Horses of Iron

(Kids? Don't try this assist at home.)
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Hello

Horses of Iron.. mhhhhhhh...... most of this Motorcyle was made or build with Iron :D
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Greetings
Martin
 
^^ Lovely Martin. Tks. Be sure and maintain that Lucas battery!
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Meanwhile...
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:cry:
 


For your viewing amusement... maybe, tune in this YT video at 3:32:
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E-Chopper said:
Hello

Horses of Iron.. mhhhhhhh...... most of this Motorcyle was made or build with Iron :D
57.jpg

Hehe Martin? Your were holding out on us maybe. Posted to ebay in the UK:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/232015409845
Douglas Pidcock 1922 Electric Motorcycle 18v

The first British Electric Motorcycle (possibly), I have emailed Beaulieu Motor Museum who have said that they have no records of any earlier electric motorcycles.

Originally built from a Douglas 2 3/4 frame then modified with Mr Pidcocks own frame and I think some BSA parts.

Mr Pidock converted the motorcycle to use on his daily journey to work at a engineering company in Peterborough during the time of petrol rationing.

The bike was featured twice in Motor Cycling in 1942 and 1943 and I have the original letter signed by Graham Walker (Murray Walkers farther) the editor at the time, in regard to sending a photographer to take the picture for the article.

Finish is not concourse and personally I think its better this way as it was intended to be a means of getting from A to B.

Riding is quiet as you would imagine with just tire and chain noise. Speed is selected by a lever 3 positions 6v, 12v and 18v and the clutch lever operating a Lucas solenoid switch to bring in the motor. The motor is a Morris lorry starter motor. I've had a new industrial charger made and the bike is fitted with 3 x 6v heavy duty rubber batteries. One or more will need replacing as i attempted a ride today and found that there was no charge. Batteries are currently showing 8-9v so i am guessing a cell has gone. They are easily available for around £100

Getting from A to B on this machine is fun if a little slow, max. of 18mph approx. In the few miles I have done the range is about 5 miles or so, a little less than Mr Pidcocks claims. Perhaps you could go a bit further or fast with a motor rewind although motor runs quietly.

Valuable No. plate, transferable, although it would be better kept with the bike.

... and another pic:
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Yah... Selling via ebay? Thing is, currently asking about $8,600 US??? On *ebay*??? I'd be more inclined to tart the old grrrl up a bit and flog her somewhere more specialized... like on ES. (Hehe... OK, maybe on Hemmings ("The Worlds Largest Collector Car Marketplace"):
https://www.hemmings.com/

("1919 Milburn Electric 27L Brougham", currently asking "$44,950US obo")
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So... "Fat" bikes (tires) are "hot" these days? How `bout a near 100 year-old "fat" bike? hehe
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Per Wiki "Le Charivari was an illustrated magazine published in Paris, France, from 1832 to 1937. It published caricatures, political cartoons and reviews. After 1835, when the government banned political caricature, Le Charivari began publishing satires of everyday life."

Punch, a magazine of humour and satire, ran from 1841-2002. (Its first edition "the London Charivari".) It became a very "British" institution renowned internationally for its wit and irreverence, it introduced the term 'Cartoon' as we know it today.

Thing is, it was publishing in the years of the first bicycles. The first "horseless carriages". The years of motorized transportation by burning fossil remains like coal... and the first efforts at electric traction.

Ya can read all about the history of Punch magazine on their site:
http://www.punch.co.uk/about/

One example, the fairy "Electra" in July 1900:

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Caption reads:
NOTICE TO QUIT.
The Fairy Electra (to Steam Locomotive Underground Demon). "NOW THEY'VE SEEN ME, I FANCY YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED." [Center of London Electric Railway opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, Wednesday, June 27, 1900.]


Anyway... Some living in crowded 21st-century urban environments, upon seeing the battery-electric powered bicycle might exclaim to the gasoline/diseasal-powered "automobile", YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED.

:mrgreen:
 
And a year later, in December, 1901:
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Caption reads:
THE GOOD FAIRY OF THE CONTINUOUS CURRENT BANISHES THE DEMON KING SULPHUR.
["The Directors of the Metropolitan Underground Railway announced yesterday that no time will be lost in proceeding with the installation of electric traction." - Daily Mail.]
 
December, 1896:
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Caption reads:
HARDLY LIKELY.
(An Incident in a Motor Race.)
First Motist (stranded). "HI, STOP! LEND ME A PINT OF OIL, PLEASE. I'M QUITE OUT!"
Second Motist (flying past). "AWEFULLY SORRY, SIR. HAVEN'T A PINT TO SPARE! YOU'LL GET PLENTY AT THE NEXT VILLAGE!"

