March 28, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Miles C. Collier – founder of the Revs Institute – tells the story of inventions that took us from our own legs to wheels, horses, bikes and cars.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
That's our American Stories dot Com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we get the special treat of hearing from
the number one car collector in the world. Miles Collier
(00:31):
is the founder of the REVS Institute, and today Miles
brings us the story of human mobility.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Here's Miles with a history of personal mobility, starting with
our legs and how we got out of Africa all
the way up to the present auto centric world and
(00:58):
the It's well known that the hypothesis that humankind arose
in Africa appears to be the consensus at this particular point,
and there was a diaspora of pre humans and humans
migrating out of there and ultimately taking over the rest
of the world, and then ultimately discovering the idea that
(01:21):
you didn't have.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
To do it all yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
You could take advantage of the energy that was stored
up in the bodies of domesticated animals, so you could
start riding horses or using oxen to plow a field
and so on. And ultimately, after six thousand years of
being paired with the horse, mankind discovered the internal combustion engine.
(01:46):
The most surprising thing I discovered in my research was
really the role of the horse in the late nineteenth
early twentieth century. What people don't realize is we think
of the Industrial Revolution, and we think of the advent
(02:07):
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 the data, that period was really the
age of the horse. The horse was omnipresent. The horse
(02:31):
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 sources other than the horse. So
a trainload of goods could arrive at the station of
(02:53):
a city and it came over hundreds of miles and
it was hundreds of tons of stuff. 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 was no other retail transportation other than the horse.
(03:15):
So it's counterintuitive, But as steam and electricity became more
and more prevalent in the eighteen eighties, nineties, and nineteen
hundreds and nineteen tens, the population of horses living in
the urban fabric increased. Concomitantly, totally counterintuitive. The highest population
(03:40):
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 that you.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Give two cubes of sugar to.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I'm talking about horses that lived in high rise stables
in the mid 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,
(04:17):
viewed in 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
(04:39):
the most impactful aspects of the horse economy and that
was if you have twenty six million working horses, and
boy did they work.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
They were viewed by the public.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
In those days as biological machines, okay, which is just we.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Shudder to think of that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
But they were not viewed as being sentient, They were
not viewed as having feelings. 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.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Let's do the math.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Twenty six million times five is one hundred 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
(05:41):
Hills of Vermont or the white Hills 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 major
(06:04):
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 the
negative impacts that has of courses obviously defecated and urinated
all over the streets, and indeed they also had the
(06:24):
bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or
came to the end of their 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.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you're listening to Miles Collier with this fascinating explanation
of life before the automobile and this idea that horses
were machines. They were animals, but they were machines and
viewed that way. Twenty six million working horses again, not
those horses in the barn, those pretty horses in the barn,
(07:12):
working horses. When we come back more of this remarkable
storytelling and automotive history and well, life before the automobile.
Miles Collier and his storytelling continues here on our American
Stories folks, if you love the great American stories we
(07:33):
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(07:53):
the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com.
And we continue with our American Stories and with Rev's
Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility.
(08:17):
Let's return to Miles on the age of the horse
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its effects including
from their poop.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You know, 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
(08:50):
real problem, but it was just a you know, an
urban sanitation problem. And the only thing that they had
to clean up all 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
(09:14):
equivalent to carbon monoxide 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.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Oh, thank you very much. That sounds pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So, you know, as 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 a virtually no
noxious fumes whatsoever. It was silent, it didn't start and
startled and panic. It was just seen as a In fact,
(10:03):
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, the parallel to the
(10:25):
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. What the
(10:46):
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,
(11:10):
no screaming of teamsters. All was going to be silent
with this new abidable 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
(11:32):
full blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during
rush hour? How many people died?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Lots?
Speaker 2 (11:42):
So the horse was a major, major problem in the
automobile was a major, major savior. And it's ironic that
roughly one hundred years later, we now see the car
as a major major problem, and we're anticipating something is
going to come along and save us, like autonomous vehicles,
at which point one can only laugh merrily and say, really,
(12:05):
so are we going to see autonomous vehicles?
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah? Probably.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And the reason I say probably is that they have
a whole number of intransigent problems that even though you
solve them ninety nine point I'm making this up ninety
nine point three percent of the time, that's an insufficiently
(12:32):
high level to ensure that they can be safely used
by everybody. I mean, you need something like ninety nine
point and none about five decimal places of nines to
the right hand side before people are going to be
comfortable with the accident rate of autonomous vehicles. And I'm
not sure that the industry is going to get there
anytime soon. We have been listening now for wooh, I
(12:55):
would say four or five years, six years about how
autonomous cars are just around the corner and how they're
all working really great. The reality is that those strange
sort of corner case issues where you have an event
crescendo of an impossibly rare chained events that autonomy still
(13:19):
can't deal with it. The amount of processing you need
to just deal with the car traveling on an interstate
is relatively that's.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
A doable problem.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
The issue where all of a sudden we're in snow
and rain and bad visibility and pedestrians and cars driven
by maniacs and all these other kinds of things and
high density traffic, it becomes way more complicated, and so
it's easier just to finesse that the flexibility of the
human driver handle it. There's a big difference between how
(13:54):
people estimate risk. It's known that humankind are extraordinary, really
poor at estimating risk, and the issue here is that
people estimate the risk that they are exposed to every
day driving themselves in an automobile, you know, way way
(14:17):
underestimating the risk that's inherent they're and taking nothing away
from them as a driver. When they are not in
charge of what's going on, they overestimate the risk because
guess what, you're not in control, and so you know,
whether it's it's true or not, you have a higher
(14:38):
threshold to get over. And that's why in my earlier
comments I said, in order for something like autonomous cars
to work, it has to be nine point ninety nine
point nine, you know, lots of digits on the right
hand side, so that in fact, a dangerous accident almost
never happens because you know, the the analogy for this
is air transportation. Only travel where the fatality rate.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Is astronomically small.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I mean it's I don't remember what is, but it
is incrementally tiny compared to automobiles, and they're moving, you know,
four hundred and seventy five million people, and you know,
do the math.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It's point, you know, one percent or the.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Other way to say it, you have a way higher
chance of being struck dead by lightning walking out your
door to the uber that's taking you to the airport.
