Textbook History Part 1: Horseless Nuisance
So we’re driving down 5th Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and while I’m marveling at the refurbished Cathedral of Learning, daughter Cindy is dealing with rolling parking lot traffic and searching for the Kauffman Medical Center.
Cindy is a fantastic driver and a Pitt graduate – along with her husband and two of her four sons – so all are veterans of navigating the Pitt/UPMC Oakland traffic.
I also spent a bunch of years trying to locate parking near Pitt, but in a time period that only remotely resembled the pandemonium my daughter was navigating today.
We finally escaped Fifth Avenue to the parking garage, and as we wound up 10 floors, passing hundreds of parked cars, I began to recall a lesson or two I had taught my automotive class about the challenges faced by the birthing of the horseless carriage.
It may be difficult to imagine, given the world, our part of it and the global obsession with cars, that at one time the automobile was not only discouraged but generally hated. It was seen by ordinary folks as a threat to horses and was litigated into relative temporary obscurity by many state or local ordinances.
The fascination with traveling faster and further than foot travel began somewhere in history with the discovery of the wheel, common in use as early as 1900 B.C. But in early America, inventors were toying with individual wheeled transportation early in the 19th century. Crude bicycles probably challenged the more expensive horse and buckboard or buggy. But several bicycle builders experimented with placing elementary gasoline fueled engines on frames with four wheels and the “horseless carriage” concept was born.
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint who invented the first steerable motorized vehicle, as experimentation was happening in many garages and several countries. Charles Duryea and J. Frank, both bicycle mechanics, are generally recognized as producing the first steerable automobile in this country.
The early automobile was not in favor with citizenry at the turn of the century. In fact, some states passed laws intended to discourage purchasing automobiles at all, even though average wages prohibited buying the hand-built vehicles. Horses were accepted as the main conveyance beyond foot travel, able to carry riders or pull wheeled buggies.
If ordinances at the state level didn’t do enough to shield horses from the aggravation of noisy, smoky-oil-burning gadgets, many communities developed and enforced their own restrictions.
Here are a few:
Any motorized vehicle entering the city limits must first get a permit from the police station.
Any motor vehicle approaching a stop sign or driver must exit the vehicle, fire three shots from a shotgun and yell in three directions before proceeding.
Any motorized vehicle approaching a stop sign must be parked, the motor disassembled and reassembled before proceeding.
And a universal and believable ordinance: Horses and horse-drawn vehicles have the right-of-way. No motorized vehicle may pass a horse and rider or a horse-drawn vehicle. Motorized vehicles must pull off the road for a horse or horse-drawn wagon to pass.
Respected inventors and thinkers like Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin were dubious about predicting success for “horseless vehicles”.
But here we are, a short century and a quarter later with roughly 288 million vehicles roaming the USA, and about 117 million making trips that average15 miles daily.*
Last Thursday, it felt like most of them were in Oakland!
*Statistics from S&P, Global mobility, 2023
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.