Gallery 13 of 16 · Muscle before motors

Animal power

Oxen and the plow, the horse collar, mules on the towpath, camels and elephants at work, and the horse city.

Photo: Irving Rusinow (U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (U.S. National Archives)

Mesopotamia, about 4000 BCE

Oxen and the plow

historyeconomics

Yoked oxen pulling a plow let one farmer work far more land than with a hoe. Early images of plows and yokes from Mesopotamia and Egypt date to the 4th millennium BCE. Castrated bulls were calm, strong and cheap to feed on straw, and they worked fields worldwide into the 20th century.

How did animal power change who did the farm work?

Sources: Andrew Sherratt, "Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution," in Pattern of the Past (1981)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

China to medieval Europe

The horse collar

historyeconomics

An ancient throat-and-girth harness choked a horse that pulled hard. A padded collar resting on the shoulders, developed in China and common in Europe by around 1000 CE, let horses pull heavy plows and wagons. The historian Lynn White argued it helped transform medieval farming, a claim others have debated.

Can one invention change an economy? What else had to change with it?

Sources: Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962); Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4 pt. 2 (1965)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Erie Canal, 1825

Mules on the towpath

historyeconomicstrade & commercialization

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, teams of mules and horses walked the towpath pulling cargo boats from the Hudson to Lake Erie, often led by young boys. Freight costs between Buffalo and New York City fell sharply, and New York became the nation's great port.

Why did a walking speed of about four miles an hour beat the wagon road?

Sources: New York State Canal Corporation, Erie Canal history

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Ancient to modern

Camels and elephants at work

historyeconomics

Camels pulled plows and turned water wheels as well as carrying loads. Elephants hauled teak logs in the forests of Myanmar and India into the 21st century and went to war in ancient armies, from Hannibal's crossing of the Alps to the Mauryan empire.

Why do working elephants still matter where roads cannot go?

Sources: Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (2015)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

19th century

The horse city

historyeconomics

Before cars, cities ran on horses. New York had well over 100,000 horses around 1900, pulling streetcars, cabs and delivery wagons, and leaving tons of manure and many carcasses in the streets every day. Electric streetcars and motor trucks replaced them within a generation.

What problems did the car solve, and which did it create?

Sources: Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2007); See also MEDL: Rails, Spurs and the Truck

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Watch and look