From chariots to e-scooters: transformations in transport | History Extra
"‘The topic of horse manure’
‘It sounds silly. And my wife sort of complained for the whole period, when I was writing this book. It's like, there's more stories about horse manure. So there's actually an apology to her in the acknowledgments about, sorry about all the stories of horse manure, but it's much more serious than it sounds, because the reason I think it's worth revisiting the history of wheeled transport now is because what is happening today in the 2020s, is very similar to what was happening in the 1890s. And so I think, you know, going back in and looking, going back and looking at what we did then and, and the decisions that were made, and the consequences of those decisions, I think, is really useful.
So the problem in the 1890s was that at the time, horse drawn, transport was the dominant form of transport within cities of various kinds. So you could ride a horse, you could go in a horse drawn, you know, carriage, you could go in a in a Hackney cab, which was like a taxi pulled by a horse, there were horse buses, which were essentially buses pulled by horses. And then some of them went on rails, and they were called horse cars. But essentially, it was all horses all the time. And this was turning into more and more of a problem. And in the fastest growing larger cities of the Western world, places like London and New York, there was literally a growing problem, which was that horse manure was piling up on the streets. And for a while, in the 19th century, it was the case that people would pay to take it away, because you could, if you had the right to gather the horse manure on the streets of London, you could scoop it all up, stick it on a car, take it to the countryside and sell it to farmers as fertilizer.
And what starts to happen in the second half of the 19th century, is that there's so much of it, the the farmers don't want to buy it, the price collapses, and cities have to start paying people to take it away, and they don't know what to do with it. And New York has this massive problem that they have these big horse manure dumps where they're literally piling it up. And they have complaints from people saying there's a horse manure dump in my neighborhood, it's really smelly, there are lots of flies, I'm really worried about the the effect of this on our health. So this is a growing problem. And then it also turns out that the number of horses in these cities is growing faster than the number of people. So both of these cities, and other cities in the same position are essentially becoming more dependent on horses. And you'd have thought that the invention of railways would help to alleviate this problem. But in fact, it made it worse, because as soon as you connect cities, up with railways, the more movement of goods and people you've got between cities, the more you need horses to move those goods and people around once they arrive in those cities. And in fact, railway companies were some of the biggest owners of horses and had the biggest stables and the biggest fleets of horse drawn vehicles.
So it's very clear by the 1890s, that this is unsustainable. Traffic is absolutely terrible. The roads are clogged not just with horse manure, but with horse drawn vehicles. It's a terrible amount of noise. There are accidents, because you know, horses occasionally get scared and kick people and things like this. So there's this sort of awareness that there's a crisis that cities have become too dependent, urban transport has become too dependent on horses, and something's got to change but no one's quite sure what it's gonna be, what is the future of transport in cities going to be?
And we are in a similar position today, which is we've arrived recognize that the dominant form of urban transport in our era, the car is unsustainable, it's unsustainable because it produces particulates, it produces C02 that leads to climate change, we waste in some cities as much as a third of the surface area on parking. You look in any street where I live in London, you'll see just lots and lots of cars just parked on the side, they’re used about 4% of the time. So they’re unused 96% of the time, this is really inefficient. And and so there's a general recognition that this is kind of crazy. And we should probably be looking for another way of doing things for the sake of our sanity, for the sake of the quality of urban life and also for the sake of the planet. And so, again, we're in this position that we recognize that something has to change, but we're not quite sure what it should be.
Now, we know what happened in the 1890s, that advocates of the automobile, the horseless carriage, it was called at the time, won the argument and said, this is the answer, this is going to fix the problem of pollution. Because cars don't produce horse manure, you're going to fix the problem of traffic because a horse and a carriage takes up twice as much room as a horseless carriage. So suddenly, there's going to be twice as much road space, no more traffic jams, it's going to be no more accidents, because cars can't kick people. And therefore it's going to it's going to be much quieter, because cars have have rubber tires, so they're almost silent. So this is going to fix all our problems. It's really, really simple. This is what we do. And of course, we know what the consequences of that decision were, which is that cars completely reshaped cities in the 20th century, and had all of these unintended consequences, both positive and negative, which we're now having to grapple with...
