With stunning visuals and encyclopedic insight, the author of The Heights
and The Works
reveals how humans move across the globe In our digital age, it’s easy to forget that almost everything we enjoy about modern life depends on motion. We ride in cars and on buses and trains to work; enjoy food shipped over oceans; fly high in the sky to any point on the planet. Over the last century, the world has come to rely on its ability to move just about anywhere effortlessly. But what prompted this transformation? What inventions allowed it to happen? And how do the vehicles and networks that keep us in motion today?airports, trains, cars, and satellites?really work?
Exploring how the world moves is the task of Kate Ascher’s The Way to Go: Moving Through Sea, Land, and Air. Lusciously illustrated and meticulously researched, The Way to Go reveals the highly complex technologies that underpin global transportation. How do airplanes and rockets get up into the sky? What really happens under the hood of a car or in the cables above a streetcar? How do submarines generate enough air to stay underwater for so long? What makes high-speed trains move so fast? How can airplanes land on ships at sea? What allows bridges to stand? How do driverless trains work?
Focusing on the machines that underpin our lives, Ascher’s The Way to Go also introduces the networks that keep those machines in business? the emergency communication systems that connect ships at sea, the automated tolling systems that maintain the flow of highway traffic, the air control system that keeps planes from colliding in the sky. Equally fascinating are the technologies behind these networks: baggage tag readers that make sure people’s bags go where they need to; automated street lights that adjust their timing based on traffic flow; GPS systems that allow us all to know where we’re going. Together these technologies move more people farther, faster, and with less effort than at any other time in history.
As our lives and our businesses become more entwined with others’ across the globe, there has never been a better time to understand how transportation works. Indispensable and unforgettable, Kate Ascher’s The Way to Go is a gorgeous graphic guide to a world moving as never before.
