Horse Vs Car: They Called It 200 Years Ago
Part of our Past Futures series looking at how Londoners of the past foresaw their future.
London was still a horse-drawn city in 1900. A decade later, cars and motor-buses were everywhere, to the point of nuisance. It was a rapid and profound change, but one that had been predicted for the best part of a century. In this week’s Londonist: Time Machine we take a look at how almost everyone, from the Georgians onward, thought the horse’s days were numbered.
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Now, on with the main event…
Horse Vs Car: They Called It 200 Years Ago
“[Motor cars] have the appearance of a fad, and an extremely dirty, dusty, inconvenient fad… These crude impracticable machines are unlikely for many years to displace in the Englishman’s affection a fine trotting horse and a smart trap.”
So wrote an anonymous equestrian to the syndicated press in 1901. Motor cars at this point were still a temperamental plaything of the wealthy, and a rare sight in London. The motor’s domination of the streets within a decade was not foreseen by everyone. After all, experiments with horseless locomotion on the roads had been going on for over a century, with no mass-market success. And, as we shall see, people had been predicting the demise of the horse for decades.
The Georgians wave farewell to the horse
Take a good look at this picture. The Steam Horse Velocity speeds alongside the Thames, belching smoke from its nostrils and posterior. A jockey figure controls a plunger device at the head, while riders share a prolonged saddle. Behind, a steam-powered wagon promises a London to Bath journey in six hours. It is a mad, chaotic vision of the future, drawn by William Heath almost 200 years ago.
Heath’s March of the Intellect cartoons are among the most delicious examples of satirical future-gazing ever committed to paper. Drawn in 1829 — seven years before London had a railway line, let alone horseless road traffic — they offer some audacious speculation about where society might be heading1.
Horseless carriages driven by steam had been under trial for many years by Heath’s time. The earliest prototypes date back to the 1760s and numerous patented improvements arrived thereafter. A report in the Morning Post of Boxing Day 1827 lists seven London-based engineers independently working on their own designs. Chief among them was Goldsworthy Gurney, whose steam carriage manufactory was close to Regent’s Park.
Around the time of Heath’s cartoon, Gurney was regularly in the press for his increasingly sophisticated prototypes. His day trips were progressing as far as Barnet and Stanmore at speeds of up to 20mph. One later model was even able to reach Bath. A press report from 1830 neatly describes a steam-powered trip along the Euston Road, and how it spooked the horsemen:
“It was still more entertaining to mark the rage of the Paddington omnibus and stage drivers, who lingered with curses to behold a coach in motion without guide or horses. Rival whips reconciled their differences to vow vengeance to the march of intellect; and many a hackney-coachman sighed as it passed along, at his own approaching end.”
Heath’s illustrated steam horses, far from being prescient, were simply a reaction to the headlines of his time. They are an exaggerated prognosis from prototype. Much as today we see a vast range of speculation about what AI might do to society, Heath is imagining how knowledge and technological developments might transform every facet of life within the near future.
Heath’s pens were not the only ones bent on such scenes. Robert Seymour parodied the future of steam in his 1830 cartoon Locomotion -- Walking by Steam, Riding by Steam, Flying by Steam. The image is perhaps the first depiction of a robotic exoskeleton, much like the titular Wrong Trousers from the Wallace and Gromit film, and similar to devices currently being explored for military and disability applications.
The great George Cruickshank was also absorbed by the changes in society. A few months after Heath’s cartoon, he sketched The Horses Going To The Dogs, which shows a steam-powered carriage hurtling along a road. The blood-and-flesh horses lament as their nemesis thunders by.
We’re a decade before Queen Victoria with some of these images, and already people lament the imminent passing of the horse. Their predictions were premature. But, as ever, the interesting thing is not what they were predicting, but why. The hope and the fear of a mechanised future were summed up in a popular 1820’s phrase that we’ve met twice already…
…the “March of the Intellect”
The industrial revolution was bringing change at an ever-greater rate in this period, both technologically and societally. Long-established ways of life were being overturned at pace. The countryside found itself smothered beneath a creeping towel of urbanisation. Rural jobs were increasingly mechanised, while those employed in industry could expect little respect and still less by salary. In other ways, human and civic rights were storming up the agenda. Abolition of slavery and the widening of enfranchisement were hot issues in the 1820s. Where would it all lead?
This inexorable accumulation of knowledge and its spread to increasingly literate masses through the printed word; the rise of industrialisation and its concomitant yield of labour-saving technology; the democratisation of society -- all coalesced into a single idea: the “March of the Intellect”.
