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

Huge piles of manure also built up next to stables and provided an attractive environment for flies. Health officials in Rochester, New York, calculated that if the manure produced by the fifteen thousand horses in the city each year was piled up, it would cover an acre of ground to a height of 175 feet and breed 16 billion flies. And Rochester was

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…

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The word teen-age had been around for a few decades. But it caught on in America in the 1940s because it referred to a cohort of young people who were seen, for the first time, as a distinct age group between childhood and adulthood. American teenagers of the 1940s were the first generation to grow up in a world where cars were commonplace; they ne

cars could also play a more direct role in the struggle for civil rights, as African American drivers showed in 1956, when they used their cars to support the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Railways swiftly displaced stagecoaches on intercity routes. But as previously noted, faster and more efficient transport between cities increased demand for rapid transport of people and goods within them, which required a greater number of horse-drawn vehicles. Railway companies in British cities bought large numbers of horses to provide local de

when the traffic did move, it was deafening, as metal horseshoes and iron-rimmed wheels clattered over uneven surfaces. In the 1890s conversation was barely possible on New York City streets because of the sound of traffic.

Under the banner of road safety and pedestrian education, cars had taken over the streets. Walking in the street had gone from being a right to being wrong.

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The new design ushered in a golden age, during which cycling flourished as a leisure activity and a means of truly personal locomotion. It let people travel as quickly as they could on horseback, but without the expense of buying, feeding, and maintaining a horse. And unlike trains, which offered high-speed travel subject to a strict timetable and