Ways and means of communication

Fülszöveg

This book outlines one of the innumerable panoramas of the history of transport and communications from the Neolithic Age up until the present day, in brief sections and developing the theme along three parallel lines: the increase in the number of people, of goods and of information which travel from place to place; the increase in the average length of journeys and the reciprocal diminishing of the time needed to make them and of the risk involved; and finally, the extension and the specialization of the ways and means of transport, as well as the systems of traction and propulsion. A wealth of photographic material provides evidence of examples of transport from bygone ages used even today in areas where material progress has gone ahead with less dynamism and developing along different lines from those in European civilizations. Even though we cannot put the same store by the Sumerian spokeless wheel, the one from Messina from last century and the one from Honduras today, we... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This book outlines one of the innumerable panoramas of the history of transport and communications from the Neolithic Age up until the present day, in brief sections and developing the theme along three parallel lines: the increase in the number of people, of goods and of information which travel from place to place; the increase in the average length of journeys and the reciprocal diminishing of the time needed to make them and of the risk involved; and finally, the extension and the specialization of the ways and means of transport, as well as the systems of traction and propulsion. A wealth of photographic material provides evidence of examples of transport from bygone ages used even today in areas where material progress has gone ahead with less dynamism and developing along different lines from those in European civilizations. Even though we cannot put the same store by the Sumerian spokeless wheel, the one from Messina from last century and the one from Honduras today, we can however draw valid conclusions by making analogies between problems and solutions in various civilizations which are ages apart, aiming at verifying the flow and direction of development, which, in our case, leads from the isolation of distant social cells vacillating on a rarefied plane, to the interconnection of ever more stratified and complex cultural structures, on a planet which communications have made continual and « intra-active » at all levels of human life. Vissza