The phrase was often used in a derogatory way by those who were sceptical of this brave, new, Whiggish world. Heath uses the phrase for his cartoon series, poking fun at the likes of Jeremy Bentham, whose then-provocative view was that mass education could improve society (imagine!). The mood is neatly summed up in this anonymous (and here abridged) poem of 1834 which I chanced across while fossicking through the newspaper archives (£) during a bout of insomnia:
I sing the March of Intellect,
(Precocious be the Lay)--
What shall impede its mighty course,
Or check its sovereign sway?
I sing the March of Intellect,
Erst sought with care and pain,
That comes through mental viaducts
And rail-roads of the brain.
I sing the March of Intellect,
Which makes such rapid way--
Porkmen and Smiths are now the Lockes
And Bacons of the day.
I sing the March of Intellect,
Its triumphs yet to swell--
The scullion writes, the pot-boy reads,
As if by magic spell.
I sing the March of Intellect--
Propelled by water hot;
Steam wonders does, and will do more,
We scarcely yet know Watt.
I sing the March of Intellect,
On rail-roads to be seen,
Which makes machinery the rage,
And man a mere machine.
When the poet speaks of the scullion writing, or deploys that rather splendid pun about the Porkmen becoming the new (Francis) Bacon, it is not in celebration but in satire. Similarly, William Heath sneers at progress at every pen stroke. His steam horses are not only comical in appearance but they’re also drawn to perturb the readership. See how the well-dressed gentry and a barrister share the saddle with a barefooted, rake-clutching farm labourer? “Is that what you want,” suggests Heath, “because that’s what will happen”.
These tensions remain with us today. Every new technology has its proselytisers and doom-mongers. Every major policy change breeds both advocacy and protest. Change is thrilling and frightening and chilling and brightening.
But let’s get back to the poor old horse…
Hold your horses
Heath and co were not so much predicting a horseless society as cocking a snook at those who sought it. In fact, it would take almost a century before engines would become commonplace on the streets of London. The technology just wasn’t there yet, and enormous organisational issues had to be overcome.
In mid-19th century London, horses were everywhere. No reliable estimate exists, but we might assume something like half a million working horses could be found in the city at any one time. They pulled omnibuses, coaches, wagons and cabs, or were ridden in the saddle.
Their hoofprint spread beyond the streets. Support industries such as stabling, grooming, saddling, agriculture (for feed) and market trading employed tens of thousands. Even the humble crossing sweeper owed his livelihood to the horse and its sloppy output. So entrenched was the ungulate infrastructure that, to the everyday Londoner at least, the transition to any alternative would have seemed unimaginable -- much as today we would find it hard to picture a future London without a tube network. Yet 19th century visionaries were forever anticipating the horse’s demise.
A 1856 article adapted from Knickerbocker Magazine, for example, looked forward to the year 1950, when London would be a literal one-horse town:
“Singular Curiosity — To be seen alive, 229, New Regent street2, a remarkably fine specimen of that noble animal, the horse. It is perfectly tame and docile, and is supposed to be the last of that species which formerly drew the cabs, broughams, &c, of the metropolis. Visitors are allowed to mount, a real saddle has been borrowed for the occasion from the British Museum."
Around the same time, an anonymous piece in Leisure Hour magazine doesn’t quite kill off the horse, but certainly points to one of its eventual competitors. The following was written in 1857, imagining the streets of the West End in the year 1957:
“The entire Strand, for instance, was a uniform width throughout; and parallel with it a good part of the way, on the north side, was another street almost as wide, and devoted exclusively to the heavy traffic of commerce. The old horse omnibuses had all disappeared, and instead of them numberless light carriages ran in tram-roads next the foot-way, drawn by some application of electric power, and stopping at short intervals. Everybody seemed to ride as it suited them, paying their way by a single smallest coin. These tram carriages were on each side of the way, and constantly running in contrary directions; the middle space between them was the horse and carriage route, and from its amplitude, and the absence of all heavy traffic, formed a convenient and spacious drive.”
This is rather far-sighted3. The first tram of any kind was introduced to London in 1860 (three years after this article) along the newly opened Victoria Street. It was pulled by horses. Steam trams appeared from 1873, but were never a great success. The first electric trams, such as described in the 1857 vision, slid out of their depots in 1901.
Opinions and speculations abounded during the long-predicted transition from horse-drawn traffic to mechanical transport. Most agreed that the horse would eventually be supplanted, but there was considerable divergence over the best substitute. Would it be a ‘steam horse’ as depicted by Heath? Would electricity provide a solution? Or could some other motive force, such as petrochemically-driven engines, rule the roads?
