CHAPTER 15

Spiritual Machines

The Supremacy of the Horse

New York City was sinking in shit. The metropolis and its three and a half million residents were being swallowed by the surging contamination and accompanying communal health problems produced by their indispensable personal, public, and commercial transportation. Instead of greenhouse gases and climate change, in 1894 the mounting pollution crisis took the shape of unimaginable piles of rancid manure produced by more than two hundred thousand urban horses and mules, prompting The New York Times to brand it “Stable City.”

While the “Great Manure Crisis of 1894” was gaining steam, the Chicago World’s Fair—convened in 1893 to honor the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus—was celebrating American progress and civilization. The sanitary splendor of the modern urban era was symbolized by its aesthetic White City centerpiece. The architects of the fair were so concerned about maintaining their facades (literally made from white “stucco” staff) of “America the Beautiful” that they declined to host Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Spurned but not defeated, he set up camp immediately outside the official grounds, raking in massive amounts of revenue without giving a cut to the fair. While the World’s Columbian Exposition, as it was formally called, promoted the impression that “thine alabaster cities gleam,” the putrid sights and sordid smells of reality in Chicago, Paris, London, Toronto, and New York told a very different story.

The White City: Two hardy Michigan horses hauling a mountain of logs bound for the construction of the Chicago World’s Fair, February 1893. (Library of Congress)

One commentator complained that the squalid streets of Gotham were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting of comminuted horse dropping, smelling to heaven and destined in no inconsiderable part to be scattered in a fine dust in all directions, laden with countless millions of disease-breeding germs.”[*1] A typical urban traction horse produced roughly 30 pounds of manure and 1.5 gallons (12.5 pounds) of urine per day. By the time of the Manure Crisis, New York City received upwards of 3,000 tons of manure a day![*2] “With the exception of a few thoroughfares,” complained a newspaper editorial, “all the streets are one mass of reeking, disgusting filth, which in some places is piled to such a height as to render them almost impassable.” Urban centers around the world were facing the same shitty situation.

The forty-five largest US cities had an average density of 426 horses per square mile. Milwaukee, home to 350,000 people, topped the list at 709. Its 12,500 horses produced 185 tons of feces a day. In 1894 the 8,500 equine Torontonians tendered 128 tons of excrement per day, while the 6 million residents of London were bombarded by a daily output of 4,500 tons from 300,000 horses. Urban English working horses were producing more than 10 million tons of manure every year.

Street sweeping during the intensity of working-day traffic was next to impossible. Nightly sanitary squads generally shoveled equine waste off to the side, where it stacked up and lined the streets and buildings like snowbanks. “Many scraps of waste land in the poorer quarters of towns were turned into vast dung heaps,” explains acclaimed English social historian Francis Thompson, “considerably aggravating the squalor, stench, and unhealthiness of such parts of the urban environment.” Vacant lots, public parks, and alleyways accumulated heaping piles of manure reaching sixty feet.

Futile fleets of wagons were used to cart out the waste. Of course, these were pulled by horses—who produced the very ordure they were picking up! The Boston City Scavenger Department, for example, employed over 500 horses pulling 120 wagons, 14 cesspool cleaners, 9 street sweepers, 6 watering carts, and 175 carcass and manure sleds. In London 1,500 horses dubbed the Heavy Brigade were tasked with the nightly duty of hauling off dung as they donated their own. Small amounts were shipped and sold to local farmers, but mass transport outside the immediate rural ring was neither feasible nor cost-effective. Moreover, farms produced their own livestock manure, and urban supply far outpaced rural demand.

According to Thompson, the scenes of mid-nineteenth-century London portrayed by novelist Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist and other tales represented an “ ‘excremental vision’ of society as a gigantic choked up sewer, of a preoccupation with ordure, filth, and bowel movements.” Battling its own Manure Crisis in 1894, The Times of London predicted that “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” The cities of the world were being submerged under mountains of manure, and their residents were at the mercy of escorting disease.

The Great Manure Crisis: Sidewalks separate pedestrians and brownstone row houses from towering piles of rancid manure lining Varick Street, New York City, 1895. (Museum of the City of New York)

During spring thaws and rainy seasons, streets turned into thick sludges of mud, manure, urine, and other refuse that seeped into basements. New Yorkers grumbled that in a few more years, the accumulated manure would be so high that the fourth story of buildings would become the first floor. “Streets in the lower part of the city,” observed Scientific American, “are completely blocked three or four days of the week.” The trendy New York brownstone row houses with their elegant staircase-stoops climbing to second-story parlors were purposefully built to rise above the streaming seas of horse manure and urban muck.

Passing vehicles, one Londoner pointed out, “would fling sheets of such soup—where not intercepted by trousers or skirts—completely across the pavement.” Ankle boots were worn by all classes as shields from this slurry of excrement, while the affluent wore long, ankle-length “splashguard” outer garments. These styles were not dictated solely by a priggish, puritanical society to stifle sexual arousal at the sight of an uncovered ankle, as has often been assumed. The reasons for these modifications were far more pragmatic and based on good ol’-fashioned horse sense.

During dry spells, reported one New Yorker, “any little puff of wind filled the air with powdered horse manure that settled on the passerby and had to be wiped from the eyes and lips,” creating the perfect storm for transmitting disease. A health official in Rochester, New York, for example, calculated in 1900 that the “15,000 horses in that city produced enough manure in a year to make a pile covering an acre of ground 175 ft [feet] high and breeding sixteen billion flies.” The US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology estimated in 1895 that horse manure provided the breeding grounds for 95 percent of the urban fly population.

Other disease-vectoring rodents and insects were attracted to the dung heaps, igniting deadly seasonal epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, and typhus. These clouds of insects were snacked on by swelling flocks of urban birds—especially proliferating swarms of English sparrows, who also splashed their poop across urban spaces and faces. This simmering zoological stew of fecal matter also fed rampant outbreaks of lethal water-borne afflictions, including cholera, typhoid, dysentery, giardia, E. coli, and assorted parasitic worms.

In 1894, as manure piled up across fourteen inner-city dump sites, New York City health inspectors reported higher rates of infectious disease “in dwellings and schools within fifty feet of stables than in remoter locations.” The Broadway and Seventh Avenue Street Railway stable, the largest in the world, housed 2,500 horses across four floors. A fire insurance map of Philadelphia marks 175 individual stables within only 130 city blocks.

