Italiano 
English Improvements in technology made the world smaller. Sailing ships, which for centuries had dominated routes around the globe, were replaced by steamships, capable of carrying larger loads more quickly and efficiently. In 1830, crossing the Atlantic by steam took 17 days. Improvements in engines meant that by 1910 the crossing time had been reduced to just 5 days. In addition, the major canals built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed ships to avoid notoriously dangerous routes, such as rounding the Cape of Good Hope and the southern tip of South America.
By the end of the nineteenth century, even the most remote corners of the world were taking part in the global economy. Once the problem of refrigeration had been solved, frozen beef, mutton, or lamb, even when it came from remote places such as New Zealand and the southern tip of South America, could cross the oceans to reach American and European industrial cities, along with fruit from South Africa and Central America. The telegraph and mass transportation ensured that in cities the gears of commerce turned more smoothly.
A successful artist born in Massachusetts in 1791, Samuel Morse began working on improvements to the electric telegraph in the 1830s, after learning about the invention of the electromagnet during a return voyage from Europe. His design used a single wire to send messages. Morse also invented an encoding system, known as Morse code, in which short and long electrical signals represented letters and were transmitted along the wire to a stylus moved by an electromagnet, which recorded the code on a moving paper tape. Morse completed the first telegraph line in America in 1844.
