A Brief History of Motion
From the Wheel to the Car to What Comes Next
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
'Speckled with anecdotes, insights and surprises. It is great fun - and utterly timely' Sunday Times
'Standage writes with a masterly clarity' New York Times
'The product of deep research, great intelligence and burnished prose . . . It is rare that I encounter a non-fiction author whose prose is so elegant that it is worth reading for itself. Standage is a writer of this class' Wall Street Journal
Beginning around 3,500 BC with the wheel, and moving through the eras of horsepower, trains and bicycles, Tom Standage puts the rise of the car – and the future of urban transport – into a broader historical context.
Our society has been shaped by the car in innumerable ways, many of which are so familiar that we no longer notice them. Why does red mean stop and green mean go? Why do some countries drive on the left, and some on the right? How did cars, introduced only a little over a century ago, change the way the world was administered, laid out and policed, along with experiences like eating and shopping? And what might travel in a post-car world look like?
As social transformations from ride-sharing to the global pandemic force us to critically re-examine our relationship with personal transportation, A Brief History of Motion is an essential contribution to our understanding of how the modern world came to be.
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.
