Caleb Crain, keeper of the blog with the best name ever, points me to his review of a book on the horse in nineteenth-century America from the New York Times Book Review. It sounds really interesting:
In “Horses at Work,” Ann Norton Greene describes Philadelphia at a standstill: “Streetcar companies suspended service; undelivered freight accumulated at wharves and railroad depots; consumers lacked milk, ice and groceries; saloons lacked beer; work halted at construction sites, brickyards and factories; and city governments curtailed fire protection and garbage collection.” The disaster prompted an appreciation of the work done by horses, which had been somewhat overshadowed by the more voguish pursuit of steam power, and The Nation went so far as to publish an essay with the Matthew Arnoldian title “The Position of the Horse in Modern Society.” Then as now, many had the idea that over the course of the 19th century the steam engine was fated to replace the horse. To the contrary, the Nation essayist asserted, “our dependence on the horse has grown almost pari passu with our dependence on steam.”
To bolster that claim with facts is more or less the burden of Greene’s book.
I’m buying the book, but I don’t quite understand why this is a subject for debate. For example, something about this explanation seems way too complicated:
So why didn’t steam power replace horsepower? The answer is that it did, but not in all circumstances. To cross long distances in early America, one bought a stagecoach ticket and was dragged at a speed of 10 to 12 miles an hour over rutted and uneven roads by teams of horses, one team relaying another along the route, in an experience that Frances Trollope once described as being “tossed about like a few potatoes in a wheelbarrow.” Railroads improved on this, because rails were smooth and because steam-powered locomotives were more efficient than horses over distances longer than 15 miles. But horses were more efficient at start-and-stop traveling, and locomotives weren’t welcome in cities, because they threw off sparks that set fires and because with some regularity they exploded. Horses therefore often pulled trains once they reached city lines. Because railroads were built by competing private companies, a passenger who wanted to change trains sometimes had to get to a depot on the other side of town. Only a horse or shank’s pony could take him there. Most important, while railroads put a large number of goods and people into motion, they delivered to the depot and no further. For the last mile, animal power was the only option in the 19th century.
It sounds to me as if Greene spent too much time studying horses, and not enough studying steam engines. In the 19th Century, steam engines were (to put it mildly) very, very large. Anyone who doubts this should go see the energy display in London’s Science Museum where they have this long display of steam engines starting with Newcomen’s and going on into the nineteenth century. As the engine evolved it got smaller and more powerful (kind of like a microchip), but never all that much smaller until around the 1890s. Here, for example, is the breakthrough engine of the 1876 Centennial Exhibit:
George Corliss invented the prototype of his famed Corliss Engine in the late-1840s. It took 25 years to get to the one in this picture, the wonder of its age because of its fuel efficiency. How is that going to compete with a horse for drawing a cart when its five times as big as the cart itself?
Thinking off the top of my head, the better explanation is likely that horses became more important in nineteenth century America because the country was growing – urbanizing, moving west, etc. The steam engine and the horse both provided energy, but they served different needs. There was no relationship between the rise of steam power and the demand for horse power until a reliable steam engine could fit inside a car. Automotive power got complicated very quickly, but that’s a subject for a post on a whole different book review.
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