num_pages: 272
description: From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses  an eye-opening road trip through 5500 years of humans on the go revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization.Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.Beginning around 3500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention--Standage zips through the eras of horsepower trains and bicycles revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Then delving into the history of the automobile's development Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered laid out and policed how it looked sounded and smelled--and not always in the ways we might have preferred.Today--after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles--the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion  Standage overturns myths considers roads not taken and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.
language: English
title: A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing