On June 21, 1961, in a dusty small town in Texas, about 60 miles south of Houston, President John F. Kennedy stepped up to the podium to make a speech before the assembled throngs of people below. Or rather, his aides did. The ongoing Cuban missile crisis demanded his presence in Washington, so he instead gave the speech through a telephone call. The event, however, was deemed of sufficient importance that Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was in attendance.

Anyone who’s somewhat interested in mass transportation systems is bound to have looked into the Hyperloop concept at one point or another. One of the things that came up during my research was something called the ‘Kantrowitz limit’. What is the Kantrowitz limit? I admittedly had never heard of it before, but it seemed like something very important that fortunately had technological solutions. Yet there was something unsatisfying about all the popular resources I could find about it.