The invention of the wheel is about 3500 BC. And it used to be thought that it was in Mesopotamia because the Mesopotamians invented so many other things. They invented cities and writing and, you know, large scale beer production. You know, really important aspects of civilization, I'm sure you'll agree. And so it was assumed that they must have invented the wheel as well. But the latest archaeological evidence is that actually wheels were invented in Eastern Europe, and the earliest surviving wheel is from Ljubljana. And it's from around that time. And, and so what seems to have happened is that wheels were invented, possibly as a sort of, byproduct of copper mining. So this copper mining is starting to take off at this point. It's the Copper Age, which is what comes before the Iron Age, and, and moving all of that copper ore around, you know, you can imagine that someone might have said, you know, it'd be easier if instead of carrying it around in baskets, we stuck some wheels on the side. And then the idea spreads very quickly around the top of the Black Sea, into the ancient Near East, so into Mesopotamia. And you do see wheeled vehicles appearing there.
What's really surprising is how slowly they take off. So today, we're used to thinking of the wheel as the greatest invention since sliced bread... there were entire civilizations that for a long time were aware of wheels and decided not to use them. The classic example being the Egyptians. So the Egyptians were aware of wheels because the Mesopotamians next door had them and the Egyptians were quite happy to borrow ideas from the Mesopotamians, writing seems to have been one of them. But they built the pyramids without using wheels at all. And that's because moving big blocks of stone around, it's actually easier not to use wheels. It's easier to use rafts on the Nile, it's easier to use sleds on the sand and pour water in front of them, rollers, that sort of thing.
And so the, the Egyptians really weren't interested in wheels, and it was only when the Hittites, who are a group of people who are in roughly what's Turkey today, they invent the war chariot and they start invading you know, the rest of what's now the Middle East. And, and the at that point, the Egyptians are like, okay, wheels, now we see the point. And there are different wheels. So the first wheels are very, very thick, heavy wheels, solid wheels made of planks of wood stuck together. They're not made, as a lot of people might think, you know, if you've seen the Flintstones, you might think the first wheel, so you get a big log and you chop a slice off the end of it.
The problem with that is there are two problems. Firstly, you need a saw. And saws are actually really hard to make. I mean, think about it, you need to make a piece of metal with teeth on it that are really sharp. Saws aren't invented until about 2000 years after the wheels. So that's definitely not how the first wheels are made. And the second problem with it is if you make a wheel by chopping a slice off a log, it's a really rubbish wheel. It's really small, so it can't go over big bumps in the ground. And it turns out that the grain in the wood means that the wood kind of crumbles or the wheel falls apart really easily. So what you really want is planks of wood, which you can make by splitting logs using chisels, and then you stick the planks together and you chisel out a circular wheel. And that's what the earliest wheel that we have, the Ljubljana wheel actually looks like. And that's what the Mesopotamian wheels look like…
But what happens with the war chariots is that you want speed. And so they figure out that you can make spoked wheels. And the Egyptians get really good at this. In Tutankhamun's tomb, there is a chariot that weighs 35 kilograms. So you could lift it with one arm if you're pretty strong. And it's like the Ferrari of its day. It's like a super, super fast war chariot. And what happens around that period is that kings in the ancient Near East, in Assyria, in Egypt start to depict themselves in murals in wall carvings, as you know, these awesome people who ride around in chariots and smite their enemies. And this idea that you are what you drive. And the more powerful you are, the faster your vehicle has to be, dates from that period. And this is why Tutankhamun has this super duper fast chariot in his in his tomb, and war chariots then become this this big thing. And so the Egyptians are like, yeah, wheels. They're awesome...