Adding to this atmosphere of urban disease and decay were thousands of dead horses. The average working life of a city horse was a fleeting five to seven years. Across urban landscapes, injured, lame, and incapacitated horses were shot and left to rot in the streets. “Dead horses were extremely unwieldly,” remarks transportation historian Eric Morris. “As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could be more easily sawed into pieces and carted off.” Between 1880 and 1910, an annual average of 26,000 dead horses were removed from the streets of London, 15,000 in New York, and 12,000 in Chicago, which maintained its position as the premier horse market for feral and farmed horses shipped in from the West.

Between 1887 and 1897, the New York branch of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded in 1866 primarily to care for unwanted horses, put down between 1,700 and 8,000 horses a year. The ASPCA and the French Society for the Protection of Animals, created twenty years earlier, were both inspired by their pioneering British counterpart, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, established in 1824 (the first of its kind in any country) by Member of Parliament Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin.

The Irish politician had previously introduced the first British animal anti-cruelty bill. It was ratified in 1822 based on English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s assertion in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) that “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.” Similar laws were passed in New York in 1828 and Massachusetts in 1835, and, by 1907, every state had anti-cruelty statutes on the books. Comparable laws were invested in the Canadian Criminal Code in 1892.

Other national philanthropic organizations sprang up, including Our Dumb Friends League (later renamed Blue Cross Fund), raised in 1897 to care for working horses in London, and the American Humane Society, with its mission to petition for the welfare of urban horses—and children. To announce its founding in 1877, free copies of the freshly released book Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions—The Autobiography of a Horse were handed out to children to promote inner-city literacy as well as English author Anna Sewell’s goal “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.” With its effective use of anthropomorphism and “first-person” narration by the eponymous Black Beauty, the novel mobilized the rhetoric of slavery in the vein of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to appeal to the masses in its plea for the compassionate treatment of horses.

The instant international bestseller recounts the trials and tribulations of Black Beauty from his carefree days as a foal with his mother on a serene English estate through his hardships and misery as a cab horse on the tough streets of London. Black Beauty eventually finds peace and tranquility in retirement on country pastures reminiscent of the rehabilitated cavalry horses from the Battle of Waterloo charging on the meadows of Sir Astley Cooper’s manor. Most urban horses had no such happy endings.

Dead and bloated horses left rotting in the streets and those that perished in distress from traffic accidents, overwork, exhaustion, or disease were discarded at industrial rendering plants (and canneries) that historian at Northeastern University Clay McShane labels “the organic equivalent of a scrap iron processor.” In 1895 one horse carcass produced a profit of $24, equivalent to roughly $1,000 today. Appearing in the 1850s, these large-scale recycling centers turned horse carrion into a surprisingly thick catalog of secondary products, similar to those developed from the bison by Indigenous peoples.

Shaved hair was used for blankets and as stuffing for cushions. Hides were turned into highly valued cordovan leather. Hooves were boiled to extract oil used for glues and gelatin. Leg bones were fashioned into knife handles and combs. Ribs and skulls were treated to remove oils and then burned for bootblack polish and filters in sugar refineries. The by-products from this process were the chief sources of ammonium carbonate, insecticides, and phosphorus for match tips. Horsemeat was sold for human consumption at “pork shops” and, more frequently, ground into pet food. Fats were skimmed for candles and soaps. The remaining vat sludge, or “soup,” was used as fertilizer or pounded with potash to produce substances used in dyes and poisons.

Destined for the rendering plant: Kids playing in the filthy street beside a dead workhorse, with milk wagons in the background, New York City, circa 1900. (Library of Congress)

These processing facilities, usually erected in the heart of urban centers, emitted an unimaginable, reeking stench from the butchery, boiling, burning, and bilge waste. Most of the rendering vats were outdoors for fear of explosions and the prohibitive cost of indoor closed boilers, or autoclaves. Of course, in death, many horses were also dumped unceremoniously into waterways or eaten by their owners—or pets.

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It is hard to believe that just over a century ago horses were literally everywhere and used for everything. They were the preeminent beast of burden. “Between 1870 and 1900, the number of horses in American cities grew fourfold, while the human population merely doubled,” reports Tom Standage in A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next. “By the turn of the century, there was one horse for every ten people in Britain, and one for every four in the United States.”

I want you to stop reading and pause for a moment after you mentally substitute horses for every aspect of our current motorized and mechanical farming, manufacturing, transport, distribution, services, war, and trade.

It is a mind-numbing exercise. “Horses were ubiquitous, working in cities, towns, and factories, on farms and frontiers, on streets and roads, alongside canals, around forts, ports, and railroad depots,” stresses Ann Norton Greene in Horses at Work. “Horses were particularly dense around cities. Census returns would confirm the visible evidence that the horse population had grown substantially, and that Americans consumed more power from horses than from any other source.”

The total US horse population peaked in 1915 at twenty-five million, with another five and a half million mules. Sustaining this massive national herd consumed roughly 30 percent of the country’s total crop area. It is fair to say that between 1880 and 1920, horses ruled the world, and humans depended on them more than at any other time in our history.

Ratio of Horses to Humans in US Cities, 1900[*3]

City	Population	Ratio Horse to Human
Kansas City	214,000	1 to 7.4
Minneapolis-Saint Paul	366,000	1 to 9.3
Los Angeles	102,000	1 to 12.7
Denver	134,000	1 to 14.7
Memphis	102,000	1 to 17.0
Saint Louis	575,000	1 to 17.5
Buffalo	352,000	1 to 18.5
San Francisco	343,000	1 to 20.1
Chicago	1.69 million	1 to 22.9
Pittsburgh	322,000	1 to 23.0
Cincinnati	326,000	1 to 23.3
Toronto (Canada)	210,000	1 to 25.0
Philadelphia	1.29 million	1 to 25.3
New York	3.44 million	1 to 26.4

At the turn of the century, American cities had upwards of five million horses performing every function and job imaginable. They were the heartbeat of commerce and transportation. A bird’s-eye view of the planet would show the urban centers of humanity crawling with horses—and their fly-ridden manure.

