When I moved to London, in the mid-1980s, one of my first purchases was a black and white copy of the A-to-Z, or, to use the full name, the Geographers’ A-Z Street Atlas for London. This invaluable book comprised page after page of maps of the streets of London, showing also the rail and tube stations, together with the major buildings and monuments, and included an alphabetical street index. So long as you knew the address of a place in London you could use the A-to-Z to find your way there without much risk of getting lost. Soon, in addition, I acquired a small pocket-sized version with larger-scale colour maps, that covered the centre of the city, and a decade later I added a large format hardback with maps for the whole city and outer suburbs, which I kept in my newly acquired car.
Nowadays I use physical maps only when I am out in the countryside, where an Ordnance Survey sheet provides rich detail, helping me to navigate off-road walking routes. In London, I use a map app on my phone, which not only tells me exactly where I am, but also the most efficient way to travel to my destination. When I open my phone map, it offers me a range of transport options, for example, whether I prefer to use the underground, the overground, or national rail services, or buses, and I can use a filter to select the cheapest option, or the route with the least walking. For some journeys, I might be offered information about trams or river taxis. When I decide to walk, the app suggests two or three different routes and for each it gives me an estimated time for the trip. There are also options for car drivers and for cyclists.
The map app is a better piece of technology that the physical book of maps, and it is no surprise that most people in London use their phones to navigate the city. Like all technologies, it is imperfect: if you lose your signal or your battery runs out, you risk getting lost. But then, it was also possible to leave your copy of the A-to-Z on the bus or the tube, and find yourself in a part of London you had never visited before, without your trusty guidebook. We all switched to using online maps because they are quicker, easier to use, and they update regularly to take account of changes to London’s streets and transport services. And yet … the travel menu on my app is not as comprehensive as it might be, for there is nothing at all about travelling by horse.
For hundreds of years, horses were used extensively for travel, industry, and agriculture. As the industrial revolution began to transform first Britain and then the rest of Europe and America, the use of horses increased, since there was more work to do and greater wealth available to invest in work-animals. The rapid growth of the canal network in England in the late eighteenth century led to higher demand for horses, both during construction and, later, towing canal boats. In agriculture, it was only in the late nineteenth century that steam powered machines became the dominant means for gathering the harvest in Britain (although much later elsewhere: it is estimated that in the US, there were only 1,000 tractors in use on farms in 1914, and across Europe, horses provided the majority of the traction in agriculture at late as 1950). The number of horses in Britain doubled between 1700 and 1850, until there were approximately eight horses for every hundred humans, peaking at 3 million horses in 1900.
The horse was the principal means of transport in rural areas, between cities, and – at least for the wealthy elites – within cities too. Those without access to a horse moved around on foot. Horse drawn carriages and coaches were widespread throughout the nineteenth century – in 1835 there were 50 coaches a day heading from London to Brighton – but inter-city travel was gradually made much easier by the growth of the railway network, the great travel innovation of that century. Steam engines reduced travel time and carried many more people, making them superior in economic terms. However, once a passenger arrived at the rail terminus of a major city, they had to abandon modern technology and revert to a horse drawn carriage or their own legs. City streets were not readily amenable to the laying of rail tracks for trams or street-cars so the old technology remained in place. When Schopenhauer wrote his short essay On Noise and Sound in 1851, his greatest complaint was the disruption to his thought process caused by drovers and coach-drivers cracking their whips in the street outside his house.
Eventually, the urban horse was replaced not by the steam train but by the petrol engine. From the 1910s onwards, the rapid development of motor technology allowed for the production of cheaper cars, which were faster, more comfortable, and more obviously modern than riding on a horse or in a horse drawn carriage. In the final volume of Proust’s novel, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, many of the wealthy elite still preferred their elegant carriages to the noisy new automobiles, but such snobbery did not survive for long. From the 1920s onwards, city roads were smoothed by cement or tarmac, and widened to allow cars to pass each other safely. Inner-city transport finally caught up with inter-city transport, after lagging behind for a century. Nowadays, travellers take a train, a bus, or a car, and the horse has become a symbol of luxury and leisure rather than of labour. Schopenhauer would, no doubt, still be complaining that street noise was disrupting his thinking, but the cracking of whips would no longer be his main problem.
The story of the replacement of the horse, in both agriculture and transport, by first steam and later the petrol engine is hardly news. Most of the data quoted above came from the German historian Jürgen Osterhammel’s book, The Transformation of the World: A global history of the nineteenth century, which was published in 2009, and draws on sources written over the past fifty years. We have long known that trains, tractors, and cars are far more efficient than horse-power, and no thoughtful person thinks that society as a whole should go back to the pre-mechanised way of life (even if a few eccentric individuals might choose to live that way). What is surprising is not that the horse became redundant as a work animal, but that the process took so long. Despite clear evidence that trains and cars were quicker and more widely accessible, despite the obvious productivity gains from using machines in agriculture, the transition from the equine to the engine took more than a century.
There are many reasons for the slow pace of change, but I do not plan to discuss these in detail here, because my more important point is this: however long it took, nowadays no sensible person thinks it was a mistake to replace horses with trains, tractors, and cars. Better for us, better for the horse, better all round. So the interesting question, for us today, now that the petrol engine – the great innovative technology of the twentieth century – has reached the end of its economically valuable life, how do we accelerate the transition from petrol to electric, and avoid wasting a century before moving to a better technology. Since this change is all about the power source for the engine it should be easy: we don’t need to build new railway tracks and asphalt the roads, because they are already there; we only need to install electric charging points and boost the capacity of grid. These challenges are ridiculously modest by comparison with those facing the nascent railway and motor-car industries.
I would have expected, therefore, that the smart people in business, the innovators and engineers, and the heads of banks and financial firms, would be in the vanguard of change. Think how much money there is to be made: every driver in the world needs a new and different car, every train company needs to replenish its stock of locomotives, every haulage firm needs a new fleet of lorries and vans, every farmer needs to purchase a new suite of machinery, and electricity generating companies need new equipment to allow them vastly to increase their capacity to produce, store, and distribute energy. In addition, since there is always money to be made in rubbish-management, there is the task of collecting and disassembling millions of obsolete machines, so that their precious constituent materials can be recycled into something more useful. So much to do, so much money to be made.
It puzzles me, therefore, that the next industrial revolution is being cheered on most loudly by hippies, anarchists, academics, public policy intellectuals, activists school students, the co-operative movement, allotment owners, social businesses, artists and poets, and, no doubt, a healthy number of horse-loving countryfolk. Meanwhile, the leaders of business and finance, who stand to gain the most in money terms from this revolution, are trying their best to delay it by another decade or more, while they focus on making a few miserable dollars more out of technology that is rapidly approaching obsolescence. (Their spare time, no doubt, is devoted to working out where to relocate to lower their tax bills.)
Of course, there were those who said that trains would never catch on, that motor cars were a fad, that there was nothing so fine as travelling in a well-sprung horse-drawn coach. Nowadays we laugh at them, and deservedly so, as fools who could not see the possibility of a better future. In a hundred years, people will look back at us and wonder why we spent decades delaying the transition to better technology, and they will learn that it was our business and finance leaders who, despite knowing the possibility of a better future, and despite all the profits to be made, refused to embrace it. Should we laugh at them or should we cry?
Next time someone in business or finance tells you we should continue to invest in oil and gas, be sure to ask them if they ride a horse to work.