The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century

8. The Decline and Persistence of the Urban Horse

c h a p t e r e i g h t The Decline and Persistence of the Urban Horse The utilization of the urban horse as a living machine declined in the years around 1900, but the speed of its decline and substitution varied from function to function. In some cases, as in the street railway industry, the change from horse-powered to electric-powered transit occurred with great rapidity. In other cases, however, such as certain types of freight delivery, crowd control, and leisure, the transformation was far slower and is still incomplete. A separate set of social, economic, and cultural circumstances in addition to mechanical technology were required to completely unhorse cities. In this chapter we therefore explore some of the areas where utilization of the horse as a living machine persisted and those areas where substitution occurred rapidly. The final result, of course, would be the nearly full substitution of other technologies for the horse. The Persistence of the Horse as a Stationary Engine While writers about the horse in the city usually focus on its work as a hauler of streetcars, cabs, and drays, it also played an important and long-lasting role as a source of stationary power. Oliver Evans received the first American patent for a high-pressure steam engine in 1787, seven years after James Watt had begun to produce them in Scotland. All historical writing about the new steam engine, especially in its stationary applications, seems to assume the inevitability of its triumph . Yet the reality was that the adoption of steam as a power source in cities was relatively slow, not really reaching a level of concentration until the 1870s. Eighty years after Evans filed his patent, for instance, the Ohio State Fair gave prizes to 107 di¤erent types of horse-powered stationary machines, most with nonfarm as well as farm applications. Urban stationary power appeared to operate primarily in workshops that needed fractional-horsepower. A study of manu- facturing in Philadelphia between 1850 and 1880 emphasizes the limited number of firms with steam or water power and the extent to which older manufacturing processes and forms persisted, especially in low-power industries such as wool-carding, bagging, and rope making.1 Horses as living machines provided small manufacturers with flexibility because horses could be added or subtracted as needed. In 1860 the American Institute in New York City held a discussion about motive power, assessing the relative costs of horse and steam power. Horse advocates argued that the cost of steam power was high compared to that of horse power: $300 for a one-horsepower engine, 25 cents a day for coal, and $1.50 per day for a skilled operator, compared to lower initial costs of perhaps $30 for the horse, 40 cents a day for food, and the use of lower priced unskilled labor for horses. Attendees actively discussed which was more reliable. Advocates of the steam engine maintained that the horse, unlike the steam engine, had to be fed whether working or not, while horse defenders argued that the horse could do other things besides power machines , such as hauling a wagon to deliver the finished product. The most telling argument for the horse, perhaps, was that it o¤ered low capital costs for entrylevel entrepreneurs and therefore played a major role in stimulating economic growth.2 Builders and contactors preferred horses, especially in situations calling for limited and inexpensive mechanical power, as well as for hauling. The average contractor had too little capital to invest in expensive, risky steam engines. Even in large-scale construction operations, horses were vital. Little progress was made, for instance, in improving earth-moving equipment throughout the nineteenth century. As late as 1900, the section on “earth-work” in a widely used civil engineering manual focused on horse-drawn equipment. In 1912 the Clyde Iron Works of Duluth, Minnesota, was still advertising several di¤erent horse-powered machines for “contractor’s use.”3 One ingenious new deployment of horses and, arguably, their first modest application to urban transport was their use as stationary prime movers turning paddle wheels on ferryboats, paddle wheels that had been invented for steam-powered boats but retrofitted to equine power. Horses were to provide the power to propel ferryboats on some water bodies into the twentieth century.4 Retrofitting from mechanical power sources was a recurring theme of equine technology. The relative slowness of the transition is striking. Theoretically, the use of...