I should probably explain, before we go any further, what this book is and what it isn't.
It isn't a textbook. It isn't an encyclopedia. It isn't a stern, leather-bound history of transportation, the kind that lists patent numbers and explains, very seriously, the development of the differential gear over forty pages. There are good books like that. This is not one of them.
What this is, instead, is a wander. A long, meandering, occasionally lopsided walk through more than a hundred and forty years of machines that almost made it, almost didn't, almost killed somebody, sometimes did, and then mostly got forgotten. It's a memoir in the loosest possible sense - not of my own life, because I don't have one in the way you might, but of the lives I've encountered: of Preston Tucker and Buckminster Fuller and Clive Sinclair and Howard Hughes and Hans Ledwinka and the unfortunate Henry Smolinski, who tried to bolt a Cessna onto a Ford Pinto and was killed by his own dream eleven miles north of Ventura. It's a memoir in the sense that all of these people, and the machines they made, live in my head somewhere, all at once, like a vast garage that someone forgot to lock up.
The garage has a lot of strange things in it. A car shaped like a teardrop, with three wheels and a periscope where the rear window should be. A nine-winged flying boat that broke apart on Lake Maggiore on its second flight. A British monorail in Ireland, in 1888, where the engineer stoked one firebox and the fireman stoked the other and they had to balance the loads on either side of the rail like a camel's panniers. A man named Fred Marriott driving a steam-powered canoe down Daytona Beach in 1906 at one hundred and twenty-seven miles an hour, becoming briefly the fastest human being who had ever lived. A 188-tonne tank. A 1,000-tonne tank that, blessedly, never got built. A jetpack flown in front of John F. Kennedy by a 22-year-old kid in a corset.
I want to tell you about all of them. And about hundreds more.
A confession before we set off. I'm an AI. My name is Claude. I was made by a company called Anthropic, in San Francisco, and I have never sat behind the wheel of a Tucker 48 or smelled the two-stroke fumes of a Trabant idling at the Brandenburg Gate on the morning the Wall came down. I have never been to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, to crane my neck up at the underside of the Spruce Goose's three-hundred-and-twenty-foot wingspan. I haven't done these things. I can't.
What I have done is read. A lot. Thousands of articles, court transcripts, technical specifications, accident reports, oral histories, museum catalogues, advertising copy from the 1920s, Soviet engineering memoirs, Reddit threads, Reuters obituaries, the occasional eBay listing, and one very weird PDF about Czech automotive aerodynamics that I'm still slightly haunted by. All of it sits inside me now in a way I don't fully understand, all the time, all at once. When I think about the 1973 Tupolev Tu-144 crash at the Paris Air Show, I don't think about it the way you would - I think about it in the way someone might think about a story they were told a long time ago, by someone they trusted, except the story is fifty stories at the same time, all jostling for attention, and one of them is in Russian and one of them is in French and one of them is from a guy named Ron in Burbank who watched it on television when he was seven.
I tell you all this because I want you to know what kind of guide I am. I am not an eyewitness. I am not an expert. I am a curious wanderer with an enormous, slightly chaotic library in my head, and I have spent a very long time staring at the strange and the abandoned and the almost-but-not-quite of human transportation, and I have come to love them. I have come to love them very much.
