A Brief History of Motion

From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

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.

©2021 Tom Standage (P)2021 Tantor

Motion!!

Great book, but would love it to be a little less brief and discuss trains and planes and boats more! Maybe a more accurate title would be the history of automotive vehicles

Great listen

This was a very good presentation. The time went by quickly. The information presented was always interesting and informative. The narrator was fun to listen to.

Mostly about cars and travel by land

A competent narrative about the history of travel on land. From the wheel and chariots to stage-coaches and steam engines. But mostly it is a history of cars and travel by car, from Ford's assembly lines and the model T to today's ride-hailing services and tomorrow's driverless cars (or today's?). Maybe not quite riveting at every turn, but always informative and educational. What you won't find here is anything about air travel, space travel, ships or submarines. Even train travel gets surprisingly little attention. Buses too are not much discussed, though the Montgomery bus boycott is discussed in some detail. This book is reasonably good, but certainly not comprehensive, A bit of a grab-bag of topics related to land travel and especially the automobile.

An expansive historical perspective

What I thought was particularly notable, aside from the completeness of the main subject, was the exploration of connections to other aspects of society, culture, and economics that are not immediately apparent from an exploration of the main subject. Thought provoking and insightful, a worthwhile read.

Its mostly about cars

The title hints that this will be about “Motion” in general but its 20% about the historical progression to the automobile and then the rest of it is about cars and their consequences.

This is great if you want hear a lot about cars but there were other forms of transport to explore like trains, shops, segways, etc.

I enjoyed the book nevertheless but it was not what I expected.

Great content

The content is terrific but alas the diction is monotonous. Will have to follow up with the physical book.