Horses pulling omnibuses, railcars, wagons, and carts hurried, hurtled, and crashed across rush-hour traffic on busy commercial streets darkened by the first skyscrapers and clattered down the quiet picket-fence-lined cobblestones of suburbia. They shuttled goods and passengers to and from railway stations and ports. Horse teams hauled building materials to, and removed debris from, construction sites, as cities expanded outward and upward during the unprecedented growth of the Gilded—or Gelded—Age.

Soon after their first appearance in Chicago in 1885, skyscrapers dominated the skylines of major American centers.[*4] The iconic triangular Flatiron building anchoring the south side of Madison Square in Manhattan, for example, opened its doors in 1902, followed seven years later by the neighboring Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower. “Humans could not have built nor lived in the giant, wealth-generating metropolises,” notes McShane, “without horses.”

Cities reverberated with the deafening sounds of horse-related occupations and infrastructure, including blacksmiths, farriers, wheelwrights, tanners, drivers, carters, breeders, breakers, knackers, teamsters, hostlers, veterinarians, groomers, saddlers, stables, markets, canneries, rendering plants, and carriage, coach, and cab makers. Horses literally drove people and profits.

By the mid-seventeenth century, scheduled stagecoach services carrying up to eight passengers appeared across Europe. An English travel almanac from 1784 cautioned that “the number of carriages is so great in Paris that one can scarcely withdraw from the burden they cause,” while warning also of the danger they posed to pedestrians on the “narrow, crowded, dirty streets.” Elaborately painted and decorated twelve- to eighteen-passenger omnibuses drawn by teams of two to six horses were shuttling people across Paris, London, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston by the 1830s. Swanky omnibuses appeared in both Toronto and Montreal in 1849. By the 1850s, most urban centers across the Americas and Europe had adopted public omnibus transportation.[*5]

Preparing the foundations of the future: Horse teams hauling materials to and from a skyscraper construction site at the intersection of Front and Yonge Streets, Toronto, 1903. (City of Toronto Archives)

In 1850, for instance, the seven hundred omnibuses operating in New York—dubbed the City of Omnibuses—averaged 120,000 passengers per day, while those in Paris handled 95,000. Reminiscent of contemporary subway travel, The New York Herald quipped, “Modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.” In London, the omnibuses were so packed that people took to riding on the roof, giving rise to the renowned red double-decker bus.

An advertisement for the debut of the Baltimore Omnibus Company in 1844 provides a concise overview of this new public transportation: “They are quite handsome affairs, well fitted up, richly decorated, drawn by good horses and we believe driven by careful drivers…. In other cities, in addition to the general convenience, they have tended greatly to enhance the value of property in the outskirts of the City, enabling persons to reside at a distance from their places of work.” Omnibuses created the first suburban rings around modern cities. They were not, however, the only form of horse-driven public transportation on the manure-plastered roads of the creeping urban sprawl.

Horse-drawn railcars, or trams, in downtown corridors across North America and Europe gained traction and popularity by the 1860s. With less friction and more concentrated power, railcars accommodating 20 people moved at eight miles per hour, roughly twice as fast as omnibuses. New York, of course, started the trend in the United States in 1832, with Toronto and Montreal following suit in Canada in 1861. By 1890, there were 5,800 miles of tramline (supported by 250,000 horses and 37,500 employees) in US cities alone, servicing 400 million passengers a year. Ridership in New York, for example, increased from 23 million in 1857 to 161 million by 1880.

In the twenty-eight American cities with populations over one hundred thousand in 1890, residents rode public transportation an average of 172 times per year. The typical New Yorker clocked in a whopping 297 annual trips. Across the country, horses were pulling 27 percent more passengers than they did a decade earlier, as urban populations soared and routes extended farther into suburbia.

Joining the fleets of mass public transportation were smaller public cabs, private carriages and carts, commercial wagons, and postal, police, and fire teams.[*6] Horses, and all manner of vehicles, clogged the gridlocked streets. Adding to the chaotic traffic congestion was the bicycle, or “dandy horse.” The introduction of the “safety bicycle,” with its chain-drive gear transmission and smaller, pneumatic tires, in the late 1880s kicked off a decade-long bicycle craze. It did nothing, however, to curb horse traffic. Or manure.

All this transportation, accommodating an increasing number of people on the move, meant big business for vehicle makers. The eighty manufacturers in Cincinnati, for instance, cranked out 130,000 horse-drawn carriages in 1890, at a time when there were more than 13,800 American companies producing some form of horse-drawn transport. The Studebaker Company of South Bend, Indiana, built 75,000 that year, and the Kentucky Wagon Manufacturing Company in Louisville, 90,000. Abbot, Downing & Co. of Concord, New Hampshire, was so successful in constructing durable stagecoaches that their product cornered the market and was forever known as the Concord coach.

Spiritual machines: A vast array of horse-drawn vehicles carrying wool, coal, ice, ale, fish, furniture, people, and other products cross Pyrmont Bridge in Sydney, Australia, 1894. On the far right, a young man in a white shirt is sweeping the gutter. As late as the 1930s, the city paid boys, nicknamed “sparrow starvers,” to collect manure to sell as fertilizer. (Sydney Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Powerhouse Collection)

Companies adorned their wagons with trademark logos, and their horses became part of their brand marketing. What would Budweiser beer be without its recognizable Clydesdales, or Coors without its Belgians? The H. J. Heinz Company was known for its white wagons and contrasting black Percheron horses. Dairy companies preferred milky white horses to match their products and promote the allure of purity. Horses were adorned with clanging bells and flashy outfits to draw attention. The Levi Strauss & Co. two-horse patch, debuting in 1886, depicts two horses attempting to pull apart a pair of jeans, demonstrating its strength and durability. Without knowing, Strauss invoked the historical connection between horses and the creation of pants three thousand years earlier by Indo-European riders of the Tarim Basin.

The fabrication of specialized vehicles demanding different horsepower strengths was comparable to today. Large-haul express companies preferred heavy coach horses averaging 1,450 pounds, while smaller delivery and buggy services used standard horses between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds. Heavy draft horses were considered too slow, lumbering, and clumsy for the quick pace and mind-rattling chaos of city driving.

