Want a preview of the battle between traditional cars and self-driving ones? Don't look to
Tesla, Apple, or Google. Look back a hundred years, when automobiles took on horses — and
the cars played dirty to win.
"Ransom Olds, who founded the Olds Motor Works, Oldsmobile, was particularly aggressive in
his attacks on the horse. This was like a psychologic thing — I don't know where
it would fall in a diagnostic sense, but he really hated horses."
That's G. Wayne Miller — he wrote "Car Crazy," a book that's about the really early
days of cars. And early car marketers had the horse on their mind. Those cars were unreliable
and traveled on really bad roads, so carmakers had a lot of work to do and a lot of gimmicks
that they used. People were scared of cars; one undertaker used to leave his card on automobile
dashboards. So automakers had to be pretty aggressive selling their invention. They raced
cars around the country and manufacturers insulted their competitors in ads.
But some of their marketing firepower was reserved for the horse. Of course, they invented
the term horsepower, defining a car's power by how many horses it could replace. But they
also rigorously tested horse braking power against their own cars, like a 15 horsepower
De Dion against a team of horses. Yeah, the machine stopped more quickly. And they taunted
mercilessly. One Olds ad said, "Nature made a mistake in giving the horse brain." The
company claimed cars were cheaper and easier than horses, even though most cars were really
pricey and often required a home mechanic.
Henry Ford hated horses too. "The horse is doomed," Ford told a reporter. "These horses
will be driven from the land, their troubles will soon be over." Carmakers took on horses
in public shame-races and in 1895 a new magazine launched with a name that was not subtle:
it was "The Horseless Age."
On the road, cars often collided into horses, and conflicts between car owners and farmers
were common. But hating on horses wasn't just personal. It was...logical.
By the early 1900s, the laboring horse wasn't noble — it was a public health hazard. Thousands
of horses died each year from disease, overwork, and old age, and those that lived produced
millions of pounds of manure.
"Those were significant and real public health hazards."
And urbanites were aware of it too. As cities like New York grew really quickly, streets
became jammed with horses and tons of horse waste.
"And there was another despicable downside: not every horse owner was a kind person. And
so horses were frequently whipped and beaten, and when they died, you know, these despicable
owners, often would leave a one ton, or ton and a half, horse in the streets. Just leave
it there. And that was a clear health hazard."
Cars helped change that. Even Horseless Age spoke up for the horse, saying in its first
issue that cars would "spare the obedient beast." So, yes, cars and horses did have
a knock down, drag out fight, but there were...two winners. And that's how it might be when self-driving
cars come around: a fight to convince consumers, followed by a likely decrease in fatalities
and pollution.
It might not always be easy. Motor World's 1905 headlines claimed that "since time of
chariots" people have "opposed all new vehicles," and that might still be true. But, as Horseless
Age put it more sweetly in their very first issue, "Streets will be cleaner, jams and
blockades less likely to occur, and accidents less frequent."
Thanks to G. Wayne Miller for talking to me, this video is basically a chapter of his book
and there are a lot of good stories in there. I wanted to share one more insult, however,
and it comes from the first issue of The Horseless Age. This is what they said in response to
the argument that the automobile scares horses: "Suppose it does. So do locomotives, bicycles,
street cars, Fourth of July celebrations, and a dozen other things. Horses must get
used to it."
Boom.