But people nevertheless that they have a fear of flying.
Not too many people are scared to get into their
you know, wallpaper, woody town and country and you know,
drive down to them, all right, And so that's just
(15:46):
part of the charm of trying to deal with human beings. Now, again,
if you put them in certain controlled circumstances, I think
they probably work, Okay. You just don't want to let
them free in the while, because just so many complicated
things happen now w W. I will immediately be proven
wrong when somebody announces an absolutely perfectly working autonomous vehicle
(16:08):
in six months from there.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But I think it's a very difficult problem.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Therefore, autonomy may be seen more where it has instantaneous
economic benefit in a relatively constrained environment. So one of
those places would be long haul trucking. Right, so that
you have a conventionally driven truck that goes to the
the entrance to the Interstate in Fresno, California, and it's
(16:36):
got a load of strawberries on board, and at that
point the driver gets off and it hits the autonomous button,
and the autonomous truck then runs from Fresno straight to
New York City. And when it gets off the Interstate
in New Jersey at a big parking lot, another driver
jumps in and he drives that thing down and through
the city, and so on so and then those kinds
(16:56):
of things would result in an enormous uh economic benefit.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Kinstre's Union won't like it. Look, I'm just blowing smoke here.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And we've been listening to Miles Collier telling the story
of human mobility and folks who were waiting and watching
in nineteen ten and twenty and thirty as Henry Ford
was bringing down the cost of cars and making them ubiquitous.
Only very wealthy people had the access or means to
have a car, and Ford, well, he transformed the world.
(17:27):
When we come back, more of Miles Collier telling the
story of human mobility here on our American story, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with Rev's Institute
founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility. Let's
return to Miles.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
The thing we do when we try and prognosticate technology
is we have a tendency both to overestimate and underestimate simultaneously.
And what do I mean by that, Well, if we
go back to sort of the popular mechanics of the
nineteen fifties, there was a magazine at the time for
sort of home shop and the technology of the future
(18:45):
kind of thing. There was an article every other issue
about flying cars simultaneously, if we remember the Sunday Papers,
we had Dick Tracy with his wrist radio, and we
now moved to the real life twenty twenty one. No
one's seen a flying car yet, and we don't anticipate
(19:05):
any in the near future. And the risk radio is
such a ridiculously primitive and silly trivial thing compared to
what our so called risk radios, to wit, the iPad
can do today. So we've massively overestimated the high profile,
(19:28):
flashy technology of flying cars and massively underestimated the mundane
technology of something like the phone. And indeed, an early
commentator in the turn of the century, the turn of
the nineteenth of the twentieth century comments on the telephone
and the automobile by saying something like the autobile has
(19:49):
had more immediate influence on our society, but I expect
that over time the telephone will prove to be the
greater change agent. I was written in like nineteen oh
two or nineteen oh three.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Well I was.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
You took him one hundred years to be right, But
wowly he's right now. I find that an absolutely amazing comment.
It'll be interesting to see what does happen. But the
thing about prognosticating the future, especially in things like this,
is you can be right on connecting all the intellectual
(20:22):
dots and still be wildly wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
What do I mean by that?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So there's a quotation in one of the early car
magazines from nineteen oh two that talks about the coming
nirvana with the automobile and how it's going to reduce
urban congestion, and the urban congestion during the time of
the horse was diabolical. So the urban congestion would be
reduced because, as the writer says, there would be the
(20:47):
space taken up by the horse, and we would therefore
immediately drop our density by fifty percent and there.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Would be freeer motion. Well, how did that work out?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
The argument that the autonomous car folks are basically making
at this point is do you realize that your automobile
sits for ninety four percent of its time doing nothing,
taking up space. With the autonomous car in the shared economy,
we can reduce the car population from down to twenty
percent of what it is today, or whatever the number is,
(21:22):
And that's exactly as true as the idea that with
the advent of the automobile over the horse, that traffic
population would drop by fifty percent. No, because people will
come up with new ways to use the artifact, new
ways that.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
We no one's thought about right now.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
For example, if you no longer have to worry about
sitting in a traffic jam, then why not send your
autonomous vehicle out to go pick up the three R
martinizing at the dry cleaner.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And if it takes six and.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
A half hours in traffic to do it, who cares?
At ainy't skin off your nose. So under that rubric,
I would say that you haven't seen traffic and problems
until we get autonomous vehicles going.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
I mean, who knows.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
That's just as valid a view of the future as
the one that it's all going to be nervana. And
the one thing I can promise you is probably not
going to be nerve on it, nor will it be
you know, the kind of hard dystopian thing that I've
just described.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
It'll be, you know, but it'll be surprising. Always.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
That's always the future of the new transcendent and radical technology,
you know, the iPhone and the iPad. I mean, these
things are are machines of the devil. But when they
first came out is all we heard about is, oh,
it's going to be so wonderful. You have a major
library at your fingertips.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Really, And most people are god only knows what the
hell they're watching on the thing or spending their time
doing and texting back and forth and all the crazy
crazy stuff. Subly, the issue is always that powerful technologies
not only do they shine bright lights that improve our
living standards and our societies and making us more humane
(23:00):
and so on and so on, but they also bright
lights cast dark shadows. You can't have one without the other,
and the dark shadows are the nature of the thing.