The first firehorses, for example, were hastily drafted into service in 1832 by the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) during a cholera epidemic as emergency substitutes for dead, sick, and dying fire crews. The horses proved so invaluable in saving time, property, and lives that they were promoted to full-time employees, pulling custom fire trucks. American firehorses were larger than their transportation counterparts, standing sixteen to seventeen hands and weighing 1,500 to 1,600 pounds on average.

In 1893, the year prior to the Great Manure Crisis, W. J. Gordon published his statistical findings in The Horse-World of London, providing an exhaustive representation of urban horses across the global order. According to the prolific author, the city had 2,210 omnibuses operated by 11,000 employees and 22,000 horses. Another 10,000 horses pulled 1,000 railcars across 135 miles of tramline. Over the course of the year, these trollies carried 1.9 million passengers more than 21 million miles.

London also registered 11,297 cabs pulled by 22,000 horses. Gordon also discovered that of the 15,000 licensed cabmen, more than 2,000 were convicted of various driving infractions, including cruelty to animals, drunkenness, loitering, and the catchall of “willful misbehaviour.” Many were repeat offenders.

The city also stabled over six thousand commercial horses, six hundred Royal Mail horses, three thousand brewery and distillery horses, and three thousand more supplying London with eight million tons of coal annually. Another twenty-six thousand found themselves on dinner plates during 1893. Thousands of additional horses serviced the massive fleet of private coaches, carts, and carriages.

In total, roughly three hundred thousand horses drove the personal and economic demands of a bustling city of six million people. Over the course of the year, these steadfast horses also bequeathed 1.6 million tons of manure and 685,000 tons of urine to the streets of London.

Predictably, transportation was at a standstill, prompting the Royal Commission on London Traffic to investigate solutions to the gridlock. From 1870 to 1900, the average speed of travel in London dipped by 25 percent. (The average speed of cars in central London today is equivalent to that of a horse-drawn carriage in the 1890s: eight miles per hour.) The overflowing traffic generated head-hammering noise pollution from the clamoring din of thousands of clip-clopping shod horses and clattering iron-rimmed or hobnailed wheels. This provided the incessant background rhythm for a competing chorus of whinnying, snorting, squealing, and the cruel cracking of whips and bellowing commands of chauffeurs and horse drivers. And just like today, there were also hazardous slowpokes, reckless speeders, infuriating tailgaters, and volatile road-ragers.

Gridlock: Rush-hour traffic on the streets of Philadelphia, 1897. (US National Archives)

Horse traffic, however, was far more chaotic and dangerous because of the dual unpredictability of humans and horses. The complete horse-drawn vehicle package was also stretched in disjointed sections of the horse team, traces, and vehicle, presenting a longer, rambling target for accidents and entanglements. Suddenly halting a team of horses pulling an enormous amount of weight was quite another issue altogether. Accidents were frequent and often lethal.

Across the United States between 1890 and 1900, for example, there were 750,000 annual horse-drawn traffic accidents causing injury or death. Serious traffic injuries were ten times greater than modern automobile levels, with death rates almost double. In 1900, for instance, horse accidents killed one out of every seventeen thousand New Yorkers. A century later, car accidents killed one out of every thirty thousand. Cities attempted to control horse traffic and its associated noise with bylaws.

Boston forbade horse-drawn traffic from passing courthouses so that judges and juries could hear the proceedings and testimony. Doctors across the world claimed that the incessant and unrelenting racket was the cause of a growing number of “nervous disorders.” Like modern noise-reducing barriers erected along interstates and highways, in high-volume neighborhoods, people wrapped their houses in straw bales to muffle the commotion. Some cities limited teams to four horses.

Posted speed limits were common: San Francisco, 10 mph; Chicago and Detroit, 6 mph; and New York, 5 mph for commercial vehicles and 8 mph for light passenger vehicles. Speeds, however, could not be measured, nor could limits be enforced. The volume and corresponding danger generally controlled the pace of traffic. It was the unofficial duty of all drivers to even out and smooth pack the roads by keeping out of the ruts, which damaged wheels and were potentially dangerous to horses’ fragile legs. Signs with slogans such as “Keep out of the ruts and save the road” were posted along well-traveled routes.

As horse-drawn transportation surged, streets were widened where possible, and layers of packed-gravel macadam roads became standard by the 1850s. With the advent of buoyed American petroleum production in the 1890s, these gave way to smoother asphalt, making the fast-approaching shift to automobiles relatively painless. Sidewalks to separate the flow of horse traffic and manure from doorways, stoops, and pedestrians also became commonplace by the 1850s.

In the immediate aftermath of the Confederate surrender on April 9, 1865, ending the Civil War, General Grant was asked about a possible political future. He responded shyly that his only political ambition was to return home to Galena, Illinois, and petition his local council for sidewalks. Three years later, he was president of the United States.

As a result of these escalating transportation concerns and the nagging Manure Crisis, New York hosted the first international urban planning conference in 1898. The ten-day agenda revolved around three inseparable and inescapable issues: horses, traffic, and manure. “Horses,” writes Tom Standage, “had become both indispensable and unsustainable.” After only three days, the meeting was adjourned. None of the delegates or scientists could see any workable solutions to the insurmountable problems and human dependence on horses. Hopefully our efforts to tackle greenhouse gas emissions will last longer than a weekend.

Human reliance on horses, and the need for an alternative form of power, were never more evident than during the Great Epizootic of 1872. “Imagine an equestrian health disaster that crippled all of America, halted the government in Washington DC, stopped the ships in New York, burned Boston to the ground, and forced the cavalry to fight the Apaches on foot,” evokes writer and avid rider CuChullaine O’Reilly. “The outbreak is known as the most destructive recorded episode of equine influenza in history.” In October 1872 a highly transmissible equine strain of influenza A—spread mainly through coughing and close contact, causing severe respiratory infection—literally went viral.

With stunning speed, it swept down from Toronto, Canada, coursing through the international arteries of trade and travel across the United States and Mexico, to Central America and the Caribbean. Within three days of the first symptoms in Toronto, all streetcar horses making up the bulk of the city’s 2,500 horses were infected. Roughly 65 percent of the horses in New York City and 95 percent in Rochester fell ill.

