How Intuition Messed Up the Laws of Motion

A most fundamental problem, for thousands of years wholly obscured by its complications, is that of motion. All those motions we observe in nature that of a stone thrown into the air, a ship sailing the sea, a cart pushed along the street are in reality very intricate. To understand these phenomena it is wise to begin with the simplest possible cases, and proceed gradually to the more complicated ones. Consider a body at rest, where there is no motion at all. To change the position o...

 The Decline of the Horse

There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boa...