Picture the bustling American cities of a century ago, teeming with activity powered not by steam or electricity, but by millions of horses. While essential for daily life and trade, these hard-working animals brought an unforeseen crisis: streets choked with waste, widespread disease, and air thick with what one observer called “dried horse manure.” It’s a surprising chapter in our urban history, revealing the very real challenges our ancestors faced living alongside so many four-legged beasts.
Today, we often discuss the impact of cars on our world, but imagine a time when the automobile was seen as a transformative solution, a public health miracle. Join Miles C. Collier, founder of the REVS Institute and an expert on all things automotive, as he shares the extraordinary story of how early cars helped clean up our crowded American cities, improve public health, and forever change the way we live. This is the often-overlooked tale of how automobiles saved us from the overwhelming realities of the “Age of the Horse.”
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or came to the end of their, you know, just totally exhausted. So, 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, one of the problems back in the day 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, lockjaw, as it was called in the day, was a real problem. But 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 full-blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during rush hour? How many people died?
Speaker 1: Lots.
Speaker 2: So, the horse was a major, major problem; the automobile was a major, major savior.
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.
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