On November 9 the Great Boston Fire raged for sixteen hours, as firefighters and civilian volunteers struggled to pull vehicles, inching forward at a crawling pace all for the want of a few skilled horses. More than half of the city’s seventy-five firehorses were dead or unfit for service, coughing uncontrollably in their stables as the blaze spread through the downtown business district. The fire claimed thirty lives, including twelve firefighters, and consumed sixty-five acres and 776 buildings, causing the equivalent of $1.6 billion in damages.

Farther west in Arizona, the US Cavalry was handicapped with sick and dying horses as it tried to corral Cochise and his Apache warriors. “There was still another source of discomfort which should not be overlooked,” recorded Captain John Gregory Bourke. “At that time the peculiar disease known as the epizoötic made its appearance in the United States, and reached Arizona, crippling the resources of the Department in horses and mules; we had to abandon our animals, and take our rations and blanket upon our backs, and do the best we could.” Humanity had taken horses for granted, and, without them, the pandemic paralyzed most aspects of modern society.[*7]

Transportation, trade, and commerce ground to a halt across North American cities as the virus ripped through dense horse populations, infecting upwards of 80 percent. The supply chain backed up and collapsed in the face of mass horse shortages. Produce and meat piled up and rotted in the static ports dotting the Great Lakes, Erie Canal, and Atlantic Ocean. Crates and shipping containers stuffed with merchandise sat motionless in eerily quiet train stations. Farmers ceased slaughter, and factories shuttered.

There was talk of economic recession, which came the following year with the Panic of 1873. Banks failed, and the value of silver plunged. The bulging wealth of the Second Industrial Revolution and post–Civil War speculative bubble burst into a global twenty-three-year Long Depression, which helped foment the economic triggers of the First World War.[*8]

As dazed and confused populations were confronted with the harsh realities and immediate repercussions of the equine epizootic, in October 1872 The Nation magazine reminded its readers of “The Position of the Horse in Modern Society”:

Our talk has been for so many years of the railroad and steamboat and telegraph, as the great “agents of progress,” that we have come almost totally to overlook the fact that our dependence on the horse has grown almost pari passu with our dependence on steam. We have opened up great lines of steam communication all over the country, but they have to be fed with goods and passengers by horses. We have covered the ocean with great steamers, but they can neither load nor discharge their cargoes without horses. We have collected at the mouths of our great rivers and at the intersections of our railroads vast bodies of people, covering miles on miles of area with their dwellings and factories, but have left them wholly dependent for their intramural travel and for their regular supplies of food and clothing on horses. More than this, we have within the last few years made horse labor an almost essential condition of the protection of our great cities from fire…. We have come to think of him as a machine…. [T]hey are the wheels of our great social machine, the stoppage of which means widespread injury to all classes and conditions of persons, injury to commerce, to agriculture, to trade, to social life.

The author warns candidly that “[W]e are now for the first time forcibly reminded that a plague might break out among horses, as plagues have broken out among men, which would sweep them away by the hundred or thousand every day, and which would momentarily baffle science…. [T]he sudden loss of horse labor would totally disorganize our industry and our commerce, and would plunge social life into disorder.” Sound familiar?

During its relatively short six-month outbreak, the mortality rate from equine influenza hovered somewhere between 3 percent and 5 percent, with urban levels reaching 10 percent. Mules, donkeys, and captive zebras appear to have been hit especially hard. “Its lasting effect, however, was that in the various fields where horses served,” notes historian Jonathan Levin in Where Have All the Horses Gone?: How Advancing Technology Swept American Horses from the Road, the Farm, the Range and the Battlefield, “it hastened the search for an alternative to the horse, whose traditional dependability was put in question.”

Just as the 1973–74 oil crisis spawned domestic production (and Japanese imports) of smaller, more fuel-efficient compact cars, a century earlier the Great Epizootic of 1872 helped stimulate the search for cleaner, less infectious, and more reliable forms of mechanical transportation to replace the faithful, but mortal, horse.

In 1260, as the Mongols were penetrating the Levant, the eccentric English philosopher and friar Roger Bacon—who, as mentioned, was the first European to record the formula for gunpowder—eerily predicted a future dominated by mechanization: “Machines may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man steering them, will be moved faster than if they were filled with rowers; wagons may be built which will move with incredible speed and without the aid of beasts; flying machines can be constructed…machines will make it possible to go to the bottom of seas and rivers.”

His contemporaries, who already regarded him as a heretical wizard, must have thought Bacon had gone completely mad. Six centuries later, his seemingly insane ideas were slowly brought to life in what computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil labeled “the age of spiritual machines.”

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The 5,500-year-long supremacy of the human-horse dyad, however, did not come to an abrupt or unforeseen end. The Horse Age was not overthrown suddenly by a mechanical coup or Matrix-like insurrection. This plodding “dehorsification,” as Russian writer Isaac Babel called it, and overlapping handoff to an automated era was gradual. It took almost a century and two calamitous world wars to complete the transfer of power.

Horses reached their pinnacle in global output between 1900 and 1915, just as the age of mechanization lurched forward. They unwittingly encouraged their own demise, which for the often overworked and abused horses was a blessing in disguise. Horses helped build the railways, subways, electric trams, war machines, and automobiles of the modern world. They were essential in hauling materials and debris to and from construction sites. Horses provided transport and fuel to the factories that manufactured the engines that forced them into a long-overdue and well-deserved retirement.

The slow death of the living machine breathed life into those twisted from metal and forged in the fires of the steel mills of Andrew Carnegie and the petroleum rigs of John D. Rockefeller. By 1890, both US industrialists had consolidated their respective monopolies on the two most important global commodities of the Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from 1870 to 1914.

During this period, coinciding with the last land grabs of colonization, or “Imperial Scramble,” international trade increased fourfold, and the world’s steel output rose from five hundred thousand tons to sixty million tons, half of it fabricated in the United States. Steel, petroleum, and rubber, not manure, lined the unsoiled road to modernization and its immaculate ideals of the White City. The machine, not the horse, would carry the torch of progress into a new future for humankind.

American Modernization During the Gilded Age, 1870 to 1920[*9]

	1870	1900	1920
Farms (millions)	2.7	5.7	6.4
Farmed Land (million acres)	408	841	956
Wheat (million bushels)	254	599	843
Workforce Agricultural (millions)	53	38	27
Workforce Industrial (millions)	28	32	44
Steel Production (million metric tons)	0.8	11.2	46
Oil Production (barrels/million)	5.1	63.5	441.7
Railway Track (miles)	53,000	259,000	407,000
Gross National Product ($ billion)	7.4	18.7	91.5
Life Expectancy at Birth (years)	42	47	54

The steam engine patented by Scottish inventor James Watt in 1769 had numerous precursors dating back almost a century to the genius Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, who also made groundbreaking contributions to optics, mechanics, astronomy, and motion a decade before Isaac Newton. To compare the output, or rate of work, performed by steam engines and draft horses, Watt devised the measurement of horsepower. Although there are now different standards and definitions of horsepower, it is basically a unit measurement of power or output from an engine or motor.[*10]

Building on this tradition, in 1804 British mechanical engineer and inventor Richard Trevithick deployed the first steam locomotive. In 1820, more than fifty years before Mark Twain narrated the shenanigans of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, seventy-five steamboats navigated the Mississippi River. When Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (often called the Great American Novel) in 1885 more than six hundred were paddling the interior rivers of the United States, transforming the tenets of American progress.

Down on the farm, however, massive, plodding, expensive, and relatively inefficient steam tractors could not outwork the horse and never really caught on. By 1910, only seventy thousand sat, predominantly idle, in American barns. Over time, the internal combustion engine, not steam propulsion, unseated the horse from its commanding reign.

In 1876 German engineer Nicolaus Otto built the first petroleum-powered, compressed-charge internal combustion engine. Despite standing more than seven feet tall, it generated only limited power. Over the next two decades, numerous contributors made successive improvements in reducing size and weight while increasing horsepower. Gottlieb Daimler, for instance, installed a small engine on a bicycle in 1885, creating the Reitwagen (riding car), or first motorcycle. A year later Carl Benz patented his Motorwagen (a derivative of Greek and Latin meaning “movable self”), which is considered the birth of the modern automobile. In the English world, however, “horseless carriage” dictated the lexicon during these early years.[*11]

Health professionals and scientists hailed the automobile as a sanitary, safe, and efficient form of transportation. After all, “Cleanliness,” as the English novelist Aldous Huxley stressed in Brave New World, “is next to fordliness.” In Huxley’s dystopian World State (plied with the Indo-European-inspired mind-control drug soma), Henry Ford is a messianic-like father figure. The calendar notates years in AF (Anno Ford), with the history-altering 1908 marking year zero. I am currently writing in the year 115 AF.

Although he grew up on a farm in Michigan, young Henry never really took a shine to horses ever since a spooked colt dragged him around with his foot caught in the stirrup. “I never had any particular love for the farm,” he recalled. “It was the mother on the farm I loved.” In 1875, when he was twelve, Ford watched an enormous steam-engine tractor lumber across a field, remarking later that “it was the first vehicle other than horse drawn that I had ever seen.” He quickly determined, however, that “steam was not suitable for light vehicles, [as] the boiler was dangerous.” After working as an engineer for Thomas Edison for nine years, in 1899 Ford set out on his own to revolutionize the auto industry.

In year zero—1908—he did just that. The cheap, mass-produced Model T horseless carriage changed the course of history. The “Tin Lizzie” was marketed as the Everyman car, with slogans such as “Even You Can Afford a Ford.” Henry flipped the switch on the assembly line, and we all know what happened next.

By 1920, the Ford Motor Company was cranking out 2 million cars per year (up from 12,000 in 1910), and the Model T accounted for 57 percent of global market share. Conversely, only 90 manufacturers in America produced horse-drawn vehicles, down from 13,800 just thirty years earlier. While the internal combustion engine fitted to cars, tractors, and other wheeled vehicles was the main catalyst behind the leisurely departure of the horse, other technologies, including electric railcars and subways, also contributed to its urban demise.

The Metropolitan Railway in London opened the very first subterranean line in 1863, followed by the first true “deep-level tube,” or subway, in 1890. Budapest and Glasgow opened their first operational lines in 1896, and Boston unveiled the first American underground the following year. Built with the muscle of 1,500 horses, the New York City subway system opened its doors in 1904, accommodating 127,381 passengers on its first day. By 1919, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Philadelphia, Hamburg, Buenos Aires, and Madrid had joined the growing club of cities with subterranean travel. Modernization was tightening its perimeter on the last roundup of natural horsepower.

The slow death of the living machine: A modern tramline juxtaposes a team of horses dragging a hearse through the thick sludge of mud and manure on St. Clair Avenue, Toronto, 1908. (City of Toronto Archives)

In 1890 the American Street Railway Association conducted a series of comparative tests between horse-drawn and electrified trams. The data revealed that horses cost 3.72 cents per car mile compared with 2.37 cents per electric tram mile. “The report undoubtedly sped the disappearance of the horse,” states McShane, “since the presidents of virtually every large street railway were at the meeting.” Between 1888 and 1902, 97 percent of American horse-drawn tramlines and streetcars had been electrified, replacing over a hundred thousand traction horses. The rails of Toronto and Montreal were converted by 1894, and those of the United Kingdom went electric between 1901 and 1903. At the outbreak of war in 1914, London boasted the largest electric streetcar system in the world, and its conductors-turned-soldiers were traded for “conductorettes” doing their bit for the war effort.

While the conversion to electric trams lowered the cost per mile by 36 percent, automobile ownership produced even greater savings. In 1915 it was 38 percent cheaper to own and operate a car for five years (the average working life of an urban horse) than a horse and passenger wagon. Registered motor vehicles in France increased from 146,000 in 1915, to 677,000 in 1925, to 2.3 million by 1935, while those in Germany rose from 93,000, to 350,000, to 2 million over the same ten-year increments.

The Urbanization of Motorized America, 1880 to 1950[*12]

Year	Urban Population as Percent	Cities with 100,000+	Vehicle Registrations
1880	28.2	20
1890	35.1	28
1900	39.6	38	8,000
1910	45.6	50	468,500
1920	51.2	68	9,239,161
1930	56.1	93	26,749,853
1940	56.5	92	32,453,233
1950	64.0	100+	49,161,691

The convenience and associated industry of automobiles sped up the progression of suburbanization, encroaching on the habitat of the metropolitan workhorse. “Moreover, like many inhabitants of America’s rapidly growing urban centers,” writes Richard Bak in Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, “Henry was personally affronted by the ubiquitous horse manure and urine.” The automobile magnate did his part to clean up the streets while saving his Ford Motor Company, headquartered in Detroit, some overhead expenses.

Initial Ford factories in both the United States and England used manure as a supplemental fuel source, burning through two thousand pounds a week. These early “eco-friendly” practices lasted until 1939, when more efficient energy sources dropped in price. Horse droppings were used to manufacture the very machines that would depose the steadfast animal. Or framed another way: one contamination was used to produce another contaminator. Transportation has always had emission problems.

The motorized solutions that saved us from horse pollution in the twentieth century are now imperiling us with their own pollution in the twenty-first century. “In our attitudes about transportation and mobility, in our relationships to automobiles, and in our language of movement and power, horses are still with us,” observes Ann Norton Greene. “We must understand their role as the important, prime movers in the nineteenth century as we face the energy challenges of the twenty-first.”

Like cyclical fashion trends, hairstyles, and pants, what is old is now new. Toyota has been developing technology to “recycle,” or convert, the methane in manure into hydrogen to power fuel cells for electric cars. The goal is to be able to run a car for a year from the annual excrement of one animal. Numerous companies and pilot projects are also studying the potential of using this same manure synthesis as a large-scale biofuel alternative for industry.

However, in a 2002 scientific report published by the European Molecular Biology Organization, the author concedes that “the massive costs involved in establishing the infrastructure required to produce, store and distribute hydrogen means that its utilisation is still years away, despite the fact that car manufacturers in both Europe and the USA are already at an advanced state in the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.” More than twenty years later, this statement holds true.

The original shift from horse to car also completely overhauled our urban and rural infrastructure. Between 1910 and 1930, the number of workhorses powering urban America shrank by more than 90 percent to a mere three hundred thousand. “The horse,” Ford eulogized unsentimentally in 1929, “is gone.” As horses went, so too did their vast economic and visible presence.

The last horse-pulled engine of the FDNY, for example, made its final run in 1922 in front of thousands of spectators gathered to catch one last nostalgic glimpse of the horse era. That same year, fifty thousand Michiganders lined the streets of Motor City to bid farewell to its last horse-drawn fire brigade as it dashed into the history books down the car-parked streets of the automotive capital of the world. Horse-related stables, transit stops, water troughs, professions, and stacks of manure were traded for petrol pumps, repair shops, parking lots, bus stops, and other infrastructure and occupations supporting the surging number of automobiles and specialized vehicles on European and North American roads.

Changing of the guard: A horse-drawn firetruck (with water tower) races past a parked automobile, Washington, DC, 1913. (Library of Congress)

The US Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, or Good Roads Act, was the first legislation of its kind, providing $75 million for countrywide construction as well as subsidies for state and municipal projects. Further legislation to create a national transportation grid, including the Interstate Highway System, accelerated between 1921 and 1956 to meet the public and commercial demands of the motorized—and increasingly suburban—age. While the shift to cars was expedited by the fact that they used the same roads as horse-pulled vehicles, it is easy to forget that they shared these crowded streets for decades.

Growing up in Canada during the Leave It to Beaver baby boom generation of the 1950s, my parents remember the milkman with his horse and wagon disrupting their high-stakes road hockey games. For door-to-door deliveries, horses were still preferred. They memorized their routes by landmarks and knew instinctively when to halt and proceed without guidance. While the horse advanced the wagon unattended, the milkman walked back and forth from house to house, swapping full bottles for empties without having to get in and out of a car to continuously move it. “I recall that when I was a boy playing on the street in New York, our game had to be interrupted every little while to let a horse and wagon go by—milk wagon, iceman, vegetable man, or old clothes man,” echoes Jonathan Levin. “We took it for granted and resumed our game, usually punch ball or stick ball, after its passing.” By the time “Jerry Mathers as the Beaver” aired its series finale in 1963, the milkman was just another memory of bygone North Americana.

Like its urban brethren, the farm horse also began its slow trot to redundancy as tractors and other agrarian machines sank their teeth into mass-produced crops. Families, neighbors, and entire communities gathered in great excitement to welcome tractors and cars to rural America. “The arrival of the Model T in hinterland cities like Omaha and Denver,” notes Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley in Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903–2003, “was an event as eagerly anticipated as a Billy Sunday evangelical revival or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.” So too was the arrival of the Fordson tractor in 1917.

Having cornered the automobile market, Henry Ford sought to apply the same manufacturing and marketing principles to tractors. “I suspected that much might be done in a better way,” he said, evoking his childhood on the farm. “I have followed many a weary mile behind a plow, and I know the drudgery of it.” The first gas-powered tractor was the Hart-Parr, introduced in 1903. Its immense size and cost, crawling speed, and mechanical issues made it impractical for most farmers, and it sold poorly in its first year—a total of fifteen. One of these forlorn fourteen-thousand-pound behemoths is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. It is immediately obvious why this machine was a commercial failure.

When the Ford Fordson, a lightweight, relatively small, and inexpensive gas tractor, was unveiled in 1917, there were fewer than eighty thousand tractors on US farms, many of them idle or inoperable steam engines. Although mechanically compromised, by 1921, three hundred thousand Fordson tractors were owned by American farmers. It quickly forced other manufacturers to drop out of the competition. Two years later, Ford controlled 76 percent of American tractor sales.

In 1924 the International Harvester Company one-upped Ford by releasing the Farmall, a sturdier “all-purpose” (hence the name) tractor that could plow, furrow, and cultivate. Set on a raised chassis, it could drive across most fields without damaging the crops. When the Fordson was scrapped from US production in 1928, the Farmall comprised 60 percent of the tractor market.

Continuous improvements to more economical and technical farming machines allied to innovations in hybridization, fertilizers, and pesticides instigated the era of industrial farming known as the Green (or Third) Agricultural Revolution. Like its Neolithic and medieval predecessors, this explosive agrarian transformation also led to unbridled—and unprecedented, by comparison—population growth. The number of people on the planet jumped from 1.9 billion in 1920 to 7.8 billion in 2020. An International Harvester advertisement extolled the virtues of this new age, declaring that “Every Farm Is a Factory.”

