An outstanding example of this can be found in London in the final years of the nineteenth century. By 1894 the British capital, now the largest city on Earth, confronted a crisis of epic proportions. Having survived the threat of invasion for almost a millennium, be it the Spanish Armada or Napoleon’s Revolutionary Army, an unexpected foe now imperilled the city – horse shit. The ‘Horse Manure Crisis’, as it was termed by The Times that year, struck fear into the hearts of Londoners who soon expected their city to be so covered in faeces that its streets would resemble the canals of Venice.
Such a threat had been a long time in the making. Over the preceding century London’s population had quadrupled, and it had no rival in industry, social complexity or geographical spread, with New York only surpassing it on each measure by the early 1920s.
This success was what precipitated the 1894 crisis. London was at the leading edge of trends resulting from the Second Disruption, especially rapid population growth – as fewer infants and children died and life expectancy, after a generation, began to increase. This, combined with rapid urbanisation, began to create major infrastructural problems in housing, transport and sanitation.
But while the Second Disruption meant more people, more trade and more work, a vital piece of technology remained from the pre-steam era: the horse. Even as late as the 1890s – when some of London’s streets had electric lights – there were around 11,000 hansom cabs in the city, as well as several thousand horse-drawn buses, each employing twelve large animals. That meant a staggering 50,000 horses transporting people around the city every day, not to mention the many more horse-drawn carts and drays delivering goods. The sheer number of animals, in addition to their size, meant London’s streets were covered by at least 1.5 million pounds of horse manure every day.
Full Automation
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