Horses would be worse
12/12/2018
"For a long time now, the automobile has been unjustly scolded and maligned. They are blamed for polluting the air, clogging the roads, worsening public health, increasing the general noise level and even killing people and animals. To quote just some of the charges. The truth is that without the invention and now widespread existence of the automobile, things would have turned out differently, but also and far worse.
Man would have remained dependent on the horse for his personal individual transportation. And no one can really imagine where that would have led .
Decades ago, we read in the newspapers that unsuspecting walkers were irritated, injured and even killed by horse-drawn vehicles traveling at excessive speeds. To illustrate a typical case from the year 1900, exactly seven decades ago, I quote a press report from that time:
" ... the master baker Fritz Löhmann from Linden was convicted of negligent homicide because he had given his offspring the key to the horse stable. The frail nine-year-old boy ran over the invalid Stoppel with his horse and cart, who died as a result."
And this happened in extremely light traffic, where the invalid Stoppel should have been able to avoid the approaching vehicle or become aware of it in time due to the clearly audible noise.
And so the question arises as to how the noise would have developed if everyone who drives an automobile today came along in a horse-drawn carriage, regardless of whether it was a truck, carriage, cab, hackney carriage, single, double or multi-horse carriage - and if everyone who rolls along on a two-wheeler today, from a moped to a scooter to a Harley, came along on a horse, then the investigation of the question is formally appropriate. ..."
You can tell from the language that this text cannot be entirely new. In fact, Fritz B. Busch wrote it almost 50 years ago in the summer of 1970. His comparison of the automobile with the horse runs for a total of four pages and always makes you smile. In 1970, Busch could hardly have foreseen what the world would look like 50 years later. However, hardly anyone today would have thought of recalling the horse as a general means of transportation.
The entire four-page column from Auto Motor und Sport 17/1970can of course be found in our magazine archive.
And while searching for suitable pictures on the subject in our photo archive, we noticed how many car manufacturers, from Mercedes-Benz and Citroën to Facel Vega, Alfa Romeo, Porsche and Ford, had their vehicles photographed with horses ...
