How the Automobile Solved a Problem No One Could Ignore

On this episode of Our American Stories, it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the automobile was hailed as an environmental savior. Cities at the turn of the century were suffocating under the burden of their own success. The horse had built them, but it was also destroying them. Streets were thick with waste, and the air carried the scent of disease. Into that chaos rolled the automobile—a machine that seemed to offer a vision of progress that was clean, modern, and under control. Miles C. Collier, founder of the Revs Institute, shares the story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next to
story from Miles C. Collier, founder of the REVS Institute
in Naples, Florida, a former race car driver and an
expert on all things transportation, heck, all things automotive. Today,
Miles shares with us the story of why cars might
have saved the city from the four legged beasts known

(00:34):
as horses.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
What people don't realize is we think of the Industrial Revolution,
and we think of the advent of steam, and it's
often described as the age of steam, as well as
possibly the age of electricity, because street trolley cars and
electric light bulbs and things were all invented in the
late nineteenth century. But in fact, if you look at

(00:59):
the data, that period was really the age of the horse.
The horse was omnipresent. The horse was critical for the
working out of modern industrialized society. Now why is that
Because if we want to think about steam and electricity
as being wholesale forms of energy, there were no retail

(01:23):
sources other than the horse. So a trainload of goods
could arrive at the station of a city and it
came over hundreds of miles and it was hundreds of
tons of stuff. But then you had the problem of
getting it from the depot to the doorstep, and that
required individualized or retail transportation to do it, and there

(01:47):
was no other retail transportation other than the horse. So
it's counterintuitive, But as steam and electricity became more and
more prevalent in the eighteen eighties, nineties, nineteen hundreds, and
nineteen tens, the population of horses living in the urban

(02:10):
fabric increased. Concomitantly, totally counterintuitive. The highest population of working
horses in the United States was in nineteen ten. There
were twenty six million working horses. And I'm not talking
about my friend Flicka sticking his head over the fence

(02:30):
that you give two cubes of sugar to. I'm talking
about horses that lived in high rise stables in the
middle of the urban fabric and that were required to
keep society going. And the impact that horses had on
society was overwhelming, and because of their presence, viewed in

(02:54):
general by society as incredibly damaging, destructive, environmentally destructive, dangerous
to life and limb bad for human morality and so
on and so on. In other words, the horse was
as vilified in nineteen ten as the automobile is today
that I found absolutely fascinating. Now, let's consider one of

(03:16):
the most impactful aspects of the horse economy, and that
was if you have twenty six million working horses, and
boy did they work. They were viewed by the public
in those days as biological machines, okay, which is just
we shudder to think of that. But they were not
viewed as being sentient, They were not viewed as having feelings.

(03:38):
They were literally biological machines. And each and every individual
biological machine required five acres of fodder producing agricultural land
in order to be sustained for one year. Let's do
the math. Twenty six million times five is one hundred

(03:58):
and thirty million acres under cultivation to just support the
biological machine, the horse working in cities. What was the
manifestation of that? Look at photographs of New England in
the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds, and you will see
that the green hills of Vermont or the white Hills

(04:20):
of New Hampshire haven't got a tree on them anywhere.
And if you go there today, you walk in the woods,
and you can go way deep in the woods, and
all of a sudden you'll come across a stone wall. Well,
those are the stone walls that bounded the fields that
were necessary to support the horse. So one of the

(04:41):
major impacts of the horse in the late nineteenth century
was the denudation of forests throughout the world, or at
least around the developed world. And with all of the
negative impacts that has of courses obviously defecated and urinated
all over the streets, and indeed they also had the

(05:01):
bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or
came to the end of their you know, just totally exhausted.
So it was a living in the city with horses
cheeked by jowls meant that the infestation of rats, flies, sparrows, fleas,
and all kinds of noxious vermin was ever present. You know.

(05:32):
One of the problems back in the day was was
tetanus okay, which comes to you know, bacteria that would
inhabit the gut of horses and then there would be
horseshoe nails that would come out and people would get
scratched or cut by something that was contaminated with tetanus bacteria.
And the next thing, you know, lock jaw as it
was called in the day, was a real problem. But

(05:54):
it was just a you know, an urban sanitation problem.
And the only thing that they had to clean up
all the those waste products was more horses pulling more wagons. Now,
of course, you know, you hang bags behind the horse
and all that kind of stuff, and it all helps
a little bit. But if we think of it as
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries equivalent to carbon monoxide

(06:17):
and oxides of nitrogen, there's nothing you can do about it.
One early commentator remarked that I don't know where he
got these numbers, but something to the effect that sixty
or seventy percent of all the dust that you inhale
on urban streets is dried horse manure. Oh, thank you
very much. That sounds pretty fun. So, you know, as

(06:41):
I say, the automobile was seen as a major public
health benefit. Tetanus was going to go away. You weren't
going to be breathing dried and the horse manure. The
car gave off virtually no noxious fumes whatsoever. It was silent,
it didn't start and startled and panic. It was just

(07:03):
seen as a In fact, it was seen as a
major health benefit for the simple reason that you could
take it and go out to the countryside and breathe
all that wonderful ozone out there and enjoy the sunshine.
And that's so it makes sense that the horse was
not looked at as a great thing. And as I say,

(07:26):
the parallel to the automobile I find rather fascinating. And
what we take from that is if we are sufficiently
dependent on a technology that it becomes overwhelming, and there
are one point four billion automobiles operating in the world today.
When that technology becomes overwhelming, of course it has negative influences.

(07:47):
What the heck did you think was going to happen? So, yes,
the automobile has all kinds of negatives. But interestingly, in
nineteen hundred it was seen as a savior. It was
seen as reducing urban noise. No more iron tires, clip
clop of iron horseshoes on cobblestrong streets, no groaning of
non ball bearing axles on wagons, no cracking of whips,

(08:12):
no screaming of teamsters. All was going to be silent
with this new a biddable servant that never started at
an umbrella or at a blowing sheet of newspaper. And
the problem was back in those days. Horses they're flight animals,
and they will startle and they will run away. Can
you imagine a horse dragging a carriage running away in

(08:34):
full blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during
rush hour? How many people died?

Speaker 1 (08:42):
Lots?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
So the horse was a major, major problem in the
automobile was a major, major savior.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery. And a special thanks to
Miles Collier of the REVS Institute in Naples, Florida. He's
a former race car driver and an expert on all
things transportation, all things automotive. And what a beautiful story
about change and about technological and industrial change. Who would

(09:15):
have thought in the beginning of the twentieth century that
our biggest problem was waste and problems that came from
the horse. But indeed it was true. And all of
that acreage you needed in order to supply the horse
with well just his deli sustenance, and incomes the automobile
to end lots of the disease that got spread from
all of that horse maneur and all of that noise

(09:37):
and all of that sound. And now today one point
four billion automobiles comes with its own set of problems.
Whatever the next advance is will come with it. That's
the one thing we've learned from all of this, the
story of how the automobile saved our cities from horses.
Here on our American stories.