You've got this period where war chariots are awesome, and everyone wants to be, and the kings and the gods are all depicted as riding chariots. But the age of the chariot doesn't last that long. It lasts a bit over 1000 years. And what happens is that horses are being bred to pull these chariots and so people are breeding bigger and bigger horses, and they figure out that you can actually get an armed, fully armored warrior on the back of a horse. Once you do that, you don't need the chariot anymore. And in fact, it's better than the chariot because you can go up hills and you can go across bumpy ground. And so cavalry is, it is recognized as you know, superior to having lots of chariots. And the sort of classic example of how this becomes apparentive [sp?] one is the battle of Gaugamela which is between Alexander the Great and King Darius of Persia, and Alexander doesn't use chariots, he uses cavalry, and Darius is still stuck in, you know, oh, yeah, chariots are awesome. And he loses. And there's a depiction of his loss. And it's a, it's in Pompeii. It's a mosaic in Pompeii, which is based on an earlier painting, but it very symbolically shows Alexander triumphant on his horse and King Darius shirking slinking away from the battlefield, in his chariot.
So at that point, you know, real men ride horses, and we get this whole period from about then, which is sort of fourth century BC, all the way through to the Middle Ages with knights. And like, you know, if you look at the, the way that Roman emperors depicted themselves, they very often had equestrian statues where they would be, you know, looking mighty and powerful on a horse. And, and cap, chariots at this point. Well chariots, kind of, the Romans didn't use chariots at all, except for racing. And for, in triumphs. They're kind of amused actually, when the Romans arrived in Britain, and they discover the locals are still using war chariots. They go, how quaint, how sweet. We've kind of moved on from that. And what happens is that wheeled vehicles become something associated with women. And so Roman noblewomen are allowed to ride in chariots, sorry, allowed to ride in wheeled vehicles, and they have these special sort of carriages for them. And the idea of the sort of Princess in the, in the magic carriage, it's made out of a pumpkin. And the, and the the knight that she marries, doesn't ride in it with her, he always rides on a horse next to it. This is a, you know, this is essentially an idea that comes from that period, where it's actually seen as demeaning for noble men to go in wheeled vehicles. They should be on horseback, because that's the only way for, for a real man to travel around.
And so we get this period where the wheel falls out of favor. It's briefly you know, it's been it's been popular for like 1200 years during the chariot period. And then it falls out of favor for about another 1800 years, where people are like, no, no, no, I'm a man, I need horses, and only only girls go in wheeled vehicles. And you know, farmers and, you know, low, low born people like that. But you know, real knights and kings don't want to be dead on a, on a wheeled vehicle. And so, then, things change again. In the 16th century, there's this reversal. Essentially, it comes down to the invention of gunpowder weapons, mean that knights on horseback suddenly look old fashioned. And it turns out you can put gunpowder weapons on the back of a carriage and you can make these sort of forts, fortresses. And this is an idea, it's invented in Hungary, where they put cannons on the back of chariots and then they can take them to a battlefield and they can make an impregnable ring of wagons with, with guns on the back. And then when knights charge at them, they can just shoot at them with these, with these powerful weapons. And this changes the perception of wheeled vehicles again, and in Europe, suddenly, people are interested in wheel vehicles and you get this new vehicle the coach, which is essentially a very, very fast carriage, and it's named after the village where it seems to have been invented in Hungary. And what happens is that that idea spreads very, very quickly around Europe and suddenly the manly thing to do is to be riding, driving your coach as quickly as possible...
Samuel Pepys… he's finally rich enough to buy his own carriage. This is in the 1660s?... And so he goes to the theater with his wife in the carriage, solely, not because he wants to go to the theater, solely so that everyone can see that they've arrived in their own carriage....
