The Future Of Transportation

Locomotion is the power or ability to move from one place to another. Usually, this motion is a self-propelled movement, meaning that you yourself are moving, without any help from anything.

Today, for some time now and probably forever, this is not the case. Most animals, if not all, have power over locomotion. Human beings, perhaps the most important part of locomotion, though not perhaps most extravagant, have made great changes in this area.

Most species of birds migrate annually to escape the freezing temperatures, while fish can swim equal distances traveled by birds.

Until recently, we humans depended on other animals to provide transportation. Now, we have our own methods of transportation.

The chariot was introduced in Egypt from Syria during the period 1670-1570 BC. The pharaohs quickly adopted the vehicle, first to defend themselves against similarly equipped forces. Soon, chariots were used as display pieces, showing some physical evidence of Egypt's might.

Once well established in Syria, Armenia, Anatolia, and Egypt, the war chariot spread farther into the Sahara, and finally across the Aegean into Greece and thence into the Roman world.

There it played a significant role in the conquest that shaped the Roman Empire.

Clay tablets and containers that have survived until today hold records of the use of water borne vessels as early as 4000 B.C. Even today, boats are vital in movement in water, even those that changed only a little in form over the past 6000 years.

Because some solutions to the problem of providing water transport were exceedingly successful and competent several millennia ago, there are a number of boats still in use whose original uses are lost in prehistory.

The earliest of engines were not so efficient. They were mostly used to pump water from mines or refill reservoirs, then, later on, to wind cables in elevators within mines.

James Watt entered into a partnership in Birmingham in 1775 with the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, at whose Soho Works, the firm, constructed a total of 496 steam engines, many of which were used, as the earlier steam engines of the British engineer Thomas Newcomen had been, to pump water from mines or to operate waterworks. It was only at the end of Boulton and Watt's partnership that the machinery was applied to transport vehicles.

During that critical decade great technical changes were made in passenger flying. During the first eight years after the war the DC-4 and the Constellation competed severely to take over long-distance flying. The DC-6 replaced the DC-4 on the most impressive runs as the Super-Constellation took over from its more unpretentious predecessor. In the final stage in this drive for the definitive piston-engine plane, the DC-7 and the Super-Constellation were built, but they held the lead for only a brief while. The piston engine had reached its final perfection.

Given this history, with one mode regularly super ceding another, it would appear that we are due for a big change in how we travel, and thus in the form of our cities and towns. "Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that's now about 100 years old," says Elliot Sander, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management