And we're all now familiar with all the negativity of
the digital age.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
And the kind of things that are going on.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
So the beauty of the automobile is it's basically done
its thing in its full impact, and we have the
ability to look at it, and if we have the
wit to be at all self aware, we can use
what we've learned from the autobile and say, now, what's
that going to do to the digital age? How can
(23:40):
the digital age ultimately be managed so that we don't
end up with replicating what the automobile has done. What
can we do about managing properly genetic engineering or a
number of other powerful technologies that are coming along, because
we have a paradigm already, which is the automobile. So
the first high technology indust your post industrial and artifact
(24:05):
to radically change our world. Because no matter whether you
love the car, don't love the car, whether you got
a driver's license or don't have a driver's license, or
whether you use a car a lot or you never
use a car, we live in an auto centric society,
and our society has been completely created around the idea
of personal mobility in the form of the automobile, and
(24:26):
it's not changing anytime soon because essentially, if we think
back to it, the great contest between forms of mobility
took place and around nineteen hundred to nineteen ten, so
you had electric street railroads everywhere, which is today's modern
(24:48):
concept of urban light rail we all love. There has
been sort of no individuals of a certain bent that
just don't get all frothy at the ma and excited about, well,
let's have more urban light rail. Well, that war was
fought by the automobile and urban light rail around nineteen ten,
(25:08):
and the car one handily. It was a total TKO
in the third round right, urban light rail's mouthpiece got
knocked on me. It was all over, oh, because nobody
wants to stand around and you catch the eight fifteen?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Are you kidding me? You know, in the rain? What
the hell?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
And how do I get to the station anyway? Jiminy crickets?
You know, hell with that, I'm jumping in the old
flivver and driving to work. Who would would you do
it any other way? I mean, the only place where
mass transit even has a chance is in pre automotive
high density cities Manhattan, you know, Boston, you know, places
(25:47):
like that, Hong Kong. But other than that, if people
vote with their accelerator foot, you give them a chance
to handle their personal mobility with a car over something else,
they'll do it. Because the car's great strength was you
had complete autonomy over who you rode with, where you went,
(26:07):
when you went, how fast you went. Sounds to me
like it's the trifecta.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
And you're listening to Miles Collier give an explanation of
well just about everything related to technology to risk taking
and of course always bringing it right back to this
autocentric world we live in and the billion plus vehicles automobiles,
they're around the world, and net Americans and people around
(26:37):
the world have voted with their accelerator pedal. It's so true,
and so many Americans, most of you listening, own a car,
love your car, and in the end, rely on your car.
As Miles so ably described, the prognosticators are almost always wrong,
and nobody knows the future and it's very hard to predict.
When we return more of this remarkable storytelling, a look
(27:01):
at the history of mobility, and so much more with
a resident philosopher on this subject. Almost when we come
back more with Miles Collier here on our American stories,
(27:37):
and we continue with our American stories and with Rev's
Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility.
He shared the story of the horse, the automobile, autonomous cars,
and now finally the missing link among all of them.
Let's return to Miles.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The big transition between the horse and the autobil and
the the the big enabling technology was, in fact, the bicycle.
The bicycle is completely underrated with respect to its influence
on modernity, the idea of living in suburbia started way
(28:26):
before even the bicycle. It started really with the horse tram.
A horse tram is like a trolley car, only it's
pulled by a horse, as opposed to having electric engines.
But the idea was that for a couple of pennies
you could rattle in on the horse tram from living
further out in the country and not being stuck in
a tenement in the urban fabric. And then by you know,
(28:48):
eighteen eighty or so, the world changed from horse trams
to electric trams. But it was trams and then the
bicycle that made living in suburbia a very practical thing.
People always wanted to live in suburbia. We see that
the earliest development of cities is that if you could,
you moved out to the countryside and the bicycle comes along.
(29:11):
And unlike the look, we got to understand. Even though
the world was heavily dependent upon the horse in the
eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties and so on, the horse was
only used as private transportation by elite individuals, by economically
and socially elites because they could afford the things.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
They were very, very expensive.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
The thing about a horse unlike a bicycle or an
automobile is even when he's not working, he's got to eat,
he's got to drink, he's got a poop, he's got
to do all of these kinds of things that you
have to manage. So it took a great deal of
human work to produce a great deal of horsework.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
And that was how it was.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
The bicycle came along and it afforded a couple of things.
The first thing was that the idea of privacy is
a modern concept. Privacy was not something that anybody thought
about in eighteen eighty or eighteen ninety because the way
you traveled around is you were either walking on crowded
(30:11):
sidewalks or you were in a trolley car cheek by
jowl with lots of other people. If you look at
photographs of that period, it's this teeming massive humanity.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
And you lived in.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Dense facilities and someone else again, and you were in
the upper economic strata. But if you were in walk
up tenements and things, there was no privacy anywhere. Along
comes the bicycle, where it's powered by the individual, and
you can get on that thing and take it for
a ride and ride in the park by yourself, or
(30:47):
go out in the countryside, and remember in those days
the country was a whole lot closer to the city
than it is today and recreate or enjoy yourself, or
travel to work by yourself without being cheap, as I say,
snogged up against various sort of disreputable examples of humanity.
(31:07):
And by giving you both privacy and then the ability
to travel on your own, giving you some mobile agency,
you could do your own thing, go where you wanted,
it changed the relationship between the sexes. Because the safety
bicycle when it first came out. Before that, the bicycle
consisted of what we call the ordinary, the high wheeler
(31:29):
that could really only be ridden by daring young men
because it was easy to fall off on a sixty
inch wheel. The trip to the ground was painful and
resulted in broken bones and things like that. And in
those days it was immodest for women to do that,
so daring young women couldn't ride high wheelers. But when
the safety bicycle came out, which looks like a modern
(31:52):
bicycle front wheel exactly the same, uses a chain drive
and it uses step gearing, and that's what makes the
safety bicycle work. And pneumatic tires so all of a sudden,
the bicycle was available to both sexes, and it gave
you the ability to control your own movement. You were
faster than a horse was. You could go all kinds
of places. That's where the impetus for the increasing number
(32:14):
of parks and roads through parks came as from the bicycle,
and you, all of a sudden had a social life
that was not conducted under the nose of various self
appointed busy bodies, and so on and so on. So
the bicycle was an enormous presagure of what the automotive
(32:34):
autocentric world was going to be like. And the bicycle
in fact became a craze in the eighteen nineties. From
about eighteen ninety too, about eighteen ninety five or six,
the bicycle was the hottest thing going and experienced things
like annual model changes, installment buy used bicycle trade ins,
and we've heard all this stuff before. So in fact,
(32:55):
in the eighteen nineties, you kept up with the Joneses
with your bicycle, not with your car something else. Also,
people don't realize, so the bicycle did a great deal
for the autonomy agency and suffrage of women. Okay, all
of a sudden, they could do their own thing, they
could go out with their friends, and it enabled people
in the countryside to get into the city easily without
(33:17):
having to be If you didn't live on a mainline
trolley track, you kind.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Of out of luck.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Well, the bicycle allowed you to live off the main line,
and it allowed suburbia to fill in in between the
roots of the trolleys. And so all of a sudden,
country people come in and enjoy the culture of the city.
The city people go out and enjoy the recreation of
the country, and someone has started to really mix things up,
and it reduced the amount of urban isolationism that existed,
(33:42):
and and so on. More importantly, technologically, the inventions of
aspects of the bicycle were absolutely unnecessary prerequisite to the
ability to produce the car. So electric welded tube frames
was developed for the bicycle. It's absolutely mandatory for the automobile.
Precision ground ball bearings acquired by the bicycle, and mandatory
(34:07):
for the automobile. Differentials which allows two wheels on the
same axle to rotate at different speeds as you go
around a corner under power mandatory for the audal developed
for the tricycle all part of the bicycle.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Evolution of things.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
The pneumatic tire originally developed in the eighteen forties for wagons,
horse drawn wagons and things, and was diabolically expensive and
as a result died out, so the the the tire.
The pneumatic tire was actually invented twice, once in eighteen
forty and once in about eighteen eighty by was named
(34:45):
James Dunlop, the uh Irish veterinarian, and was originally the
the uh The matatic tire was used on the bicycle,
and it made the safety bicycle the equal of the
high wheeler, because without the pneumatic tire, the safety bicycle,
because it was so relatively stiff compared to a high wheeler,
(35:06):
gave a very very unpleasant ride. But the minute the
pneumatic tire was put on the safety bicycle, all those
problems went away. And since it had solved the other
problems of change gears and safety and so on and
so on, and the bicycle took off. And from the bicycle,
then the pneumatic tire went to the automobile, and it's
(35:27):
became a very important aspect of the automobile. So the
bicycle is in fact, probably more important almost than the
internal combustion engine and development of the automobile, because all
the prerequisite technology was found in the bicycle. But by
the end of the nineteenth century, the bloom was off
(35:49):
the rose because of this new, much more charismatic, much
more fascinating device, the automobile, which had one great feature,
which is you didn't have to propel it yourself, and
that was a totally charming aspect.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Of the thing.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
And the early bicycle manufacturers recognized a good thing when
they saw it, and many of them immediately jumped from
being bicycle manufacturers to being car manufacturers. So the Pope
bicycle became the Pope Hartford automobile. The Rover in England
was originally a bicycle and became an automobile, and so on,
(36:27):
because those guys were the technologists of the day and
they immediately saw that here was something much better coming along,
and they switched allegiances overnight. We live today and have
lived probably since around World War One, in an autocentric environment.
