ON INTERSTATE 80 IN NORTHERN NEW JERSEY - New Jersey State Police Trooper John Salamone knows fast, resents fast, tries to prevent fast. Just west of the most frenetic town of all, on one of the busiest stretches of one of the busiest roads, he polices a rush-hour parade.

He switches on his radar, and as trucks, cars, sport-utility vehicles pass the 55-mph sign, the LED readout clocks each. 66. 69. 73. 77. Hurtling toward Hackensack. 67. 71. 76. Pushing toward Parsippany. Drivers cutting off drivers, tailgating, passing on the shoulder.

Each with a foot on the gas and a century of hurry in the rearview mirror.

"That really frightens me, when you see how oblivious people are," Salamone laments. "This overwhelming desire to get from A to B, it's madness,"

A hundred-year madness. The 20th century: It started with horses and hours. It ends with Maseratis and microseconds, with airplanes streaking across skies, microprocessors burning across desktops.

We phone. We fax. We page. We e-mail. We stuff day planners. We race from one end of life to the other, rarely glancing over our shoulders. Technology, mass media and a desire to do more, do it better and do it yesterday have turned us into a world of hurriers.

"Don't look back," the baseball pitcher Satchel Paige once said. "Something might be gaining on you."

In these jumbled days, something probably is.

Stop and smell the roses? No more. Instead, better wake up and smell the coffee. What an exhilarating, exhausting world we've created in our haste to create a world we can manage.

A world of seven-day diets and 24-hour news channels and one-hour photo processing and 30-minute pizza delivery and 10-minute facials and two-minute warnings and Minute Rice. Get rich quick. Get fast-tracked. Get your 15 minutes of fame. Just do it.

About this time a century ago, America was still a rural nation.

Meals could take entire afternoons to prepare; trips into town ate up whole days. Those with telephones made calls by turning a crank and dialing "central" to connect them.

Then, everything accelerated. The innovations in transportation alone boggle the mind:

1903: the first speed limit (England, 20 mph).

1908: the Ford Model T, top speed 45 mph (speeded-up assembly-line manufacturing began in 1913).

1911: the world's earliest air-mail delivery (in India).

1933: the Boeing 247 (600 miles in four hours).

1947: Test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier (700 mph).

1969: Apollo 10's three astronauts become the fastest humans ever (24,791 mph).

Quick transit begetting quick access begetting quicker, busier, more compressed lives.

"No century has been like this. And we're only speeding up," says David Grubin, producer of the recent PBS documentary "America 1900." To him, fast often means progress: "We're always complaining about the pace of life, but prosperity and speed go together."

What caused it all? Was it the Industrial Revolution, which automated tasks, created a vast off-the-farm labor force and infused the twin dreams of Bigger and Better into American life? Was it the urbanization that brought heartland job-seekers and northward-migrating blacks and foreign immigrants pouring into spaces too small for them, racing to build the national industrial behemoth and catch the American dream?

Was it the technology? The radio and the telephone, which transmitted the human voice instantaneously? The movie, which condensed life into a fast-moving tale? Or the microchip, whose speed, according to Moore's Law, doubles every 18 months and makes us view gadget efficiency as a birthright?

It was all of the above - vast forces working together, condensing life, collapsing events into one big glob of Franklin Planner complexity.

"My dad was born in 1897. And he moved from a farm in the Central Valley of California to Los Angeles in a covered wagon. And then he sat there in his living room and watched guys walk on the moon. I don't know how his mind held both of those events," says Carroll Pursell, a technology historian and author of "White Heat," a book that examined the cultural impact of technology.

People do recognize the hurry in their lives. They talk of fixing it, but they don't have the time. A survey conducted for Hilton hotels found 71 percent of Americans think time is moving too quickly, but only half of them would slow down if they could. And even fewer - 43 percent - don't think thinning their packed schedules would make them happier.

Can we slow down? Is it still possible?

Not a chance. We're busy beings, we 20th century humans. Places to go, people to meet, planners to fill, files to download, shows to tape, bills to pay, planes to catch, frozen dinners to nuke, Web sites to surf, kids to pick up, stress to manage, thromboses to have, speeding tickets to pay. Gotta move on.

Twentieth century's about over, folks. Hurry along, now. Nothing more to see here.

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