The great manure crisis of 1894 has become a half-joking reference to the very serious public health challenge that big cities around the world faced near the end of the 19th century.
A growing reliance on horse power meant the smell, disease and discomfort of manure that wasn’t being removed fast enough. Exactly because this feels so archaic a problem neatly conveys how much we relied on horses, and then how dramatically we replaced them with mechanical labor. Yet the love persists.
This is from Timothy Winegard’s summer 2024 book The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity. It’s thicker, denser and at at times more lyrical than I expected. It’s certainly a new approach to the sweep of history. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Horses belonged, and belong, to all human beings
- Democratic and transformed the world
- In 1972, Alfred Crosby introduced the idea of “the Colombian exchange”: this author notes horses made it possible
- First we ate and drank horse milk and only later we rode them
- A horse a horse my kingdom for a horse : Richard III
- Bone wars and Huxley used horses to try to track early evolution — but initially couldn’t square Europe and new world fossils
- “The horse was a gift from North America to the rest of the world.” After Pangea broke apart they evolved in North America
- In Tanzania, the “footprint tuff” dig has first hominid and horse together (Hopparion) – 3.6m years ago
- Carl Sandburg: I am the grass I cover all; I am the grass. Let me work
- How are horses so muscular if they’re only grass eaters? Their teeth evolved to eat grass and their eyes evolved to let them eat without being eaten
- “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 200,000 urban horses and mules”
- Great manure crisis of 1894
- Fire insurance map from 1894 marks 175 horse stables within 130 city blocks
- Omni buses pulled by horses
- Bicycles (dandy horse!) added to congestion but couldn’t replace horses because of roads — 1880s bicycle craze
- Between 1890-1900, 750k annual horse drawn traffic accidents causing injury or death across United States. ” serious traffic injuries were 10 times greater than modern automobile levels, with death rates almost double. In 1900, for instance, horse accidents killed one out of every 17,000 New Yorkers. A century later, car accidents killed one out of every 30,000.”
- London, then Boston and NYC, and then by 1919 Paris, Berlin, Philadelphia, Athens and Madrid, buenos Aires all had subways — declining use of horses
- 1920, ford 2m cars – 12k in 1910
- The horse made its Olympic debut in 680 BC in chariot races
- “There is something about the outside of Horse that is good for the inside of a man” Winston Churchill
