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

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The change in public sentiment from indifference to enthusiasm was to occur in an incredibly short period of time. The first race for motor vehicles from Paris to Rouen, which occurred in [July] 1894, set more of our inventive minds at work upon the motor problem, but it brought forth no general response from the American people. But the race from

American cars were not simply more numerous; they were also much bigger than cars in other countries. On average, they were three quarters of a ton heavier than those made in Europe and Japan, and their V-8 engines had more than twice the engine capacity of the four-cylinder engines most prevalent elsewhere. As a result, they used a lot more fuel.

The dramatic success of the Liverpool and Manchester railway triggered a mania for railway investment in Britain, where more than fifty new lines, covering sixteen hundred miles, were soon been approved by Parliament. Other countries followed Britain’s example in the 1830s and 1840s, building intercity rail links and extending commuter lines around

For the first time, American drivers realized they could not take the supply of gasoline for granted. The oil shock led the government to introduce a national speed limit of 55 mph, and fuel-economy standards that required American manufacturers to achieve an average fuel economy, across their entire product lines, of 18 miles per gallon by 1978 an

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Thus it was the bicycle, rather than the steam engine, that paved the way for the automobile. And the bicycle paved the way in a more literal sense, too. Starting in the…

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

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

Horseless carriages of this form were demonstrated by inventors in London in 1774 and Paris in 1779. And in 1813 Karl von Drais, a German physicist and inventor, built a horseless carriage that could carry four people, with one of them steering using a tiller, and another providing the motive power by pedaling. The problem with all these vehicles w

In 1888, however, the first electric streetcars were introduced, starting in Richmond, Virginia, and spreading to two dozen other cities within a year. These could travel at 12 mph or even 15 mph, extending the half-hour commuting distance from three to at least six miles, and once again hugely increasing the potential residential area around a cit