamship on the Mississippi River, killing more than one hundred people. The private backers and designers behind the Sirius and the Great Western were trying to prove a point then, one that aviators would find themselves having to prove a hundred years later—that their vessels could quickly (and safely) cross the Atlantic.

The Sirius came into sight that Sunday night a little after ten, dropping anchor at the Battery amid cheers from a crowd acutely aware that they had just witnessed something historic. The ship had made the journey from Cork in nineteen days with forty passengers, plus crew. It had run out of fuel just as the crew spied Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The captain risked a mutiny in refusing to raise the sails the last leg into New York Harbor, instead ordering the firemen to break off the spars on the unused mast and feed those into the furnace. It worked, and the Sirius beat the Great Western by a few hours—though the much larger vessel made the crossing in a mere fifteen days. THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW AGE IN STEAM POWER, went the headline in the New York Herald on April 23 above a glowing article that declared the ships’ arrivals as thus solving the problem of possibility regarding quick and safe transatlantic travel. Soon after, a Canadian named Samuel Cunard and some investors launched a venture that would lead to the first regular steamship service between the United Kingdom and North America. The maiden voyage for that venture was in March 1840. Perhaps as a nod to the uniqueness of such travel in the annals of humankind, the ship for that first voyage was called the Unicorn.

The people on Manhattan’s Battery would have found this revolution in travel inconceivable at the start of the 1830s, such speed seemingly the stuff of the penny dreadfuls that flooded the reading public that decade in England. The dramatic change was one of many revolutions of the time. Most of these were far from thunderclaps of unexpected activity, but as in the case of the race between the Sirius and the Great Western, the culminations of years of planning and pursuit. However labored their journeys, these insurgencies invariably arrived in shocking fashion. They shredded norms and upended the ways of doing things—and usually quite quickly in both cases.

Europe was halfway through the 1820s when the world’s first steam-powered railway rolled out along twenty-seven miles through the English cities of Stockton and Darlington. Within fifteen years of that 1825 debut, steam railroads were rolling out across Europe, Canada, and the United States, and—with speeds of up to thirty-six miles per hour, never mind the greater capacity and relative comfort—they quickly made coaches obsolete. They also made trading in goods that much easier, especially for previously more isolated businesses, including breweries. In Bavaria, small-time brewers were barely making ends meet until opportunities for export arrived with railroads and steamers, one historian notes. Around the same time, another form of conveyance—this one for news and information—arose that would intersect with the rise of the railroads. Until the 1840s, news and information traveled as fast as a horse, a boat, or a human could carry it. In 1843, Samuel Morse, a painter and an art professor at New York University in Manhattan, obtained a congressional subsidy of $30,000 to run a telegraph line thirty-seven miles from Baltimore to Washington, DC. Morse had been tinkering with electrical communication for years, adjusting his rudimentary telecommunications device and gathering investors for the effort. It paid off in 1844 with the opening of that Baltimore-Washington line via Morse’s immortal first phrase, What hath God wrought. Telegraph lines spread after 1844 faster than railroad lines. In Britain there were thirteen miles in 1838. Fifteen years later, there were four thousand, such astonishing growth driven in part by the need to coordinate railroad schedules.

In a two-week span in 1839, just as railroads and telegraphs began unspooling at great distances on two continents, a French painter named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and an English aristocrat named William Henry Fox Talbot announced separate discoveries concerning the reproduction of images. Daguerre could fix an image on a silvered sheet of copper, while Talbot could produce a negative image on a sheet of sensitized paper. Both methods—developed independently—gave birth to modern photography. By the end of the 1840s, the mass production of photography was possible and the chronicling of human experience would never quite be the same.

There were all sorts of smaller revolutions in all sorts of fields during this same period in the nineteenth century, so much so that it is difficult to overstate the pace of innovation. In 1840 the United Kingdom introduced the penny post, the first uniformly standard, one-size-fits-all method for paying for the mailing of a letter. It launched a revolution in mail, once the provenance of those wealthy enough to pay someone—usually a servant who had other tasks as well—to deliver a letter or a card. In 1846 William