Blaise Pascal also came up with this idea of what we would now call public transport or a bus. And so the idea was that you'd have vehicles that could seat several people, about a dozen people, and they would be pulled by horses. And they would follow fixed routes within a town within Paris. And he managed to get permission to do all of this. And, and you had to pay a small amount to go on these these vehicles. But yes, it caused a real stir, because eventually, the city authorities started to worry that this would encourage the mixing of the social classes. And so they said, actually, we're not going to, we're only going to let the rich go on these on these vehicles. And the rich didn't want to go on these vehicles. Because if you went on one of these public buses, public carriages, it showed that you weren't wealthy enough to afford your own carriage. So the rich were like, well, if everyone knows that only the rich are going on them. And I'm on, they'll look at me go, you're a rich person who can't afford your own carriage. That's embarrassing. And by this stage, people are starting to throw stones at the carriages because they're not allowed to use them and so on. So the whole thing gets shut down pretty quickly...
They've been around for a surprisingly long time, electric vehicles. The most, the best selling car in America in 1897 was an electric vehicle, there were various attempts to get them going, the problem has always been the batteries. Those early electric vehicles use lead acid batteries, which are very, very big and heavy, and they don't store that much energy. And you could buy an electric car 120 years ago that would maybe do 80 miles on a charge if you were lucky. The big problem is there's not gonna be anywhere to charge it if you went out. And so you could charge it at home. And then you would have a limited amount of range. But cars were really being sold as adventure machines at the time. And you really could go out if you had a petrol powered car because you could buy gasoline at you know, a hardware store or something like that there. It was sold as a as a solvent as a cleaning fluid. And then you could buy it cans of it. And so it was, there was already a means of distributing it, the petrol pump comes a bit later it comes in the 20s. But, but essentially you could you could head out on the open road and expect to be able to buy fuel for your car. Whereas if you headed out an electric car, then all you've got to do is run out of batteries and be in trouble. So as a result, electric cars really didn't go anywhere.
And they ended up being sold as cars suitable for women. And this was for a couple of reasons. They were easier to start, they didn't have a crank handle. And women were assumed to be weak and, you know, unable to turn the crank handle on the car. They were less dirty, because, you know, in those days if you bought a petrol car, they gave you the tools to fix it as well. It was expected it would go wrong a lot, you would have to tinker with it. And that was going to mean lots of grease and oil and stuff all over your clothes. And you know, that was something that men were expected to be interested in and women were not. And then the other thing is that I think some men bought electric cars for their wives, not just because they were clean and quiet and easy to start, but because it actually limited how far they could go. And Henry Ford was one of these people, he obviously had this big success with a Model T Ford but he doesn't give his wife a Model T, he buys her an electric car. And this limited how far she could drive. She wasn't going to run away. The car, the battery would run out. So she could drive into town and see her friends or go to the opera then she could drive home again, and she couldn’t go any further than that. So this idea that electric cars are not just rubbish, but they're girly is a, is a 20th century, early 20th century thing.
And it's only in the 1990s, that that changes. And it's not because the car industry decides it needs to do anything about it, it's because of consumer electronics. The, the first modern, you know, lithium ion battery is is developed, essentially by Sony to put in the camcorder. And it then gets used in laptops. And then it's in the early 2000s, that a couple of car nuts in California, it’s always California, realized that if they bought 7000 camcorder batteries, and they took all the lead acid batteries, they built this electric car, they took all the lead acid batteries out and put 7000 pound camcorder batteries instead, they would have a car that was not just lighter, but it had a longer range because these batteries take, pack more energy in and it would go faster. And that car was called the T zero. And it could do about 250 miles nought to 60 in some ridiculously, you know, like five seconds or something. And that car essentially led to the founding of Tesla. The founders of Tesla saw it and said, this is amazing. We've got to build this. And that is what changed people's perception of electric cars, they went from being rubbish and slow, to suddenly being manly and fast, and they've got great acceleration. And you know, so even people who are obsessed with cars, can, could get into them. And that really, really has changed that, that has changed the perception. Now electric cars are the highest performance cars now, all these electric cars, are these hybrid cars’"
