A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

So the approach taken by the Ford Motor Company for its new Model T, which was launched in October 1908, was (like the car itself) something of a departure from the norm. Most of the advertisement is text, not imagery, and rather than being aspirational, its tone is practical and no-nonsense: “high priced quality in a low priced car … the Ford car

People living in the Carpathian region would have had both the means and the motivation to create wheeled vehicles during this period, which is known as the Copper Age. As the name suggests, this was when metalworking first began, allowing tools to be made from copper rather than stone. (Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was subsequently found to

Why some countries ended up driving on the right, and others on the left, is the subject of much speculation. But it seems that for much of the medieval period there was no hard-and-fast rule: vehicles generally tried to stay in the middle of the road, and their main concern was avoiding hazards such as ditches and potholes. The rules for passing o

Levittown provided the template for suburban developments across America. The mass-production techniques that had made cars affordable had now done the same for housing, the other vital component of what was starting to be called the American Dream, a term coined in 1931 by the author James Truslow Adams. This new suburban lifestyle was, in other w

Looking further ahead, some urban planners are imagining how suburbs might evolve. Alan Berger, codirector of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that if efforts to retrofit suburbs and reduce car dependency pay off, the paved area (in the form of roads and parking lots) in future suburbs could be

The connection of New York to Philadelphia by rail in 1834, for example, reduced the journey time between America’s two largest cities from two days to five hours.

General Motors was founded in 1908, the same year the Model T was launched. Its founder, William C. Durant, had made a fortune in carriagemaking and decided to move into cars. He established GM as a holding company and immediately acquired Buick, a carmaker he already controlled, followed by a string of other carmakers, including Oakland, Oldsmobil

in April 1866 a French newspaper, Le Journal de l’Ain, unambiguously described a vélocipède bicycle (i.e., a two-wheeled velocipede) with pedals on its front wheel. Various people claimed to have pioneered this arrangement, chief among them two Frenchmen, Pierre Lallement and Pierre Michaux, and the fight over patent rights went on for decades. But

Writing in 1971, Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher, called the automobile “the epitome of possessions” because of its unique ability to signal social status. But today the smartphone is fast taking its place. And compared with cars, smartphones are arguably more democratic.

As car ownership became more widespread among African Americans, a new genre of guidebooks emerged in the 1930s. The most famous of these was The Negro Motorist Green Book, by Victor Green, a Black travel writer, who took his inspiration from similar books that helped Jewish travelers avoid discrimination. These books listed hotels, restaurants, an