Resistance to change ongoing
Electric cars are either the saviour of the planet or the worst thing to happen, depending on your point of view. But we have been here before, writes Damien O’Carroll.
Ever hear the one about the man who pitched a radical idea that could replace the dominant mode of transport with something cleaner and way more efficient at the time the world was facing a serious environmental and health crisis, only to be met with scepticism and ridicule?
This man was considered a dreamer and a lunatic by many, but as a visionary forward thinker by quite a few people as well.
He wasn’t the first to come up with the concept he was pushing, but he was the first to make it work to the degree that he could sell it to the public in the United States, yet he was derided by many who should have known better.
But this man wasn’t called Elon Musk – his name was Alexander Winton, and he also wasn’t a billionaire to begin with, so couldn’t simply forge ahead with his idea on his own accord. In fact, he once recalled an angry meeting with a potential financial backer who found out about what he was doing and claimed to be ‘‘disappointed in him’’.
The discussion got heated, and the potential backer eventually said Winton was a fool if he genuinely thought his vehicle would disrupt the status quo and become common.
Winton showed the man an interview with a highly respected entrepreneur who confidently predicted that in a decade’s time, people would be able to buy such vehicles for the same cost as more conventional transport, that the money spent running the conventional transport would be saved, and even safety and quality of life would be improved.
‘‘A great invention that facilitates commerce enriches a country just as much as the discovery of vast hoards of gold’’ the man said in the interview. The potential investor dismissed the article derisively as just ‘‘another inventor talking’’.
But the man was very wrong. The ‘‘inventor’’ he dismissed was none other than Thomas Edison and the article was an interview with Edison about the new ‘‘horseless carriages’’ that had recently begun appearing on America’s roads.
And Alexander Winton was quite likely the first man to sell a fullyfunctioning gasoline-powered horseless carriage to a member of the public in the US in 1898.
Winton was a contemporary of Charles E Dureya (who Winton considered to be the first man to build an automobile in the US) and Henry Ford who went on to revolutionise the production of said automobiles.
And the environmental and health crisis the world was facing at the time? Not entirely dissimilar to the one we face today, albeit less catastrophic and more, well, messy. . .
In the late-1800s the population of large cities were still largely dependent on the horse as its main form of transport, even though horses had begun being supplanted by bicycles and trains at the time.
In London alone there were still estimated to be more than 50,000 horses pulling the 11,000 hansom cabs and thousands of horse-drawn buses (that each required 12 horses) and delivery drays around the city every day.
And the emissions were terrible. Only they were a different kind of emission to the ones we worry about today – each horse produced around 7 to 16 kilograms of manure a day, as well as more than a litre of urine.
Not only did this smell rather unpleasant, it also attracted massive numbers of flies, which would happily spread typhoid fever and other equally unpleasant diseases.
But, wait – there was more: your standard horse had an average working lifespan of three years (life was particularly hard on working horses back then) and when they dropped dead, they were generally left on the side of the road to decompose for a bit, because it was easier to saw them up after they had spent a few days putrefying in the sun. So that was pleasant, too.
To put it plainly, London was poisoning its residents. The horse population had reached such a level, that in 1894 The Times newspaper rather hysterically predicted that ‘‘in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure’’.
And it wasn’t just London that had a problem – New York alone had a population of 100,000 horses that produced around a million kilograms of manure a day.
The sheer scale of the problem was debated in 1898 at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York, but no solution could be found. It seemed urban civilisation was doomed to drown under a literal sea of horse crap.
But by that time Winton, Dureya and, most importantly, Henry Ford had developed the horseless carriage, with Ford discovering the secret to making them en masse at a cost more people could afford.
At the time there was a lot of uncertainty about what the public would want when it came time to replace their horse.
A man named Joseph Barsaleaux from New York built a ‘‘motor horse’’ that looked like a horse, but featured a single wheel, with reins attached to the mouth of the horse for steering.
Automobiles powered by compressed city gas (coal gas, in other words), compressed air, superheated water and even a spring-motor device that stored energy running downhill and used it going uphill were unleashed.
Steam and electric-powered cars where ‘‘clogging the market’’ (according to Winton), but in the end public opinion turned to gasoline because it was ‘‘clean, safe, and dependable’’.
Filling a car with gasoline was far more inconvenient than feeding a horse, as petrol stations weren’t yet a thing – the world’s first purpose-built petrol station was constructed in Missouri in 1905 – and if your horse ever ran low on energy during a long trip it could grab a bite to eat and take a nap almost anywhere, so range anxiety must have been an issue for horseless carriages of the day.
Winton ran newspaper advertisements stating ‘‘Dispense with a horse and save the expense, care and anxiety of keeping it’’, proudly proclaiming that his motor carriages were ‘‘easily managed’’ and had ‘‘no odour’’, all of which sound very similar to EV proponents spouting lines about EVs ‘‘needing no maintenance’’ (they actually do, just not as much).
And, of course, the big thing was – much like EVs today – motor carriages back then were far better for our health than a sea of manure and disease that horses were creating.
Of course there are differences: back in the late-1800s the world’s population was still only around 1.5 billion, compared to the 7.8 billion or so the planet has to hold today. Although horses were already on their way out when the car arrived, the parallels are hard to ignore.
The same arguments against EVs were thrown at motorised horseless carriages when they first appeared, but we got past those.
Horses are still around and the car isn’t going anywhere – it’s just what powers it that will change. Now, fullyautonomous cars? Well, that’s another thing entirely. . .
The same arguments against EVs were thrown at motorised horseless carriages when they first appeared, but we got past those.