The automobile population in Los Angeles, for instance, was over
(36:49):
a million cars in the nineteen twenties. I have a
photo an illustration in my book, taken on top of
some high ground overlooking the beach at Malibu is pictures
probably shot.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
In the middle nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
As far as you can see, there are cars parked
side by side along the beach. I mean there have
to be you know, five thousand cars in this photograph
and this.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Is nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
So the point about the automobile is it was utterly seductive,
you know.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
More it was you had a bicycle on steroids. It just.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It scratched a number of human itches that had existed
for four or five, six thousand years, but it did
it in brand new ways.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And what terrific storytelling. And a special thanks to Alex
a terrific job is always, and a special thanks to
Miles Collier for the storytelling. And by the way, to
learn more about the REVS Institute and to visit it
in person or virtually, go to Revsinstitute dot org. That's
Revsorsinstitute dot org. An untold story about human mobility here
(38:07):
on our American Story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
That's our American Stories dot Com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we get the special treat of hearing from
the number one car collector in the world. Miles Collier
(00:31):
is the founder of the REVS Institute, and today Miles
brings us the story of human mobility.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Here's Miles with a history of personal mobility, starting with
our legs and how we got out of Africa all
the way up to the present auto centric world and
(00:58):
the It's well known that the hypothesis that humankind arose
in Africa appears to be the consensus at this particular point,
and there was a diaspora of pre humans and humans
migrating out of there and ultimately taking over the rest
of the world, and then ultimately discovering the idea that
(01:21):
you didn't have.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
To do it all yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
You could take advantage of the energy that was stored
up in the bodies of domesticated animals, so you could
start riding horses or using oxen to plow a field
and so on. And ultimately, after six thousand years of
being paired with the horse, mankind discovered the internal combustion engine.
(01:46):
The most surprising thing I discovered in my research was
really the role of the horse in the late nineteenth
early twentieth century. What people don't realize is we think
of the Industrial Revolution, and we think of the advent
(02:07):
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 the data, that period was really the
age of the horse. The horse was omnipresent. The horse
(02:31):
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 sources other than the horse. So
a trainload of goods could arrive at the station of
(02:53):
a city and it came over hundreds of miles and
it was hundreds of tons of stuff. 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 was no other retail transportation other than the horse.
(03:15):
So it's counterintuitive, But as steam and electricity became more
and more prevalent in the eighteen eighties, nineties, and nineteen
hundreds and nineteen tens, the population of horses living in
the urban fabric increased. Concomitantly, totally counterintuitive. The highest population
(03:40):
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 that you.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Give two cubes of sugar to.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I'm talking about horses that lived in high rise stables
in the mid 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,
(04:17):
viewed in 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
(04:39):
the most impactful aspects of the horse economy and that
was if you have twenty six million working horses, and
boy did they work.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
They were viewed by the public.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
In those days as biological machines, okay, which is just we.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Shudder to think of that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
But they were not viewed as being sentient, They were
not viewed as having feelings. 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.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Let's do the math.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Twenty six million times five is one hundred 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
(05:41):
Hills of Vermont or the white Hills 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 major
(06:04):
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 the
negative impacts that has of courses obviously defecated and urinated
all over the streets, and indeed they also had the
(06:24):
bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or
came to the end of their 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.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you're listening to Miles Collier with this fascinating explanation
of life before the automobile and this idea that horses
were machines. They were animals, but they were machines and
viewed that way. Twenty six million working horses again, not
those horses in the barn, those pretty horses in the barn,
(07:12):
working horses. When we come back more of this remarkable
storytelling and automotive history and well, life before the automobile.
Miles Collier and his storytelling continues here on our American
Stories folks, if you love the great American stories we
(07:33):
tell and love America like we do, we're asking you
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If you agree that America is a good and great country,
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(07:53):
the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com.
And we continue with our American Stories and with Rev's
Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility.
(08:17):
Let's return to Miles on the age of the horse
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its effects including
from their poop.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You know, 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
(08:50):
real problem, but it was just a you know, an
urban sanitation problem. And the only thing that they had
to clean up all 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
(09:14):
equivalent to carbon monoxide 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.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Oh, thank you very much. That sounds pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So, you know, as 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 a virtually no
noxious fumes whatsoever. It was silent, it didn't start and
startled and panic. It was just seen as a In fact,
(10:03):
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, the parallel to the
(10:25):
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. What the
(10:46):
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,
(11:10):
no screaming of teamsters. All was going to be silent
with this new abidable 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
(11:32):
full blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during
rush hour? How many people died?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Lots?
Speaker 2 (11:42):
So the horse was a major, major problem in the
automobile was a major, major savior. And it's ironic that
roughly one hundred years later, we now see the car
as a major major problem, and we're anticipating something is
going to come along and save us, like autonomous vehicles,
at which point one can only laugh merrily and say, really,
(12:05):
so are we going to see autonomous vehicles?
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah? Probably.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And the reason I say probably is that they have
a whole number of intransigent problems that even though you
solve them ninety nine point I'm making this up ninety
nine point three percent of the time, that's an insufficiently
(12:32):
high level to ensure that they can be safely used
by everybody. I mean, you need something like ninety nine
point and none about five decimal places of nines to
the right hand side before people are going to be
comfortable with the accident rate of autonomous vehicles. And I'm
not sure that the industry is going to get there
anytime soon. We have been listening now for wooh, I
(12:55):
would say four or five years, six years about how
autonomous cars are just around the corner and how they're
all working really great. The reality is that those strange
sort of corner case issues where you have an event
crescendo of an impossibly rare chained events that autonomy still
(13:19):
can't deal with it. The amount of processing you need
to just deal with the car traveling on an interstate
is relatively that's.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
A doable problem.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
The issue where all of a sudden we're in snow
and rain and bad visibility and pedestrians and cars driven
by maniacs and all these other kinds of things and
high density traffic, it becomes way more complicated, and so
it's easier just to finesse that the flexibility of the
human driver handle it. There's a big difference between how
(13:54):
people estimate risk. It's known that humankind are extraordinary, really
poor at estimating risk, and the issue here is that
people estimate the risk that they are exposed to every
day driving themselves in an automobile, you know, way way
(14:17):
underestimating the risk that's inherent they're and taking nothing away
from them as a driver. When they are not in
charge of what's going on, they overestimate the risk because
guess what, you're not in control, and so you know,
whether it's it's true or not, you have a higher
(14:38):
threshold to get over. And that's why in my earlier
comments I said, in order for something like autonomous cars
to work, it has to be nine point ninety nine
point nine, you know, lots of digits on the right
hand side, so that in fact, a dangerous accident almost
never happens because you know, the the analogy for this
is air transportation. Only travel where the fatality rate.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Is astronomically small.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I mean it's I don't remember what is, but it
is incrementally tiny compared to automobiles, and they're moving, you know,
four hundred and seventy five million people, and you know,
do the math.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It's point, you know, one percent or the.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Other way to say it, you have a way higher
chance of being struck dead by lightning walking out your
door to the uber that's taking you to the airport.