This was only one month after Britain has repealed some of their "Red Flag" laws, including the requirements that any road-going locomotive have a crew of three (with one walking in front waving a red flag) and a speed limit of four miles an hour outside of cities increased to 14 mph (22 km/h.) One estimate I have read figured that by this time there were still less than one hundred "horseless carriages" in all of England...

...so there were NO "gas stations". Budding motorists had to hope that chemists aka pharmacies might have a stock of bottles of ...gas... naptha or whatever they were burning as fuel, if they were lucky...

Basically, they all suffered from "range anxiety" the same way that today folks using electric vehicles (that aren't easy to pedal) can worry about range per charge!

And the sign over the road:
ALL TRESPASSERS ON THE HIGH ROAD WILL BE PROSECUTED
By Order MOTOR ASS.

...predicting that these motists will claim to own the roads and all others keep off... :)

Off to the left over the group of horses taking an early retirement the sign:
The HORSES HOME
ALL PLAY,NO WORK

On the vehicle that's out of gas ya can still see a little "bicycle DNA" in the forks for the two front wheels... the vehicle looks very "home-grown", very much a modified design for horse-drawn carriage.

The vehicle on the left was far more sophisticated. Unencumbered by Red Flag laws, horseless designs had been improving rapidly on mainland Europe, and this trike looks a dead ringer for the 1896 "Voiturette" manufactured by the French firm of Léon Bollée:
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Easy to imagine what these machines must have meant to a hoi polloi only familiar with the sounds of horses hooves...
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By January 1897 Punch could already comment on the noise and smell...
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September, 1896:
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(EVen in 1896, folks knew silent electric vehicles could be deadly...) :mrgreen:
 
from July, 1897:
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Caption reads:
"`ERE, JUST `OLD MY BROOM A MINUTE, I'M JUST GOIN' UP THE STREET. IF ANY OF MY REGULAR CUSTOMERS COMES, JUST ARST `EM TO WAIT A BIT!"

By the end of the 20th-century folks worried about car tailpipe exhaust and hydrocarbons and lubricants dripped on city pavements, but by the end of the 19th-century horse "road apples" were a real problem. The older boy here was self-employed as a sweeper. Wealthy patrons would pay for him to sweep a path across the road when they wished to cross to the other side...

Eric Morris wrote a fun piece "From Horse Power to Horsepower in the Spring 2007 "Access" newsletter from the University of California Transportation Center:
http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access 30 - 02 - Horse Power.pdf­

Amazing article about "horse economics" etc. Some excerpts:
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world’s first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.

The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era’s predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.

The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.

And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth century city - for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.

All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.

SADDLED WITH THE URBAN HORSE
The horse pollution problem was not a new one. Julius Caesar banned horse-drawn carts from ancient Rome between dawn and dusk in an effort to curb gridlock, noise, accidents, and other unpleasant byproducts of the urban equine.

Nearly every item shipped by rail needed to be collected and distributed by horses at both ends of the journey. So as rail shipments boomed, so did shipments by horse. Ironically, railroads tended to own the largest fleets of horses in nineteenth-century cities.

This situation was made even worse by the introduction of the horse into an area from which it had been conspicuously absent: personal intra-urban transportation. Prior to the nineteenth century, cities were traversed almost exclusively on foot. Mounted riders in US cities were uncommon, and due to their expense, slow speeds, and jarring rides, private carriages were rare; in 1761, only eighteen families in the colony of Pennsylvania (population 250,000) owned one. The hackney cab, ancestor of the modern taxi, was priced far beyond the means of the ordinary citizen.

This changed with the introduction of the omnibus in the 1820s. Essentially large stage coaches traveling fixed routes, these vehicles were reasonably priced enough to cater to a much larger swathe of the urban population. By 1853 New York omnibuses carried 120,000 passengers per day. Needless to say, this required a tremendous number of horses, given that a typical omnibus line used eleven horses per vehicle per day. And the need for horses was to spiral even further when omnibuses were placed on tracks, increasing their speeds by fifty percent and doubling the load a horse could pull. Fares dropped again, and passengers clamored for the new service. By 1890 New Yorkers took 297 horsecar rides per capita per year.

MAKING HAY: FEEDING THE URBAN HORSE
The consequences of the horse population boom were sobering. While the horse may be a charming and even romantic animal, when packed into already teeming and unsanitary cities its environmental byproducts created an intolerable situation.

