The Story of Transport

Getting From Here to There

For almost the whole of human history, there was only one way to travel: on your own two feet. If you wanted to reach a faraway place, you walked, and it could take days, weeks or even years. The world was an enormous place, and most people never journeyed more than a short distance from where they were born.

Today, things could hardly be more different. We zoom along roads in cars, race across countries on trains, and fly between continents in a single day. We have even sent people to the Moon. The story of how we got from walking to space travel is one of the most exciting in all of history — the story of transport.

This book follows that journey through time. We will start with the very first inventions that let people travel farther and faster, and we will end among rockets and spaceships. Along the way we will see how each new kind of transport changed not just how people moved, but how they lived, traded, fought and built the whole world.

The Wheel and the First Journeys

The earliest people travelled on foot, carrying everything themselves. A huge step forward came when humans began to use animals. Around 6,000 years ago, people tamed horses, donkeys, oxen and camels, which could carry heavy loads and people across great distances. In some lands, camels could cross scorching deserts; in others, oxen pulled heavy sledges.

Then came one of the greatest inventions in history: the wheel. Wheels were first used for making pottery, but around 5,000 years ago people began fitting them to carts and wagons. Suddenly, with an animal to pull it, a single cart could carry far more than a person could ever lift. Wheels rolled, and trade and travel rolled with them. To make the most of wheels, people built better and better roads. The ancient Romans became famous road-builders, laying tens of thousands of kilometres of straight, paved roads across their empire so that armies, messengers and goods could move quickly.

Across the Water

While wheels conquered the land, people were also learning to travel across water. Boats may be even older than the wheel. The first were probably simple rafts or hollowed-out logs, but over thousands of years they grew into mighty ships.

Water travel had huge advantages. A boat could carry far heavier loads than any cart, and it could reach places no road could. Rivers became highways, and the open sea became a road to distant lands. Many of history's greatest civilisations, from Egypt to China, depended on boats to trade and to carry goods up and down their rivers.

Sailors slowly grew bolder, venturing across open oceans. With sails to catch the wind, clever ships and tools like the compass to find their way, explorers crossed vast seas, connecting distant continents for the first time. Whole new trade routes opened up, carrying spices, silk, gold and ideas around the world — though this age of sailing also brought conquest and great suffering to many peoples. For thousands of years, ships were the only way to cross the great oceans, and they shaped the fate of nations.

The Age of Steam

For most of history, all transport relied on muscle power or wind: people walked, animals pulled, and sails caught the breeze. Then, a little over 200 years ago, a world-changing invention arrived: the steam engine.

A steam engine burns fuel, usually coal, to boil water into steam, and uses the pushing power of that steam to drive machines. For the first time, people had a powerful engine that did not get tired and did not need wind. This was at the heart of the great Industrial Revolution, and it transformed transport completely.

In the early 1800s, engineers fitted steam engines to vehicles that ran on metal rails: the railway was born. Pioneers such as George Stephenson built locomotives like the famous Rocket, and soon railways were spreading across countries at astonishing speed. Trains could carry hundreds of people and huge loads of goods faster than anything before. They shrank the world: a journey that once took days now took hours. Steam also went to sea in steamships, which could cross oceans on a schedule without depending on the wind. The age of steam linked towns, cities and nations as never before.

Cars and the Open Road

As the 1800s ended, inventors found a new source of power: the internal combustion engine, which burned petrol or diesel inside the engine itself. In the 1880s, German engineers including Karl Benz built the first practical motor cars — horseless carriages that could drive along under their own power.

At first, cars were rare, expensive playthings for the rich. That changed thanks to Henry Ford in the United States. Ford used a moving assembly line, where each worker added one part as the car moved past, to build cars quickly and cheaply. His famous Model T became affordable for ordinary families, and soon millions of people owned cars.

The car changed the world. People could now live further from where they worked, travel for pleasure, and reach places no train ran. Towns and cities were reshaped around roads, petrol stations and car parks. Lorries carried goods door to door. But cars also brought traffic jams, accidents and pollution — challenges we are still working to solve today, with electric cars and cleaner engines.

Taking to the Skies

For thousands of years, humans had dreamed of flying like birds. People watched birds soar and tried, again and again, to copy them, usually with painful failure. The dream finally came true in stages.

First came lighter-than-air craft: hot-air balloons in the 1780s, which could drift on the wind, and later airships. But the great breakthrough came on a windy day in 1903, when two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, flew the first powered, controlled aeroplane. Their first flight lasted only a few seconds, but it changed history.

Aeroplanes improved with astonishing speed. Within a few decades, planes were crossing oceans and carrying passengers. Then, in the 1940s, the jet engine made aircraft faster and more powerful than ever, and air travel grew into something millions of people could use. Today you can fly between continents in hours, a journey that would once have taken months by ship. The aeroplane connected the whole world, bringing distant places and peoples within reach of one another.

Into Space and the Future

Transport did not stop at the edge of the sky. In the 20th century, engineers built rockets powerful enough to escape the pull of Earth's gravity altogether. In 1957 the first artificial satellite was launched, in 1961 the first human travelled into space, and in 1969 astronauts walked on the Moon — an achievement that would have seemed pure fantasy to the people who first invented the wheel.

Today the story of transport is still being written. Engineers are building electric and self-driving cars, faster and cleaner trains, and new spacecraft, while trying hard to reduce the pollution that transport can cause. From a person walking across the plains to a rocket racing into space, transport has been one of the great engines of human history, carrying not only people and goods but also ideas that changed the world.

What We Learned

We have travelled through the whole story of transport.

We began on foot, then saw how animals, the wheel and roads first let people carry heavy loads and travel farther. We sailed across rivers and oceans in boats and ships that connected distant lands. We watched the steam engine give birth to railways and steamships, then met the car and the moving assembly line that put the world on wheels. We took to the skies with balloons, the Wright brothers and the jet engine, and finally blasted into space aboard rockets.

Each new form of transport shrank the world and changed how people lived, worked and dreamed. The journey from walking to spaceflight shows just how far human cleverness can carry us.

Want to keep exploring how people travelled and invented? Take to the skies in A Short History of Flight, or look under the bonnet in How Cars and Engines Work.