But people nevertheless that they have a fear of flying.
Not too many people are scared to get into their
you know, wallpaper, woody town and country and you know,
drive down to them, all right, And so that's just
(15:46):
part of the charm of trying to deal with human beings. Now, again,
if you put them in certain controlled circumstances, I think
they probably work, Okay. You just don't want to let
them free in the while, because just so many complicated
things happen now w W. I will immediately be proven
wrong when somebody announces an absolutely perfectly working autonomous vehicle
(16:08):
in six months from there.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But I think it's a very difficult problem.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Therefore, autonomy may be seen more where it has instantaneous
economic benefit in a relatively constrained environment. So one of
those places would be long haul trucking. Right, so that
you have a conventionally driven truck that goes to the
the entrance to the Interstate in Fresno, California, and it's
(16:36):
got a load of strawberries on board, and at that
point the driver gets off and it hits the autonomous button,
and the autonomous truck then runs from Fresno straight to
New York City. And when it gets off the Interstate
in New Jersey at a big parking lot, another driver
jumps in and he drives that thing down and through
the city, and so on so and then those kinds
(16:56):
of things would result in an enormous uh economic benefit.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Kinstre's Union won't like it. Look, I'm just blowing smoke here.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And we've been listening to Miles Collier telling the story
of human mobility and folks who were waiting and watching
in nineteen ten and twenty and thirty as Henry Ford
was bringing down the cost of cars and making them ubiquitous.
Only very wealthy people had the access or means to
have a car, and Ford, well, he transformed the world.
(17:27):
When we come back, more of Miles Collier telling the
story of human mobility here on our American story, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with Rev's Institute
founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility. Let's
return to Miles.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
The thing we do when we try and prognosticate technology
is we have a tendency both to overestimate and underestimate simultaneously.
And what do I mean by that, Well, if we
go back to sort of the popular mechanics of the
nineteen fifties, there was a magazine at the time for
sort of home shop and the technology of the future
(18:45):
kind of thing. There was an article every other issue
about flying cars simultaneously, if we remember the Sunday Papers,
we had Dick Tracy with his wrist radio, and we
now moved to the real life twenty twenty one. No
one's seen a flying car yet, and we don't anticipate
(19:05):
any in the near future. And the risk radio is
such a ridiculously primitive and silly trivial thing compared to
what our so called risk radios, to wit, the iPad
can do today. So we've massively overestimated the high profile,
(19:28):
flashy technology of flying cars and massively underestimated the mundane
technology of something like the phone. And indeed, an early
commentator in the turn of the century, the turn of
the nineteenth of the twentieth century comments on the telephone
and the automobile by saying something like the autobile has
(19:49):
had more immediate influence on our society, but I expect
that over time the telephone will prove to be the
greater change agent. I was written in like nineteen oh
two or nineteen oh three.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Well I was.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
You took him one hundred years to be right, But
wowly he's right now. I find that an absolutely amazing comment.
It'll be interesting to see what does happen. But the
thing about prognosticating the future, especially in things like this,
is you can be right on connecting all the intellectual
(20:22):
dots and still be wildly wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
What do I mean by that?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So there's a quotation in one of the early car
magazines from nineteen oh two that talks about the coming
nirvana with the automobile and how it's going to reduce
urban congestion, and the urban congestion during the time of
the horse was diabolical. So the urban congestion would be
reduced because, as the writer says, there would be the
(20:47):
space taken up by the horse, and we would therefore
immediately drop our density by fifty percent and there.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Would be freeer motion. Well, how did that work out?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
The argument that the autonomous car folks are basically making
at this point is do you realize that your automobile
sits for ninety four percent of its time doing nothing,
taking up space. With the autonomous car in the shared economy,
we can reduce the car population from down to twenty
percent of what it is today, or whatever the number is,
(21:22):
And that's exactly as true as the idea that with
the advent of the automobile over the horse, that traffic
population would drop by fifty percent. No, because people will
come up with new ways to use the artifact, new
ways that.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
We no one's thought about right now.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
For example, if you no longer have to worry about
sitting in a traffic jam, then why not send your
autonomous vehicle out to go pick up the three R
martinizing at the dry cleaner.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And if it takes six and.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
A half hours in traffic to do it, who cares?
At ainy't skin off your nose. So under that rubric,
I would say that you haven't seen traffic and problems
until we get autonomous vehicles going.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
I mean, who knows.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
That's just as valid a view of the future as
the one that it's all going to be nervana. And
the one thing I can promise you is probably not
going to be nerve on it, nor will it be
you know, the kind of hard dystopian thing that I've
just described.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
It'll be, you know, but it'll be surprising. Always.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
That's always the future of the new transcendent and radical technology,
you know, the iPhone and the iPad. I mean, these
things are are machines of the devil. But when they
first came out is all we heard about is, oh,
it's going to be so wonderful. You have a major
library at your fingertips.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Really, And most people are god only knows what the
hell they're watching on the thing or spending their time
doing and texting back and forth and all the crazy
crazy stuff. Subly, the issue is always that powerful technologies
not only do they shine bright lights that improve our
living standards and our societies and making us more humane
(23:00):
and so on and so on, but they also bright
lights cast dark shadows. You can't have one without the other,
and the dark shadows are the nature of the thing.