One ingenious if impractical idea of 1899 (£) involved using bars of solidified air “sliced off on demand by the motor which needs it, and exhausted back into its native element after giving up its work”. Perhaps, even, fresh air could be obtained from mountain tops, compressed into a solid, then used to power the Tube.
“What a boon to suffering railway men and those who go down into the bowels of London railway tunnels. Yet who shall say that such a dream shall not come about, and that in the near future?”
The laws of thermodynamics probably had the greatest say.
Closing the stable door
By the turn of the 20th century, the first justified whinnies of alarm for the future of horse-drawn transport were heard. Motor cars were now a reality, if still a rarity on the streets of London. The vast majority of traffic was still horse-drawn, but change was in the (non-solidified) air.
Sir Henry Norman MP was a keen motorist and regularly talked up the coming age of the engine. In 1903, he foretold that our centuries-long reliance on equine muscle was coming to an end. He even put a date on it:
“For my own part, I am convinced that ten years hence [i.e. 1913] there will not be a horse left in the streets of London -- except the few kept surely for pleasure and pride in their beauty and strength, and for police and military purposes.”
Cars were proving economical, longer-ranging, more powerful and eventually safer than the unpredictable horse, but they also had another advantage: a gaseous exhaust rather than the deposition of a stinking, brown cackpackage. As T Baron Russell wrote, with no small amount of sexism, in 1905:
“A lady of the year 2000 who could be miraculously transported back to London at the present moment would probably faint (they will not have ceased fainting) at the intolerable disgustingness of what is, I suppose, [by 2000] one of the cleanest cities in the world, even if the cruelty of employing horses for traction, and the frightful recklessness of allowing them to soil the streets in which people walk, did not overpower her susceptibilities in another way.”
In the event, it would not be until after the first world war that cars could be said to have thoroughly replaced the horse. But other vehicles made the transition sooner, and perhaps more unexpectedly.
The horseless omnibus
The first motor buses entered service at the dawn of the 20th century, but they remained large, lumbering curiosities for a decade. In 1905, an estimated 12,000 horse-drawn buses still served the capital under the auspices of the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC), with 23,000 horses stabled by this and other companies.
As late as 1906, John Burns MP, a keen London historian who famously described the Thames as “liquid history”, thought the motor omnibus was a dead end: “Their cost, noise, maintenance, ubiquity of movement, and mobility of obstruction, discount them from London use,” said he, favouring electric trams instead. Even so, the bus companies turned increasingly to motorised vehicles as the decade drew on.
The tide began to turn in 1909, when the LGOC reported losses of £45,000 in its horse business, but profits of £59,000 from its motor vehicles. In 1910, the company was disposing of around 150 horses every day. By 1911, just 30 horse buses remained. The last, tenacious beasts were sold at auction later that year, leaving the roads clear for motorised transport and a mere handful of privately operated horse buses. At this time, Lord Mayor of London Sir Vansittart Bowater felt moved to predict that by 2013 “a horse will excite more wonder in the City than an aeroplane or dirigible does to-day”. He was probably correct.
A whole tranche of transport infrastructure had been replaced almost overnight, with many knock-on effects. Manure was found to be in short supply, and the price rocketed. The growing lack of horses led to deep concerns in military circles -- horses would still play a large role in the First World War (as would motor omnibuses).
This short video gives a good sense of the picture around 1910. About half of the wagons and personal vehicles are motorised and half horse-drawn. All of the omnibuses are motorised.
In a curious coda to the story, even the old numbered badges, worn by bus drivers and conductors, would be ditched. When nobody wanted these redundant accoutrements for scrap, they were dumped in the Thames Estuary by a solitary police sergeant, who reportedly saluted as some 60,000 badges made their way to the bottom of Black Deep.
Presumably, they lie there to this day, sunken tokens of another age.
Thanks for reading! Paying subscribers can read other articles from my ‘Past Futures’ series — which looks at how Londoners of the past imagined their future — in our archive. Feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me on matt@londonist.com.
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I’ve featured another detail from Heath’s cartoons in this newsletter before, when looking at vacuum railways. Elsewhere, they predict everything from aerial warfare to household robots to voyages to the moon — all with a cheeky side-eye at the march of progress.
New Regent Street doesn’t exist, but if we take it to mean Regent Street, the door number would put this horsey curiosity pretty much next door to the Apple Store, on the corner with Hanover Street.
Curiously, central London’s most visible relic of the tram era passes beneath Strand, the location imagined above. The Kingsway tram tunnel cuts a trench along Kingsway, before its appropriation as a road tunnel beneath Aldwych and Strand at the southern end.