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

Supermarkets showed that suburban car owners were willing to travel to get better prices. As supermarkets spread, they gave rise to those archetypal American suburban spaces: shopping centers, in which several stores are grouped around a large supermarket or pharmacist, with space for parking in front.

The clue to the trigger for this change in attitudes, and its geographic origin, lies in a single word: kocsi. Kocs (which is pronounced “coach”) was a Hungarian village on the road from Buda to Vienna. Somehow this village gave its name to a kind of four-wheeled vehicle, the kocsi (pronounced “coachee”), and as the adoption of this vehicle spread

In December 1924, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, convened the first National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, with the aim of drawing up a set of safety rules that could be used across the country. The industry got Hoover to water down his initial hostility toward cars and installed its own representatives on the key committees

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

And all of this increased dependency on the car. Before 1920, most American city dwellers had commuted to work on foot or by public transport. But during the 1950s commuting by car became the norm and has been ever since: today eight in ten Americans drive to work, usually alone. Zoning rules contributed to car dependency in the new suburbs by stri

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

In the year 1800 wooden vehicles pulled by animals were the most advanced form of land-based transport on the planet and had been for more than five millennia. Admittedly, nineteenth-century coaches had features that the earliest wagons had lacked, such as metal-rimmed and spoked wheels, steering, steel-spring suspension, and glass windows. But the

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Steam trains had shown that horseless transport could be fast. Bicycles had shown that it could be personal. Could it be both? Was it possible to build a vehicle that was as fast as a train, as convenient and personal as a bicycle, and could travel on existing roads like a horse? One way to do it, which inventors had never quite given up on, was to