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

Written by Tom Standage

Narrated by Liam Gerrard

Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.

Beginning around 3,500 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. 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 and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666125122

Tom Standage

Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He is the author of several books, including Uncommon Knowledge, Seriously Curious, Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years and The Victorian Internet. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and Wired.

Reviews for A Brief History of Motion

[Matthew Gibb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book! Love this writer. The chariot had two wheels because humans walked on two feet and were not like animals. This also talks about ride hailing, autonomous vehicles and there are chapters that describe how Car Culture and especially teenagers, shaped the modern world. As the 2cd biggest driver of the economy after housing this is a kind of living timeline and delivers all that it promises. I look forward to reading more by this excellent author.