Horses, Mules, Tractors, Trucks, and Cars on American Farms, 1870 to 1950 (millions)[*13]

Year	Horses	Mules	Equine Total	Tractors	Trucks	Cars
1870	7.6	1.2	8.8
1880	10.9	1.9	12.8
1890	15.7	2.3	18.0
1900	17.9	3.1	21.0
1910	20.0	4.2	24.2
1915	21.5	5.1	26.6
1920	20.1	5.7	25.8	0.25	0.14	2.1
1930	13.7	5.4	19.1	0.92	0.91	4.1
1940	10.4	4.0	14.4	1.6	1.0	4.1
1950	5.4	2.2	7.6	3.6	2.2	4.2

Globally, between 1910 and 1970, working farm horses declined by more than 90 percent, while human labor fell by 70 percent. Between 1920 and 1945, in the aggregate, each tractor displaced four working horses. “Horses, you see, belong to the vanished agricultural past,” wrote the futuristic novelist George Orwell in 1937, “and all sentiment for the past carries with it a vague smell of heresy.”

In the United States, the tractor put twenty million farm horses out of work but freed up eighty-eight million acres of land to yield human consumables rather than horse feed. This equates to roughly 25 percent of the nation’s entire crop area. Across the United Kingdom and its commonwealth of empire, including Canada and Australia, some fifteen million acres shifted away from horse fodder.

As a result, the average consumer now had access to a far greater selection of cheaper foods than ever before. The advent of mechanized farming within an accessible motorized society produced changes to everyday diets. In 1947, for example, more than seven million transport trucks hauled foodstuffs across an expanding grid of US roadways. The consumption of American table staples—potatoes, turnips, onions, carrots, corn, and cabbage—which were grown locally and easily stored in cold cellars, dropped by 25 percent between 1920 and 1945. The shelves of neighborhood supermarkets began to resemble those of my local Safeway.

Tractors by Continent, 1920 to 1990 (thousands)[*14]

Region	1920	1930	1939	1950	1961	1970	1980	1990
N. and C. America	294	1,030	1,576	4,220	5,326	6,038	5,606	5,841
S. America			17	70	297	465	880	1,186
Europe		130	270	990	3,698	6,077	8,454	10,356
Soviet Union		78	440	430	1,212	1,978	2,646	2,609
Asia				35	200	783	3,475	5,599
Africa			6	95	235	334	439	532
Oceania				142	351	428	427	403
WORLD TOTAL				5,552	11,318	16,102	21,932	26,526

With its hegemony over steel and petroleum production, the relatively rapid American ascent to mechanized industrial agriculture was somewhat of an anomaly. “Agricultural motomechanization began to develop in the interwar period,” state Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart in A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis. “But it is necessary to emphasize that, in 1945, animal traction was still overwhelmingly prominent in most industrialized countries, and motomechanization was deployed in all these countries only after World War Two.”

While international aggression stimulated mechanization on and off the battlefield, for its deadly encore, the horse endured two final whirlwinds of war. The volatile German kaiser from 1888 to 1918, Wilhelm II, who was prone to mercurial outbursts and crippling depression, maintained that mechanization was “a temporary phenomenon,” insisting that the future still belonged to the horse. Only after their immeasurable, involuntary sacrifice during the World Wars were horses consigned globally to what former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has called “the roadkill of history.”

The twentieth century marked both the rise and fall of the Horse Age. As Ulrich Raulff explains: “The last century of the era of the horse witnessed not only the exodus of the horse from human history, but also its historical climax: never before had humanity been as heavily dependent on horses as when Benz and Daimler’s first internal combustion engines began rattling away…. [T]his changeover was a considerably drawn-out process: the two world wars prompted a mercilessly heavy reliance on horses and it was only after the middle of the century that traction power was cheap enough to lead to a dramatic decline in horse numbers.” After five millennia of unbroken immortal combat, the last military hoorah of the horse was, unfortunately, also the most destructive.

Skip Notes

*1 Gotham, a nickname for New York City, was first used in 1807 by author Washington Irving, known for the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with its enduring character the Headless Horseman.

*2 This is roughly the combined weight of your favorite NFL football team, the Statue of Liberty, one Blue Whale, the total amount of gold mined in South Africa in a year, and all the garbage produced in Baltimore in a day.

*3 McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century, 16; US Census Bureau, 1900.

*4 The ten-story, 138-foot-tall Home Insurance Building opened in Chicago in 1885.

*5 Omnibus means “for all” in Latin, as in justitia omnibus (“justice for all”).

*6 Cab is short for the French cabriolet, a light, two-wheeled carriage drawn by a single horse.

*7 Highly effective vaccines are now available to combat most strains of equine influenza.

*8 During this severe economic depression from 1873 to 1896, the British lost ground to Germany (which amassed the most dynamic economic and industrial growth seen in the past two hundred years) in most commercial portfolios. Between 1870 and 1912 Britain’s total share of global trade was slashed from 32 percent to 14 percent, iron output fell from 50 percent of the world’s share to 12 percent, while copper decreased from 32 percent to 13 percent. Even coal production, the lifeblood of Pax Britannica and the propulsion behind the assembly of her mighty empire, was threatened. By 1910, German coal output equaled that of the United Kingdom. German steel production increased tenfold between 1880 and 1900. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany was smelting twice the amount of pig iron as British foundries. Domestic agriculture accounted for 95 percent of German consumption, whereas Britain imported 58 percent of its daily per capita caloric intake.

*9 US Bureau of Labor Statistics; US Census Bureau; US Department of Agriculture; US Energy Information Administration; Eric Foner, Kathleen DuVal, and Lisa McGirr, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 7th ed., vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Seagull, 2022), 608.

*10 Today there are two common definitions of horsepower: mechanical (or imperial), which is 745.7 watts, and metric, which is 735.5 watts. One human can exert 1.2 horsepower; a single horse, 15 horsepower.

*11 The word car evolved from the Proto-Indo-European *ḱr̥sós (wagon) and *kwékwlos (wheel or circle).

*12 US Census Bureau; US Department of Transportation; Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Research Library

*13 US Department of Agriculture, Census 1954. The number of donkeys employed on farms peaked in 1910 at a mere 106,000. This table does not include specialized motorized farming equipment such as combines, bailers, brooders, grinders, pickers, and milking machines.

*14 From Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World, 48.