We need that energy on flights today.

When British journalist Don Iddon boarded the SS United States in 1954, his first act was to find a copy of the boat’s first-class passenger list. As he read it, his heart sank. Of course, Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman, was on board, as were a few prominent business people. But the list, as he later wrote and Steven Ujifusa tells in the book Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France, from Jefferson to the Jazz Age, featured a distinct lack of “big names.” Where were all the movie stars?

With the rise of steamships in the 19^e century and into the 20th century^e In the last century, passenger lists were a central feature of any long journey: a valuable taster among passengers of the kinds of people they would come into contact with during their journey. Lorraine Coons, a historian who wrote a book about steamship travel, told me that during her research she first noticed them appearing around 1880. These lists, often color-coded by cabin class, were distributed to newcomers, who invariably searched them for celebrity names. It didn’t matter whether your reputation was favorable or disgraceful; anyone with a high profile would provide good entertainment during the trip. Journalists also received copies: when ships departed from port cities, local reporters published articles listing all the famous names on board.

What made these lists so unique is the enormous transparency they offered. Royals, politicians and A-list celebrities were mentioned alongside ordinary, middle-class passengers, a rare mix of social classes that prompted one writer to complain in 1910: ‘The very best of people are cast aside with the nobodies. ” But that accessibility was also the beauty of the passenger list. There was no loophole for the wealthiest travelers: if you wanted to sail on the boat, you had to be on the passenger list.

These days we no longer really have a comparison: those cryptic, initialized upgrade monitors at the terminal port don’t irritate quite the same. On planes, travelers are reduced to shuffling through first class while surreptitiously trying to spot a famous face. Even that has become increasingly difficult as celebrities flee to large private suites and terminals before boarding their flights through VIP programs that take them to and from the plane. For the truly intrepid, one way to track a celebrity’s travel movements is via publicly available private jet flight data – and the likes of Taylor Swift and Elon Musk have tried to destroy it.

While a return to the officially sanctioned curiosity of the steamship era is unlikely, in today’s hyper-stratified world, where the wealthiest can pay for the privilege of privacy, we could probably use a little bit of that social transparency. Those old passenger lists helped, at least briefly, break the secretive dynamics of travel, giving everyone on board equal access to gossip. A little intrigue about your fellow passengers couldn’t hurt. And who knows, maybe getting a list of names could make an international flight today a little more bearable. A little speculation about the other powerful travelers on board could ease the tension at high altitude, in what has historically been a pressure cooker of resentment.

In the context of a weeks-long steamship voyage, it was perhaps inevitable that passenger lists would become the subject of careful study. Early 20s^e century, the glamor of international travel only took travelers so far. Once the passengers were away from the coast, one of their biggest challenges was avoiding boredom. Some ships offered lectures; others developed music bands from the ship’s crew; the Ile de France had a bowling alley. What activities the ships did not offer, passengers often sought out for themselves. Steamship travelers organized theater programs, boxing tournaments or big balls. At night, dance music sounded from gramophones.

And so gossip became a commodity. Many passengers began self-publishing their own steamship newspapers, covering the personal histories of those on board. Some ship’s newspapers published blind articles about passengers. Historian Martyn Lyons discovered that a reader had guessed in the margins of a surviving copy of the Tamar Times which traveler each blind item referred to. Analyzes of passenger lists also often appeared in these newspapers. On one ship, a passenger published a single-issue newspaper called The Rolly-Poly, which included an analysis of all the passengers on the list: “Of the women, all are wives, except 78 who aspire to be so.” Even the elite consulted these lists to choreograph their social interactions so that they didn’t accidentally get caught up in a conversation with someone who wasn’t sophisticated.

That the low passenger list could become a focal point shows how boring these journeys were. Passenger lists were not Wikipedia entries: they were bare documents, generally containing names and nothing more. A few steamship operators, Coons said, also listed travelers’ places of residence, but most were strictly limited to names. Passengers were forced to act out the (perhaps embellished) backstories of the celebrities on board by piecing together their own spotty memories.

Despite these limitations, observers found ways to track down the rich and famous. A name preceded by a title like ‘Baroness’ indicated a person of importance, and so did the size of each passenger’s entourage. It wouldn’t be unusual for a wealthy person’s name to be listed next to “two nurses and a governess.” For example, one passenger list noted the presence of “JK Smith and valet.” Medical professor William Thomas Corlett described feeling disappointed with the quality of guests on board a ship he rode – until he consulted the list. Only then did he note with pleasure the presence of “Herr von This and Herr von That,” as he put it, “along with a few barons and a few baronesses.”

Not every steamship company liked the passenger list. Some devised ways to keep their steamships as exclusive as possible so that passenger records would not spread to the public. The SS Carolina, for example, did not let passengers book shared trips for fear that this would attract middle-class customers and lead to passenger list leaks. In short: you had to pay for the entire trip, otherwise you couldn’t board.

Yet passenger lists that have reached the public have become extremely important in recent decades. Genealogists and historians now rely on passenger lists to track how people moved around the world. Amateur genealogists at Ancestry.com regularly use passenger lists to trace their roots. That includes our most famous chronicler of family history, Henry Louis Gates Jr. In retrospect, these documents also charted social transformations: it was not unusual for immigrants to adopt a new name when boarding a steamship, or for trans passengers to favorite name embraced. sex. I thought a lot about passenger lists while researching Zdeněk Koubek, a high-profile Czech athlete who changed gender in 1935, for my upcoming history book The other Olympians. In 1936, when Koubek was living as a man, he visited New York and appeared on the passenger list next to his new gender: “Mr.”

I admit that passenger lists may no longer make sense in our world of technical surveillance, where even a simple set of names would be scrubbed by algorithms. But I think without them we’ve lost any sense of camaraderie; we have lost the thrill of unfolding the manifesto and wondering what you might find. These lists could impress or disappoint, but they always entertained. In 1901, Mary Lawrence, a wealthy Bostonian, was browsing the steamship’s first-class passenger list Oceanic. She was excited when she saw the name Otho Cushing, an illustrator and cartoonist whose work she knew. “Here at last was an interesting fellow traveler,” she wrote in her diary, according to the book Seductive journey.

But almost ten years later, when she rode the same steamship again, the list was not so colorful. Laurens was crushed. “There was no one on the passenger list that we had ever heard of,” she complained. Today, Lawrence’s certainty that the list was a complete record of the passengers on board is striking. It didn’t seem to occur to her that there might be loopholes in the law for people who could pay, that you could take your name off the manifesto if you were famous enough. And maybe those loopholes are actually true it didn’t to exist. Steamships had classified cabins, of course, but there was no special treatment for celebrities: at sea everyone was on board. list.