By the early 1910s, the number of cars had surpassed the number of strollers, but their use continued well into the 1920s and even the 1930s in secluded places. In the late 1910s, cities became inhospitable to poor horses. Slippery asphalt was replacing dirt roads, neighborhoods began to ban stables, and producers opted for imported fertilizer instead of manure. As horses disappeared, so did the many jobs that relied on equine economy.
In 1890, there were 13,800 companies in the United States dedicated to the construction of horse-drawn carriages. In 1920, there were only 90 of those companies left. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution caused more goods to be produced and distributed, which in turn increased the demand for horses to transport goods and people. In the United States alone, horses in urban areas outnumbered people by three to one in the 1890s.
This resulted in a large amount of manure, whose disposal literally became an increasing problem. Any vacant lot became a dump for horse manure, and the piles grew bigger than the four-story buildings. As one historian has commented, “in 1870 all families in the United States were directly or indirectly dependent on horses. This dependence became evident in the fall of 1872, when a serious strain of equine influenza spread throughout the Northeastern United States.
There was nothing like horse disease to show that such an important part of the American economy and its jobs revolved around horses. As one author has pointed out, what seems evident today—the transition from horses to cars—was, in many ways, much less than inevitable. While the inventors were playing with the engines of the future, today they relied on horses to do the heavy daily work, pulling trams, carriages, delivery cars, brewery cars, urban vehicles and buses. However, around the turn of the century, the popularity of motor vehicles (colloquially referred to as horseless carriages) began to grow.
However, advances in equipment and in the fire station itself, including sliding poles, electrical alarms, and quick-attached horse collars, finally allowed horses to relieve volunteers of their tasks of carrying hoses by hand. Car enthusiasts dreamed of a horse-free city with “clean, dust-free and odorless streets, with lightweight vehicles with rubber tires that moved quickly and silently through their gentle extension, would eliminate much of the nervousness, distraction and tension of modern metropolitan life.” At the current pace, it was projected that the streets of London would be completely buried under nine feet of horse manure in 50 years, so in 1898, urban planners held an international planning conference in New York City. While grazing the legendary fire horse was a practical matter, progress, as the Brooklyn Eagle wrote, had a profound impact on the city's culture. The city even ended its horse-drawn public transportation services in favor of motorized ones, as its residents switched from horses to cars.
He began by asking city legislators for a series of new laws, such as requiring horse owners to keep their animals in stables overnight instead of leaving them on the street. In fact, horses caused so many sanitation problems in large cities that urban planners were desperate to find a solution. Pollution caused by internal combustion engines and exhaust gases damaged air quality in cities such as London and New York, but it was still preferable to the mess and smell of horses.