Horses need to eat. According to one estimate each urban horse probably consumed on the order of 1.4 tons of oats and 2.4 tons of hay per year. One contemporary British farmer calculated that each horse consumed the product of five acres of land, a footprint which could have produced enough to feed six to eight people. Probably fifteen million acres were needed to feed the urban horse population at its zenith, an area about the size of West Virginia. Directly or indirectly, feeding the horse meant placing new land under cultivation, clearing it of its natural animal life and vegetation, and sometimes diverting water to irrigate it, with considerable negative effects on the natural ecosystem.

And what goes in must come out. Experts of the day estimated that each horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure per day. For New York and Brooklyn, which had a combined horse population of between 150,000 and 175,000 in 1880 (long before the horse population reached its peak), this meant that between three and four million pounds of manure were deposited on city streets and in city stables every day. Each horse also produced about a quart of urine daily, which added up to around 40,000 gallons per day for New York and Brooklyn.

The aesthetics of the situation require little editorial comment. Horse droppings were not only unsightly but their stench was omnipresent in the nineteenth-century city. Urban streets were minefields that needed to be navigated with the greatest care. “Crossing sweepers” stood on street corners; for a fee they would clear a path through the mire for pedestrians. Wet weather turned the streets into swamps and rivers of muck, but dry weather brought little improvement; the manure turned to dust, which was then whipped up by the wind, choking pedestrians and coating buildings. Municipal street cleaning services across the country were woefully inadequate.

Moreover, thanks to the skyrocketing horse population, even when it had been removed from the streets the manure piled up faster than it could be disposed of. Manure makes fine fertilizer, and an active manure trade existed in the nineteenth-century city. However, as the century wore on the surge in the number of horses caused the bottom to fall out of this market; while early in the century farmers were happy to pay good money for the manure, by the end of the 1800s stable owners had to pay to have it carted off. As a result of this glut (which became particularly severe in summer months when farmers were unable to leave their crops to collect the dung), vacant lots in cities across America became piled high with manure; in New York these sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet. Needless to say, these were not particularly beloved by the inhabitants of the nineteenth-century city.

Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.

In addition, horses often fell, on average once every hundred miles of travel. When this took place, the horse (weighing on average 1,300 pounds) would have to be helped to its feet, which was no mean feat. If injured badly, a fallen horse would be shot on the spot or simply abandoned to die, creating an obstruction that clogged streets and brought traffic to a halt. Dead horses were extremely unwieldy, and although special horse removal vehicles were employed, the technology of the era could not easily move such a burden. As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could more easily be sawed into pieces and carted off. Thus the corpses rotted in the streets, sometimes for days, with less than appealing consequences for traffic circulation, aesthetics, and public health.

Due to the costs of feeding the animals and stabling them on expensive urban land, it made financial sense to rapidly work a small number of horses to death rather than care for a larger group and work them more humanely. As a result, horses were rapidly driven to death; the average streetcar horse had a life expectancy of barely two years. In 1880, New York carted away nearly 15,000 dead equines from its streets, a rate of 41 per day.

As difficult as it may be to believe for the modern observer, at the time the private automobile was widely hailed as an environmental savior. In the span of two decades, technology eradicated a major urban planning nightmare that had strained governments to the breaking point, vexed the media, tormented the citizenry, and brought society to the brink of despair. Yet, given the environmental problems that the automobile has brought, it is worth asking: was this a Faustian bargain?

Children at play in the streets of New York City, 1900 (Click to view whole image):
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From recent news reports it is becoming apparent that buying an ebike can lead to a life of crime...

Professor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso was writing about how the bicycle promoted crime too, back around 1900... Punch had a laugh at him then:
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All these Prams and Perambulators. Imagine the baby boys falling out. The original Peter Pan musical opened in 1904, the theme was that while baby girls did not stir within the carriage, the boys could be rambunctious and fall out in Kensington Gardens. If the family didn't come back and recover him in a few days, then it was off to Neverland with him and there'd be a new Lost Boy. Trying to picture a real nanny like the one in the art work. Well, THAT would be the one that would lose the baby, right? ". . . .And straight on 'til morning."
 
Thank the Gawds we have so much variety in comfy ebike designs today! Scooter-style, beach cruiser, chopper etc... By April 1901 Punch could see practical problems with the "scorcher-style" road bike:
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The year before this, another problem...
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Actually, they really "nailed" this problem all the way back in September, 1897:
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Caption reads:
AWEFUL FATE OF THE CYCLIST SCORCHER!
(About A.D. 1950.)

