For the far-reaching impacts of horse pollution, check out The Horse & the Urban Environment.
According to the New York State Auctioneers Association:
Keep in mind that this was when New York City consisted only of Manhattan and not the outer boroughs.
Right on.
We would have some real kick arse steam engines, maybe fuel cells, or god knows what other advanced power source that didn’t rely in internal combustion. ICE have the advantage of decades of R&D behind them, put that same effort behind any other technology and good things would happen.
If internal combustion engines were impossible, we’d have really good steam cars. Probably they wouldn’t be as good as our current IC cars, but they’d certainly be better than horse-drawn carriages. Or we could have serviceable electric cars, probably not nearly as high performance as our IC cars, but they’d get us around.
As of 2007 I think we’d see about the same number of horses in NYC as we see today. There would probably be more subways and commuter trains and trolleys in most cities and fewer busses and personal cars, but virtually no horses.
If we assume that both steam engines AND IC engines are impossible then the point of departure would be much earlier than 1880s New York because New York city couldn’t have existed in the same way in 1880 without steam trains. Without steam engines and trains I don’t think we’d ever have electric cars because those electric cars would have to be produced by factories driven by steam engines. And electrical generators are just steam engines that power generators, without the steam engines no electricity, except a small amount of hydro, wind, or tidal electric power.
So…the prospect of a modern city with horses replacing cars also requires that horses replace trains and steam engines. And without steam engines the industrial revolution would never have happened. And thus a “modern city” is impossible. And New York would be a city of a few hundred thousand people, the ports would be thick with sailing ships, and we’d live more or less like they did back in 1776, with a similar population density, and most people would work in agriculture and be yeoman farmers, or serfs, or slaves.
Just picking up on the discussion of the relative safeties of steam vs internal combustion engines:
One of the safety advantages with an IC engine is its complexity. Or, to turn it around, one of the dangers of a steam engine is its simplicity.
If an IC engine is poorly maintained, it’s probably going to fail to do its job long before there’s any danger, since it relies on very precise control of things like fuel/air mixture, cylinder pressure, high-voltage electrical integrity and so on. Long before your Ford engine decays enough to pour large quantities of neat petrol onto spark-plugs (or something equally daft) it will have failed to rotate and you’re on the phone to a mechanic to complain about the thing not starting up, losing power or making knocking sounds.
A steam engine, on the other hand, is extremely robust. They can go on working right up until that valve on the boiler clogs up, or a joint comes apart, and then BINGO! Fatalities!
I agree that we’d have a different mix of transportation if we relied on steam and electric cars. Public transportation would be a much larger part of the mix, we’d probably have more density, and perhaps we wouldn’t have the current default of one car per person, cars would be more expensive and more dangerous.
But we’d still be using cars and trucks and trains and canals and busses and taxis and bicycles rather than horses. Heck, modern bicycles alone would kill off most urban personal transport use of horses. Horses might be used to pull heavy loads, but bicycles and bicycle rickshaws would kill the horse drawn carraige.
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but there seems to be an unnecessarily disparaging undercurrent regarding steam engines. In fact, external combustion engines have some significant advantages, including clean burning (granted, CO2 but not monoxides etc.) and a “flat power curve” (effectively the same power at any RPM). “Blowing a boiler” was most uncommon and typically resulted from “locking down the stops” (over-riding the pressure relief valves), commonly when racing. This was a big problem with Mississippi steamboat racers, according to that famous river pilot Mark Twain.
The big disadvantage to the iconic Stanley Steamer and similar was warm up time (takes a while to get up to pressure with a fire under the water boiler) and the fact that an operator had to replace both fuel AND the boiler water as consumables. But early in the 20th Century, a Stanley held the land speed record over all IC comers, until a Stanley driver was killed in a race. The Stanley brothers decided that racing wasn’t worth a human life, and never raced their cars again. This just when racing was about to become the major marketing device of the auto industry.
An external combustion (“steam”) car can run on literally anything that burns, including oil derivatives, natural gas, lump coal, perfume, alcohol (methanol, ethanol, or others), tree trimings, or dried horse manure. (Return to horse thread!)
And that flat power curve means there is no requirement for a transmission to keep the turning speed of the wheels within the actual power producing part of the IC engine’s power curve. Huge weight savings here! Also, no complicated carburetion system or fuel injection, just an open air Bunsen burner (or pile of kindling).
Even the consumable water problem (to refill the boiler, remember) was solved using recirculating Freon type gases in a closed system in place of water in an open system. And the “wait half an hour between starting up and driving away” was solved (or greatly reduced) by “flash boilers” adjunct to the main boiler. You could drive away almost immediately at moderate speed. By the time you got to the expressway entrance, you probably had enough “steam” for highway speed.
Interestingly, it was primarily that marketing device (racing) that caused the demise of personal steam power, not any significant actual disadvantage. In the context of the time, steam was seen as “old fashioned” while the IC engine (unreliable, cranky, and far more complex though it was), seemed new and innovative. And as may be noted, if steam had continued in popularity and development until now, additional improvements of an unknown nature would almost certainly have resulted. Regardless, even the technology of steam circa 1930 would seem to have some significant advantages today.
Those 15 million NY horses would have produced sufficient fuel (when dried) for quite a fleet of mass transit and/or heavy hauling steam carriers.
Another thing to remember is that horses, or at least horse-drawn carriages, aren’t that fast. You couldn’t get around a large metro area in any reasonable length of time by horse. I’d say that without the gasoline engine, cities would be heavily dependent on rail, with some form of semi-adequate personal transportation based on steam or electric cars. I do think that cities would be planned differently without the universal automobile culture we have today.
On a somewhat related issue, if the internal combustion engine had never been invented, would we have airplanes? Would it have been possible to make the leap directly to jet engine powered aircraft without having ICE powered aircraft as a stepping stone?
Compared to todays rush-hour traffic jams, I expect a horse could easily beat those speeds!
The thread title appears to ask if the USA of 2007 could be maintained by horses. The answer is no. The USA of 2007 is highly dependent on rapid transportation of raw materials and goods from place to place. With only horses I’m not sure the USA of 2007 would even be governable.
As has been pointed out, with only horses the USA of 2007 wouldn’t exist. All manufacturing and food production would be local and limited to the surrounding territory within, say, 20 miles. The standard of living would be low.
What about bicycles?
It’s worth pointing out that most large ships, including all of the aircraft carriers in the US Navy, use steam engines, albeit diesel and fission-fired steam engines. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, a steam-powered vehicle need not be running on coal.