as a status symbol, the house has, of late, supplanted the car. 
If so, this shift from the mobile open road to the manicured 
roots of suburbia may signify a real change in American 
orientation. There is a growing uneasiness about the degree to 
which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a 
resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance. 
The town planners are plotting ways and means to buy back 
our cities for the pedestrian from the big transportation 
interests.

     Lynn White tells the story of the stirrup and the heavy- 
armored knight in his Medieval Technology and Social Change . 
So expensive yet so mandatory was the armored rider for shock 
combat, that the cooperative feudal system came into 
existence to pay for his equipment. Renaissance gunpowder 
and ordnance ended the military role of the knight and returned