As always…
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It’s interesting that they thought that this detail was worth noting:
“Unlike some competitors, our electric truck won’t entrap you and condemn you to a fiery death in the event of an accident!”
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Cugnot’s invention! 
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Yeah, Cugnot was steampunk before it was cool.
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The One Most Influential Person in Automotive History Within Walking Distance of my House:
(though his invention was never actually manufactured, and he was not the only person to come up with the idea).
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It is quite possible that Zeppo Marx came up with the break light.
He was quite the mechanical prodigy and made aircraft components during WW II, parts for medical machines afterwords and the Space Shuttle used a spring-loaded deploy system for satellites that was based on some thingy or other he designed decades previously.
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Where are the propellers?
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In the A/C.
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I was in the Ship a few weeks back. A pint and a large red wine cost us EIGHTEEN FUCKING POUNDS AND FIFTY PENCE! I nearly died.
Viz Ouseburn and its environs, have you seen On The Night Of The Fire? 30s British film noir set in Ouseburn Valley?
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No, I haven’t seen that, but looks like exactly the kind of thing I’d like, thanks for the recommendation.
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Yes, yes, colloquial use and all that. But neither of the terms “asphalt” or “bitumen” should be confused with tar or coal tars:
Tar is the thick liquid product of the dry distillation and pyrolysis of organic hydrocarbons primarily sourced from vegetation masses, whether fossilized as with coal, or freshly harvested. The majority of bitumen, on the other hand, was formed naturally when vast quantities of organic animal materials were deposited by water and buried hundreds of metres deep at the diagenetic point, where the disorganized fatty hydrocarbon molecules joined in long chains in the absence of oxygen. Bitumen occurs as a solid or highly viscous liquid. It may even be mixed in with coal deposits. Bitumen, and coal using the Bergius process, can be refined into petrols such as gasoline, and bitumen may be distilled into tar, not the other way around.[Jimbopedia]
This is not just a technicality.
Bitumen is safe enough to seal up a drinking water reservoir with. Actual tar (like the coal tar that was one of the products of gasworks in the good old days) has just the kind of hydrocarbon mix (hello benzene, my old friend) that makes it both toxic and carcinogenic.
It is very easy to tell them apart by smell. Personally, I really like the smell of fresh, hot asphalt.
(Wood tar, produced and used since prehistoric times, is just microbicidal and still used as an additive in the flavoring of candy, alcohol and other foods, dandruff shampoo and so on. Wood tar has its own fascinating history, but paving roads at scale isn’t part of it.)
The weird thing about asphalt is that it occurs naturally. And the composition of the asphalt from Pitch Lake in Trinidad is pretty much perfect for paving roads and has been used for this, industrially, since ~1881 in Europe and 1888 in the US. It was scooped up from the lake, poured into little wooden barrels where it cooled down and solidified, and shipped. The end user would simply remove the barrel and had a solid block of asphalt in just the right size to put into a mobile asphalt cooker by the roadside. “Trinidad Asphalt” is a term still used in road construction, although it usually refers to manufactured asphalt that replicates the original composition.
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I didn’t know they were in serious talks with Detroit about selling the system to the city.
They took a bit of poetic license in the promo video - the POV shots of “gliding through the city” were shot some 40 km from the test track in Wuppertal. Riding the one and only Schwebebahn.
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So Ford’s founder was only slightly less Nazi than Volkswagen’s?
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