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The moments. Lily Kim with the gold medal flex. The stars. Ilya Malinan. Out of this world.
The spectacle from beautiful northern Italy with very special guests every night of the Olipix. Experience the world's biggest show. Prime time in Milan tonight, 8-7 Central on NBC and Peacock. Hello, Malcolm Gladwell here. We're here in New York City with T-Mobile for Business, recording another episode of Revisionist History about how 5G network slicing strengthens trust and connections across worldwide industries.
Slicing can be used for so many different things. We're here with our friends from CNN, from Siemens Energy. The ways that it can be used, frankly, are limitless and are really, really built to think through how can T-Mobile understand the pain points that our customers have, smash those pain points, and help you deliver very specific outcomes. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Up Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies.
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Go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart. And we continue with our American stories. Up next, a story from Miles C. Collier. Founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida.
A former race car driver, and an expert on all things transportation. Heck. All things automotive. Today, Miles shares with us the story of why cars might have saved the city. from the four-legged beasts known as horses.
What people don't realize is we think of the Industrial Revolution and we think of the advent of steam and it's often described as the age of steam as well as possibly the age of electricity because street trolley cars and electric light bulbs and things were all invented in the late 19th century. But in fact, if you look at the data, That period was really the age of the horse. The horse was. Omnipresent, the horse was critical for the working out of modern industrialized society.
Now, why is that? Because if we want to think about steam and electricity as being wholesale forms of energy, There were no retail sources other than the horse, so. a train load of goods could arrive at the station of a city, and it came over hundreds of miles and it was hundreds of tons of stuff. But then you had the problem of getting it from the depot to the doorstep. And that required individualized or retail transportation to do it, and there was no other retail transportation other than the horse.
So it's Counterintuitive, but as steam and electricity became More and more prevalent in the 1880s and 90s and 1900s and 1910s. the population of horses living in the urban fabric increased concomitantly, totally counterintuitive. The highest population of working horses in the United States was in 1910. There were 26 million working horses. And I'm not talking about my friend Flick sticking his head over the fence that you give two cubes of sugar to.
I'm talking about horses that lived in high-rise stables in the middle of the urban fabric and that were required to keep society going. And the impact. that horses had on society was overwhelming and because of their presence, viewed in general by society as incredibly damaging, destructive, environmentally destructive, dangerous to life and limb, bad for human morality, and so on and so on. In other words, the horse was as vilified in 1910 as the automobile is today. That I found absolutely fascinating.
Now let's consider one of the most impactful aspects of the horse economy, and that was if you have 26 million working horses. And boy, did they work. They were viewed by the public in those days as biological machines.
Okay, which is just we shudder to think of that. But they were not viewed as being sentient, they were not viewed as having feelings, they were literally biological machines. And each and every individual biological machine required five acres. of fodder producing agricultural land in order to be sustained for one year. Let's do the math.
26 million times 5 is 130 million acres under cultivation to just support the biological machine, the horse, working in cities. What was the manifestation of that? Look at photographs of New England in the 1890s and 1900s, and you will see that the green hills of Vermont or the white hills of New Hampshire haven't got a tree on them anywhere. And if you go there today, you walk in the woods. And you can go way deep in the woods, and all of a sudden, you'll come across a stone wall.
Well, those are the stone walls that bounded the fields that were necessary to support the horse.
So, one of the major impacts of the horse in the late 19th century was the denudation of forests throughout the world. or at least around the developed world. and with all of the negative impacts that has. Porsches obviously defecated and urinated all over the streets. And indeed, they also had the bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or came to the end of their, you know, just totally exhausted.
So it was a. Living in the city with horses cheek by jowls meant that the infestation of rats, flies, sparrows, fleas, And all kinds of noxious vermin was ever-present. Yeah. Yeah, one of the problems back in the day was tetanus.
Okay, which comes from bacteria that would inhabit the gut of horses and then there would be horseshoe nails that would come out and people would get scratched or cut by something that was. contaminated with tetanus bacteria, and the next thing you know, lock jaw, as it was called in the day, was a real problem. But it was just an urban sanitation problem, and the only thing that they had to clean up All those waste products was more horses pulling more wagons.
Now, of course, you know, you hang bags behind the horse and all that kind of stuff, and it all helps a little bit. But if we think of it as the 19th and early 20th centuries equivalent to carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen, there's nothing you can do about it. One early commentator remarked that. I don't know where he got these numbers, but something to the effect that 60 or 70% of all the dust that you inhale on urban streets is dried horse manure. Oh, thank you very much.
That sounds pretty fun.
So, you know, as I say, the automobile was seen as a major public health benefit. Tetanus was going to go away. You weren't going to be breathing dried horse manure. The car gave off virtually no noxious fumes whatsoever. It was silent.
It didn't start and startle and panic. It was just seen as a, in fact, it was seen as a major health benefit for the simple reason that you could take it and go out to the countryside. and breathe all that wonderful ozone out there and you know enjoy the sunshine and And so it makes sense that the horse was not looked at as a great thing. And as I say, the parallel to the automobile I find rather fascinating. And what we take from that is: if we are sufficiently dependent on a technology.
that it becomes overwhelming. And there are 1.4 billion automobiles operating in the world today. When that technology becomes overwhelming, of course it has negative influences. What the heck did you think was going to happen?
So yes, the automobile has all kinds of negatives. But interestingly, in 1900, it was seen as a savior. It was seen as reducing urban noise. No more iron tires, clip-clop of iron horseshoes on cobblestone streets, no groaning of non-ball-bearing axles on wagons, no cracking of whips, no screaming of teamsters. All was going to be silent with this new biddable servant that never started at an umbrella or at a blowing sheet of newspaper.
And the problem was back in those days, horses are flight animals, and they will startle and they will run away. Can you imagine a horse dragging a carriage? Running away in full-blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during rush hour. How many people died? Lots.
So the the horse was a major, major problem and the automobile was a major, major savior. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Miles Collier, founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida. He's a former race car driver and an expert on all things transportation, all things automotive. And what a beautiful story about change and about technological and industrial change.
Who would have thought in the beginning of the 20th century that our biggest problem was waste and problems that came from the horse? But indeed, it was true, and all of that acreage you needed in order to supply the horse with, well, just his daily sustenance. And in comes the automobile to end lots of the disease that got spread from all of that horse manure. and all of that noise and all of that sound. And now today, 1.4 billion automobiles comes with its own set of problems.
Whatever the next advance is, will come with its. That's the one thing we've learned from all of this. The story of how the automobile saved our cities from horses. Here on Our American Stories. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up?
Then check out Up Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies. This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of. It's commercial free. Stream anywhere.
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