Horses
Early regulations covering the automobile included the enforcement of Red Flag laws, which required self-propelled vehicles be preceded when moving by a person waving a red flag. The intent was to warn an approaching horse drawn vehicle or rider that the automobile was there and enable them to avoid the clattering vehicle which often scared horses into a panic. In Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth the legislature passed a law which required the automobile driver to stop, disassemble – yes, disassemble – the vehicle and conceal it, allowing the horse to pass without incident before reassembling and passing on his way. Fortunately the governor had the good sense to veto the law.
Clearly horses and cars were not meant for each other. Lawmaker were urged to restrict the efficiency of the automobile which then shared the road with pedestrians, cyclists, and horse drawn vehicles. As automotive technology evolved cars became quieter, less inclined to backfire (except when being started), and burned fuel more efficiently, decreasing the noxious fumes they emitted to a certain extent. Horses and their owners became more tolerant of the horseless carriage. Or maybe they just got used to it.
At any rate it wasn’t long before the car began to displace the horse as the main mode of transport in cities. Its convenience was undeniable. Hitch up a team or crank a starter? Speed of arrival made the internal combustion engine superior to a team of horses. Fire departments and police departments began to adopt the car over the horse. The vast infrastructure which supported the horse drawn industry began to crumble. Stables and liveries which housed, bought, sold, and rented horses for all uses closed as quickly as garages and car dealers opened. Besides the aforementioned blacksmiths, farriers, whip makers, drivers adept with horse teams, saddlers, buggy and coachbuilders, and many other trades and professions were slowly driven – no pun intended – out of business.
There was another, largely overlooked service which was eliminated by the automobile. American cities in 1900 were home to an estimated 3 to 3.5 million horses. Horses create about 22 pounds of what will charitably be called manure every day, and the majority of it was randomly deposited on city streets. Manure attracts flies. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century cities were filled with the stench of the rotting manure and teeming with flies. Health issues aside, and they were considerable based on the population density of some cities, there was an esthetics problem.
Cities and towns faced a losing battle attempting to keep the streets clean, and city budgets were greatly strained by the need to continually remove the manure. Many towns located on waterways simply disposed of it by dumping it in the water. There was no collecting and selling to farmers, whose own animals produced sufficiently to meet their fertilizer needs. As the automobile displaced the horse as the main mode of transport, the business of collecting manure (and also horses which died on the street) was gradually replaced by other needs, some of them created by the automobile.