And we're all now familiar with all the negativity of
the digital age.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
And the kind of things that are going on.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
So the beauty of the automobile is it's basically done
its thing in its full impact, and we have the
ability to look at it, and if we have the
wit to be at all self aware, we can use
what we've learned from the autobile and say, now, what's
that going to do to the digital age? How can
(23:40):
the digital age ultimately be managed so that we don't
end up with replicating what the automobile has done. What
can we do about managing properly genetic engineering or a
number of other powerful technologies that are coming along, because
we have a paradigm already, which is the automobile. So
the first high technology indust your post industrial and artifact
(24:05):
to radically change our world. Because no matter whether you
love the car, don't love the car, whether you got
a driver's license or don't have a driver's license, or
whether you use a car a lot or you never
use a car, we live in an auto centric society,
and our society has been completely created around the idea
of personal mobility in the form of the automobile, and
(24:26):
it's not changing anytime soon because essentially, if we think
back to it, the great contest between forms of mobility
took place and around nineteen hundred to nineteen ten, so
you had electric street railroads everywhere, which is today's modern
(24:48):
concept of urban light rail we all love. There has
been sort of no individuals of a certain bent that
just don't get all frothy at the ma and excited about, well,
let's have more urban light rail. Well, that war was
fought by the automobile and urban light rail around nineteen ten,
(25:08):
and the car one handily. It was a total TKO
in the third round right, urban light rail's mouthpiece got
knocked on me. It was all over, oh, because nobody
wants to stand around and you catch the eight fifteen?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Are you kidding me? You know, in the rain? What
the hell?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
And how do I get to the station anyway? Jiminy crickets?
You know, hell with that, I'm jumping in the old
flivver and driving to work. Who would would you do
it any other way? I mean, the only place where
mass transit even has a chance is in pre automotive
high density cities Manhattan, you know, Boston, you know, places
(25:47):
like that, Hong Kong. But other than that, if people
vote with their accelerator foot, you give them a chance
to handle their personal mobility with a car over something else,
they'll do it. Because the car's great strength was you
had complete autonomy over who you rode with, where you went,
(26:07):
when you went, how fast you went. Sounds to me
like it's the trifecta.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
And you're listening to Miles Collier give an explanation of
well just about everything related to technology to risk taking
and of course always bringing it right back to this
autocentric world we live in and the billion plus vehicles automobiles,
they're around the world, and net Americans and people around
(26:37):
the world have voted with their accelerator pedal. It's so true,
and so many Americans, most of you listening, own a car,
love your car, and in the end, rely on your car.
As Miles so ably described, the prognosticators are almost always wrong,
and nobody knows the future and it's very hard to predict.
When we return more of this remarkable storytelling, a look
(27:01):
at the history of mobility, and so much more with
a resident philosopher on this subject. Almost when we come
back more with Miles Collier here on our American stories,
(27:37):
and we continue with our American stories and with Rev's
Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility.
He shared the story of the horse, the automobile, autonomous cars,
and now finally the missing link among all of them.
Let's return to Miles.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The big transition between the horse and the autobil and
the the the big enabling technology was, in fact, the bicycle.
The bicycle is completely underrated with respect to its influence
on modernity, the idea of living in suburbia started way
(28:26):
before even the bicycle. It started really with the horse tram.
A horse tram is like a trolley car, only it's
pulled by a horse, as opposed to having electric engines.
But the idea was that for a couple of pennies
you could rattle in on the horse tram from living
further out in the country and not being stuck in
a tenement in the urban fabric. And then by you know,
(28:48):
eighteen eighty or so, the world changed from horse trams
to electric trams. But it was trams and then the
bicycle that made living in suburbia a very practical thing.
People always wanted to live in suburbia. We see that
the earliest development of cities is that if you could,
you moved out to the countryside and the bicycle comes along.
(29:11):
And unlike the look, we got to understand. Even though
the world was heavily dependent upon the horse in the
eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties and so on, the horse was
only used as private transportation by elite individuals, by economically
and socially elites because they could afford the things.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
They were very, very expensive.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
The thing about a horse unlike a bicycle or an
automobile is even when he's not working, he's got to eat,
he's got to drink, he's got a poop, he's got
to do all of these kinds of things that you
have to manage. So it took a great deal of
human work to produce a great deal of horsework.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
And that was how it was.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
The bicycle came along and it afforded a couple of things.
The first thing was that the idea of privacy is
a modern concept. Privacy was not something that anybody thought
about in eighteen eighty or eighteen ninety because the way
you traveled around is you were either walking on crowded
(30:11):
sidewalks or you were in a trolley car cheek by
jowl with lots of other people. If you look at
photographs of that period, it's this teeming massive humanity.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
And you lived in.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Dense facilities and someone else again, and you were in
the upper economic strata. But if you were in walk
up tenements and things, there was no privacy anywhere. Along
comes the bicycle, where it's powered by the individual, and
you can get on that thing and take it for
a ride and ride in the park by yourself, or
(30:47):
go out in the countryside, and remember in those days
the country was a whole lot closer to the city
than it is today and recreate or enjoy yourself, or
travel to work by yourself without being cheap, as I say,
snogged up against various sort of disreputable examples of humanity.
