I was amused to read an article by Stephen Davies the academic director at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. The article said that about a hundred years ago social commentators were complaining that life had become desperate about the great horse-manure crisis. Davies noted that in the Times of London in 1894, it was estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure!
In the nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily needs. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses.
The problem was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Thus, the streets in those times were covered by horse manure which attracted flies, which when dried was blown everywhere.
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
The problem was overwhelming. The larger and richer a city became, the more horses it needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. As well, these horses had to be stabled, using up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
The great crisis vanished within three years of the conference when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. Even though horses were a problem, in the background inventors and entrepreneurs such as Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford were developing a solution. The price of horse-drawn transport rose steadily along with the cost of feeding and housing horses…this created strong incentives for people to find alternatives.
This story points out the difficulty of predicting the future. It also inspires hope. We humans are such creative beings that I am sure solutions to some of our greatest problems already exists and we are on the cusp of embracing them.
Live! Laugh! Love! Hope!
