James May's Magnificent Machines: How men in sheds have changed our lives by James May & Phil Dolling

Author:James May & Phil Dolling
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781444717983
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

REGAINING CONTROL OF THE CAR

The emancipation of the horse was a long time coming. The advent of steam power in the industrial revolution was the first blow for its freedom, since steam would inherit the yoke the horse had worn for thousands of years in service to humankind’s quest for productivity. James Watt, the inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine, quantified a unit of horse power for his machines simply because that’s how his customers would specify them: in terms of the number of horses they would replace.

The beam engine liberated the horse from its duties in the pumping houses of pits and in small factories everywhere. Later steam engines would banish horses from the towpaths of canals. The coming of the railways spelt the end of the stagecoach and down on the farm the traction engine gradually replaced the plough horse.

But it was not until the twentieth century that the horse was released from the worst of its bondage, which was the role it played in our towns and cities. The romantic vision of the horse in Victorian Britain is of an elegant thoroughbred trotting along at the head of a light trap occupied by a genteel lady. In reality, most city horses were heavyweight beasts of burden living a life so gruelling that even a healthy one might live for only two or three years before dying of exhaustion. Final and merciful release for the horse would come only with the invention of the internal combustion engine and the motor vehicle.

The growth in vehicle ownership during the twentieth century was phenomenal, and within one generation the whole culture of horse-drawn transport had been put out to grass. This was generally for the better, and not just for the horse.

Many of the problems we associate with the motoring age were already troubling people in the horse era. In London, in the late nineteenth century, some 300,000 working horses took to the roads each day. There were horse traffic jams, horse accidents, horse delays, and probably horse-generated road rage. Horses were expensive to run and horses were stolen.

Horse emissions were pretty bad, too. A typical large horse produces around nine tons of manure a year, and perhaps 1,500 pints of urine. So it is easy to see why some Victorian statisticians prophesied the eventual submersion of whole cities under horse pooh. And while horse manure in small quantities is unlikely to infect humans, in large piles it can spread E Coli. More ominously, horse manure is a fertile breeding ground for flies, and studies have suggested that the disease spread by these flies was the primary cause of the terrible infant mortality rate in nineteenth-century cities.

So the coming of the motor vehicle should have been seen as a good thing. Even so, there were many – especially those in the pro-horse lobby, who clearly believed that this noble beast was not yet done with suffering – who wanted the new machine to be tamed.

The most draconian piece of anti-car legislation ever written, Britain’s infamous Red Flag Law, had already been repealed in 1896.

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