(31:07):
And by giving you both privacy and then the ability
to travel on your own, giving you some mobile agency,
you could do your own thing, go where you wanted,
it changed the relationship between the sexes. Because the safety
bicycle when it first came out. Before that, the bicycle
consisted of what we call the ordinary, the high wheeler
(31:29):
that could really only be ridden by daring young men
because it was easy to fall off on a sixty
inch wheel. The trip to the ground was painful and
resulted in broken bones and things like that. And in
those days it was immodest for women to do that,
so daring young women couldn't ride high wheelers. But when
the safety bicycle came out, which looks like a modern
(31:52):
bicycle front wheel exactly the same, uses a chain drive
and it uses step gearing, and that's what makes the
safety bicycle work. And pneumatic tires so all of a sudden,
the bicycle was available to both sexes, and it gave
you the ability to control your own movement. You were
faster than a horse was. You could go all kinds
of places. That's where the impetus for the increasing number
(32:14):
of parks and roads through parks came as from the bicycle,
and you, all of a sudden had a social life
that was not conducted under the nose of various self
appointed busy bodies, and so on and so on. So
the bicycle was an enormous presagure of what the automotive
(32:34):
autocentric world was going to be like. And the bicycle
in fact became a craze in the eighteen nineties. From
about eighteen ninety too, about eighteen ninety five or six,
the bicycle was the hottest thing going and experienced things
like annual model changes, installment buy used bicycle trade ins,
and we've heard all this stuff before. So in fact,
(32:55):
in the eighteen nineties, you kept up with the Joneses
with your bicycle, not with your car something else. Also,
people don't realize, so the bicycle did a great deal
for the autonomy agency and suffrage of women. Okay, all
of a sudden, they could do their own thing, they
could go out with their friends, and it enabled people
in the countryside to get into the city easily without
(33:17):
having to be If you didn't live on a mainline
trolley track, you kind.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Of out of luck.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Well, the bicycle allowed you to live off the main line,
and it allowed suburbia to fill in in between the
roots of the trolleys. And so all of a sudden,
country people come in and enjoy the culture of the city.
The city people go out and enjoy the recreation of
the country, and someone has started to really mix things up,
and it reduced the amount of urban isolationism that existed,
(33:42):
and and so on. More importantly, technologically, the inventions of
aspects of the bicycle were absolutely unnecessary prerequisite to the
ability to produce the car. So electric welded tube frames
was developed for the bicycle. It's absolutely mandatory for the automobile.
Precision ground ball bearings acquired by the bicycle, and mandatory
(34:07):
for the automobile. Differentials which allows two wheels on the
same axle to rotate at different speeds as you go
around a corner under power mandatory for the audal developed
for the tricycle all part of the bicycle.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Evolution of things.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
The pneumatic tire originally developed in the eighteen forties for wagons,
horse drawn wagons and things, and was diabolically expensive and
as a result died out, so the the the tire.
The pneumatic tire was actually invented twice, once in eighteen
forty and once in about eighteen eighty by was named
(34:45):
James Dunlop, the uh Irish veterinarian, and was originally the
the uh The matatic tire was used on the bicycle,
and it made the safety bicycle the equal of the
high wheeler, because without the pneumatic tire, the safety bicycle,
because it was so relatively stiff compared to a high wheeler,
(35:06):
gave a very very unpleasant ride. But the minute the
pneumatic tire was put on the safety bicycle, all those
problems went away. And since it had solved the other
problems of change gears and safety and so on and
so on, and the bicycle took off. And from the bicycle,
then the pneumatic tire went to the automobile, and it's
(35:27):
became a very important aspect of the automobile. So the
bicycle is in fact, probably more important almost than the
internal combustion engine and development of the automobile, because all
the prerequisite technology was found in the bicycle. But by
the end of the nineteenth century, the bloom was off
(35:49):
the rose because of this new, much more charismatic, much
more fascinating device, the automobile, which had one great feature,
which is you didn't have to propel it yourself, and
that was a totally charming aspect.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Of the thing.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
And the early bicycle manufacturers recognized a good thing when
they saw it, and many of them immediately jumped from
being bicycle manufacturers to being car manufacturers. So the Pope
bicycle became the Pope Hartford automobile. The Rover in England
was originally a bicycle and became an automobile, and so on,
(36:27):
because those guys were the technologists of the day and
they immediately saw that here was something much better coming along,
and they switched allegiances overnight. We live today and have
lived probably since around World War One, in an autocentric environment.
The automobile population in Los Angeles, for instance, was over
(36:49):
a million cars in the nineteen twenties. I have a
photo an illustration in my book, taken on top of
some high ground overlooking the beach at Malibu is pictures
probably shot.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
In the middle nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
As far as you can see, there are cars parked
side by side along the beach. I mean there have
to be you know, five thousand cars in this photograph
and this.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Is nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
So the point about the automobile is it was utterly seductive,
you know.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
More it was you had a bicycle on steroids. It just.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It scratched a number of human itches that had existed
for four or five, six thousand years, but it did
it in brand new ways.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And what terrific storytelling. And a special thanks to Alex
a terrific job is always, and a special thanks to
Miles Collier for the storytelling. And by the way, to
learn more about the REVS Institute and to visit it
in person or virtually, go to Revsinstitute dot org. That's
Revsorsinstitute dot org. An untold story about human mobility here
(38:07):
on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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