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We learn all this until the historic moment finally comes: the daring pre-dawn adventure of Bertha Benz, who in 1888 secretly received her husband’s prototype. motorwagen and with his two sons and many drums ligroin, fuel de jour (gasoline was considered useless and dumped in the marshes), drove 65 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim to see his mother. And from this courageous female determination came the real star of the story, the car itself.
Naturally, since this is extensive history, we learn a lot about Henry Ford, mass production, and the Model T, but then how cunningly General Motors could make cars while GM could sell them (their brands are Chevrolet, Cadillac, Pontiac). We learn that you noticed. and one, Buick from a company that formerly made bathtubs) by lending prospective buyers money to pay for them. The General Motors Admissions Company helped get millions of Americans on the road, helped create the suburbs and suburbs, and even more insidiously helped many of those millions find their way into near-permanent debt, like the other millions left today.
The hinge of the book is Standage’s show at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where designer Norman Bel Geddes was present (who also drew up plans for a nine-deck amphibious airliner with 26 engines and a ballroom). Unforgettable visionary Futurama exposition. ) presented his startling vision for the “shape of cities in the automotive age”, where people and cars were separated safely and allowing the automobile (in no way responsible for our “traffic problems”) to dominate economic vitality. allows the nation and its citizens the freedom to go anywhere, at any time.
Shopping malls, gas stations, drive-in cars—and redline, Robert Moses, urban disaster, white flight—all grew out of this utopia-dytopia, and Standage writes with masterful clarity before turning his attention to the subject as needed. Our Automotive Future.
I wish he hadn’t. This does not mean that his writing here is any less vivid; rather, he writes about a bleak world of self-driving cars and Ubers everywhere, drone deliveries, electronic highways, artificial intelligence, and things that might be around the corner or on the block but which foggy people like me wish would go away soon. I prefer to remember the enduring appeal of the wheeled age, just as I did in 1985 when I traveled to the British-administered South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha in a cargo ship with a car in its hold and made an official statement to the UK. 220 people: Since this car will now be the second on the island and the two vehicles have the potential to collide, from now on all vehicles on Tristan’s only path must go left by order of Her Majesty the Queen.
Telling history through a selection of specific objects, such as maps, items in a museum, uniforms, is a contemporary publishing metaphor. Standage had significant success with “History of the World in Six Cups” more than a decade ago. David Rooney, now a leading British horologist, topped the charts with his brilliantly written “About Time,” trendy under the subtitle “A History of Civilization in Twelve Hours.” His insight is that time-recording devices of one kind or another (he describes, quite poignantly, his unbiased passion for such items, from sundials to plutonium-powered clocks) are central to human endeavour, and he points out the power of such influence. well-chosen examples.
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