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Saturday, August 14, 2021

Distance Melts Away: Mail From New York to Los Angeles Delivered in Less Than 50 Hours, Aug. 14, 1921

Distance Melts Away

Mail has been delivered from New York to Los Angeles in less than 50 hours, a distance of 3,000 miles. The mail was carried partly by express and partly by airplane, and this may properly be regarded not merely as an aerial triumph in the transportation of mail, but as signaling a time when passengers can be conveyed with equal swiftness across the continent. There was a time when months intervened before communication could be established between the extreme east and west.

Verily, the world is shrinking physically every day. We will be able to girdle the earth in a couple of weeks. Distance is no longer a barrier. Time has been reduced to a matter of quick calculation in terms of moments and hours. The inhabitants of the far corners of the earth and the isles of the sea are our neighbors. If anything should happen to them today, we would know about it tomorrow, and in a few hours thereafter, chances are help would have reached them from this continent. The wings of the wind have become the chariots of men. The speed of lightning allows nothing less to satisfy us.

And if the physical distance has been annihilated, social distance must melt away. We must be brethren as well as neighbors and acquaintances, and when we are willing to look upon the world as one society and its people as one flesh, a new spirit of tolerance will be bred within us and the hate and greed and distrust and those voices that generate wars shall vanish away.

From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Aug. 14, 1921, Julian S. Miller, editor.

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