Which is why when The Times speculated in 1894 about the city a half century thereafter it concluded, ‘In fifty years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.’ Such a conclusion seemed reasonable – after all, cities of this kind had never existed before and they appeared to be unsustainable. Even an urban studies conference convened specifically to discuss the issue some four years later, failed to arrive at any solutions.
And yet we now know such predictions never came to pass. The technologies of the internal combustion engine and electricity, already in evidence as The Times penned its obituary for the world’s leading experiment in urban living, meant cars, buses and electric trams replaced the horse-drawn cart and carriage. By 1912, a seemingly insurmountable problem had been solved. In every major city horses were being replaced with motorised vehicles. What looked like a secular problem was merely a hangover of the First Disruption coming up against the birth pangs of the Second.
Peak Human
While the Second Disruption began to unfold in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the date of The Times prognostication – 1894 – makes clear just how long it took for many of its innovations to permeate across society.
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