DRIVEN AT LAST BY A LONG-SUFFERING PUBLIC FROM ALL OF THE HAUNTS OF MEN, HIS LIMBS ADAPTED TO ONE MEANS OF LOCOMOTION ONLY, HE IS COMPELLED TO HOP ABOUT AS BEST HE CAN IN INACCESSIBLE MOUNTAIN RETREATS!

Sign on mountain top reads
MOUNTAINEERS
ARE REQUESTED
NOT TO MOLEST THE
CREATURES WHO
FREQUENT THESE HEIGHTS
THEY ARE
QUITE HARMLESS
 
Dauntless said:
All these Prams and Perambulators. Imagine the baby boys falling out. The original Peter Pan musical opened in 1904, the theme was that while baby girls did not stir within the carriage, the boys could be rambunctious and fall out in Kensington Gardens. If the family didn't come back and recover him in a few days, then it was off to Neverland with him and there'd be a new Lost Boy. Trying to picture a real nanny like the one in the art work. Well, THAT would be the one that would lose the baby, right? ". . . .And straight on 'til morning."

Cool. :) With the advent of the high speed perambulator of course, somebuddy came up with those seat belts and shoulder straps and air bags.

Phew!
 
August, 1895:
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HE EXTINCTION OF THE HORSE.
Squire. "Isn't that the Mare, Coper, you hoped to make three figures of as a Lady's Hack?"
Local Dealer. "Yes, Sir, this is her, worst luck! She'll have to go for a "Cabber" now - unless I boil her down for Bicycle Oil!"

By the end of the 1800's there were plenty of reports and published evidence about the collapse of the horse economy...
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One for all the electric Cougars out there (you know who you are.) From November, 1890
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HE YOUNG SPARK AND THE OLD FLAME.

Young Spark. "TRY ME! YOU'VE TOLERATED THAT FUSTY OLD FOGEY LONG ENOUGH!"

Old Flame (aside). "FLASHY YOUNG UPSTART!"

["It is obvious that small tunnels for single lines, of the usual standard gauge, may be constructed some distance below the ground, and yet the atmosphere of such tunnels be as pure as upon a railway on the surface."
-- Illustrated London News, on the City & South London Electric Company.]

"Young Spark" loquitur:--

Your arm, my dear Madam! This way, down the lift, Ma'am!
No danger at all, no discomfort, no dirt!
You love Sweetness and Light? They are both in my gift, Ma'am;
I'll prove like a shot what I boldly assert.
Don't heed your Old Flame, Ma'am, he's bitterly jealous,
'Tis natural, quite, with his nose out of joint;
You just let him bluster and blow like old bellows,
And try me instead--I will not disappoint!
Old Flame? He's a very fuliginous "Flame," Ma'am;
I wonder, I'm sure, how you've stood him so long;
He has choked you for years--'tis a thundering shame, Ma'am!
High time the Young Spark put a term to his wrong.
Just look at me! Am I not trim, smart, and sparkling,
As clean as a pin, and as bright as a star?
Compare me with him, who stands scowling and darkling!
So gazed the old gallant on Young LOCHINVAR.

He's ugly and huffy, and smoky, and stuffy,
And pokey, and chokey, and black as my hat.
As wooer he's dull, for his breath smells of sulphur;
Asphyxia incarnate, and horrid at that!
You cannot see beauty in one who's so sooty,
So dusty, and dingy, and dismal, and dark.
He's feeble and footy; 'tis plainly your duty
To "chuck" the Old Flame, and take on the Young Spark.
A Cyclops for lover, no doubt you discover,
My dear Lady LONDON, is not comme il faut;
If I do not woo you the sunny earth over.
At least I lend light to love-making below.

He's just like old Pluto, Persephone's prigger;
You'll follow Apollo the Younger--that's me!
He's sombre as Styx, and as black as a nigger.
His lady-love, LONDON! Bah! Fiddle-de-dee!

His murky monopoly, Madam, is ended.
Come down, my dear love, to my subterrene hall!
I think you'll admit it is sparkling and splendid,
As clean as a palace, not black as a pall.
Electrical traction with sheer stupefaction
Strikes Steam, the old buffer, and spoils his small game.
You're off with the old Love, so try the new bold Love,
And let the Young Spark supersede the Old Flame.

Carries her off in triumph.
 
Earliest Punch cartoon I've seen showing a motorized bicycle... September, 1902:
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HOW JONES FELT ON A SECOND-HAND MOTOR BICYCLE OF THE VIBRATING KIND WHICH HE HAD BOUGHT FOR A "MERE SONG."

Unfortunate for Jones he wasn't riding an electric...
 
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