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

By 1921 the Model T accounted for 57 percent of world automobile production; by 1923 Ford’s assembly lines were cranking out 2 million vehicles a year, up from eleven thousand in 1909.

“Fordism became a fetish for industrialists everywhere … the promise of mass production, the resultant economy in costs, the reduction in overhead, the ability to produce a good article at an unbelievably low price, became the basis of new industrial cult.”

The reemergence of the electric car in the twenty-first century can nevertheless be traced back to the era of the oil crisis. In 1972 Stanley Whittingham, a researcher at the oil company Exxon, was investigating a new battery design based on lithium. The lightest metal on the periodic table of elements, lithium can store fifteen times as much elect

Second, steam vehicles were frowned on by city authorities because of the noise and smoke they produced, and because of concerns about boiler explosions.

By 1931 there were 115 White Castle restaurants across several states, and a host of imitators with names including White Tower, Little Tavern, White Tavern Shoppes, and White Hut, all of which copied the formula of selling mass-produced hamburgers in pseudo-medieval surroundings. As a result, hamburgers overtook hot dogs to become the most popular

When it came to styling, GM’s cars reflected the growing enthusiasm for fully enclosed, “closed body,” designs that could be used in any weather, with solid roofs and side windows. Closed bodies were unusual before the First World War, but the proportion of American cars with closed-body designs rose from 10 percent in 1919 to 85 percent in 1927. H

The veterans returning to America after the Second World War came home to a severe housing shortage. By one estimate, America had 5 million fewer homes than needed in 1945; in 1947 one third of veterans were still staying with relatives or in shared housing. To address the problem the federal government took steps to encourage construction and home

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Instead it was the idea of rails, rather than steam power, that ended up being borrowed from steam trains and applied to urban transport, in the form of horse-drawn buses, known as horsecars or trams, that ran on rails laid on city streets. Running buses on rails, rather than on uneven roads, reduced friction and enabled horses to pull greater load

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.