A Brief History of Motion
From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, an eye-opening road trip through 5,500 years of humans on the go, revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization.
Hailed for their "colorful, smooth, and wonderfully engaging" writing (Smithsonian), Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now, he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.
Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention--Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in, from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Then, delving into the history of the automobile's development, Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered, laid out, and policed, how it looked, sounded, and smelled--and not always in the ways we might have preferred.
Today--after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles--the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion, Standage overturns myths and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Standage (Writing on the Wall) delivers a brisk and entertaining history of personal transportation. Asserting that advances in transportation technology have helped shape society, Standage details how the shift from horse-drawn carriages to motor vehicles in the early 20th century was driven in part by health concerns over the "huge piles of manure" that built up near urban stables, and explains how the enthusiasm for cars reshaped U.S. cities and gave rise to the suburbs after WWII. But America's car culture is changing as a result of climate change anxieties, urban growth, and the rise of electric vehicles and ride-hailing apps, according to Standage, who notes that "the number of miles driven per vehicle, and per person of driving age," has been in decline since 2004. He sketches the environmental and geopolitical concerns associated with mining lithium and cobalt to make electric car batteries, and the technical problems faced by engineers trying to build a fully autonomous car. More immediately promising, in Standage's view, are "mobility as a service" networks that allow people to access multiple modes of transport (bike rentals, buses, taxis) through a single app. Full of easy-to-understand history lessons and technical explanations, this is a well-informed look at how innovation, when properly guided, can pave the way to a brighter future.
