Pope Manufacturing's Columbia Motor Carriage. The paradigm is, of course, in the US, where capitalism’s first requirement - growth - brought crises at a suddenly cascading pace. A Brief History of Motion is mostly about the automobile and its grip on the culture and economy of the 20th century pretty much everywhere. “Faster and more efficient transport between cities increased the demand for rapid transport of people and goods within them,” Standage observes. Why were cities of the 1880s and ’90s suddenly filling up with manure after the five-millennia interlude? Another transportation tech innovation, the steam locomotive, is implicated. But there are capitalist wheels within wheels, as even an editor of the “liberal” Economist like Standage acknowledges. “In the year 1800, wooden vehicles pulled by animals were the most advanced form of land-based transit on the planet and had been for more than five millennia,” Tom Standage writes in his entertaining A Brief History of Motion. Hence, the private automobile succeeded the horse and buggy, bringing (as we now know) its own perils to humans and the planet. As mechanization began to take hold at the turn of the century, horse-free vehicles became an appealing alternative to the current biohazardous arrangement. Population centers - including London and New York - were desperate for a solution to this ongoing crisis of public health and aesthetic decency. The Great Horse-Shit Crisis of the late 19th century imperiled Western cities with deluges of equine emissions.
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