Don: 0:26

And, and that's when Doug realized it wasn't soup after all.

Ron: 0:33

Man, that guy is an idiot.

Don: 0:36

Welcome, everybody Welcome back to the. Uncannery, my name is Don and I'm Ron, and we're talking about Doug, but we are. He's not here. Yeah, that's why we're talking about it, but we are because he's not here.

Ron: 0:45

Yeah, that's why we're talking about it. It's fun, we talk behind his back. Um, he's not here and he will return, though. Uh, once again at home with babe in hand, um, and uh, godspeed, yeah.

Don: 0:58

So just if you are you listening out of, uh, Listening out of order. Doug wasn't here last time either, but we didn't kick him out of the club completely. We just no, we're just waiting.

Ron: 1:09

Yeah, this is a test really and I'd say it's going very well.

Don: 1:18

Oh, so well, welcome to another discussion. Well, welcome to another discussion, ron. I was thinking today on my way home about all of the technology that we live with. Oh man, yeah, cool technology and I like gadgety stuff. Yeah, it's one of the things I look for when I'm out shopping. I like to play around. I inherited it from my dad. My dad was a gadget guy.

Ron: 1:45

Yeah.

Don: 1:46

So we had one of everything from um, from infomercials on TV and in the kitchen, and uh, and that was always fun. But you know, gadgets are one thing and gadgets are, are, are tricky and neat, but uh, but is there, like what can you not live without? Like what? What would be a a deal breaker for you? What if we took away some piece of technology? What would? Uh, what would, what would the first?

Ron: 2:10

thing that comes to mind, I guess, is like the internet, right, like, but I like it's not a gadget, that's a, that's a technological phenomenon. Um, but like thinking about it also, like it would be kind of cool to not have the internet, maybe.

Don: 2:25

Um, cause, I'm at least. Have you ever not had the internet?

Ron: 2:28

Yeah, I, I have memories of not having the internet. I am, uh, at least old enough to remember not having the internet. I think we got it sometime when I was around like I don't know, six or seven, um, and I think we were maybe even like later adopters of it than most people. But the real answer, something that I can't live without, like my computer, actually like my PC, whether or not it had the internet, I kind of just love having like a hub. I'm thinking, like all the stuff I do, like you know that's where I write, I, you know I type. It keeps our photographs. You know the hard drives have all my media, all of my music. I can play video games.

Don: 3:07

You're like everything is in that thing, you know that was what I was going to ask, because that's been a shift recently, like geographic you know, yeah, geologically recently. Um, computers used to be just be for work and you would word process them on. On them there were some kind of lame games that would happen. Like Doom, but through the 2000s then, like they've kind of transformed into like a life hub.

Ron: 3:31

Yeah, it's like an entire media center, right, like pretty much all the media we watch, like my computer is hooked up to my TV, right, everything streams through there, basically, and stuff. So that would be a bummer. I always think like, uh, if, uh, if there was like an earthquake and everything in our house was destroyed, I don't think I'd mind all that much. I mean I would.

Don: 3:52

Obviously it's a careless thing to say that would suck.

Ron: 3:56

But the only thing I feel like is super essential is like my big giant 2005 pc tower which I still have like four hard drives in there.

Don: 4:07

It's a it's a liability, though, too, because, uh, I had a laptop stolen out of the back of my truck once and, uh, it was uh trying to think when it was stolen, it would have been around like 2010, 11, something like that, so it had all of my photographs on it yeah but it was kind of before most things were in the cloud right, yeah, exactly so so whoever owns my 2010 laptop has all the pictures of our honeymoon on it.

Don: 4:35

That uh, oh, that's how I can find those so easily so um, but uh, but kids these days won't ever know that that danger, because everything is loaded to Facebook and to yeah, I don't know, I don't.

Ron: 4:48

The cloud and iCloud. I definitely use the clouds. I think I have like backups of most of that stuff, but, um, that's not my preferred way to do it, like I'd still rather just. Maybe that's the the old fashionedness of me.

Don: 5:06

I want to know the the. That megabit file is somewhere on a hard drive disk.

Ron: 5:08

Oh, I thought you were going to say the film no, like I would just want it all in one place. So I guess, if, yeah, my computer went away, that would be a pretty big change in my lifestyle. I don't really know how we would. You'd have to read more, yeah, which wouldn't be so bad. I guess that would also be good. But then how would I talk to? My friends on Discord.

Don: 5:33

How about you? So the reason that I was thinking about it on the way home is because I got a new car. Yeah, yeah, nice and white. I'm going to call my car the thing I can't live without, but I think it's only because of where, where we live.

Ron: 5:49

Yeah.

Don: 5:49

Yeah, in in California we're a car country. We're a very car country. The public transport system's not, uh, super well built out, and so if you want to ever leave your house, you need to have some kind of personal transportation.

Ron: 6:02

Yeah, and that's a good answer too, but I think I'd kind of love to like not have my car, because it would force me to like be a rent, like, yeah, utilize public transportation that doesn't exist, or walk or ride a bike Um, you're right, that would definitely like strain, it's one of the things I love about traveling.

Don: 6:20

Like I, one of our favorite places to travel is london, because you can literally go anywhere you want in london with and just by just walking out the uh, the front door and you know, walk a block down, take a escalator. That goes forever and you're on a train? Yeah, it's uh it's awesome and you can get anywhere you need to be in about a half hour.

Ron: 6:39

I do get mad when, uh, coming back from a european city, or lond in particular, coming back home and being like why the hell didn't? Is it too late. Like can we fix our cities, can we do what they did?

Don: 6:52

Right, so and, uh, and, and you know the uh, the kind of car I got was, uh, was, an electric vehicle.

Ron: 6:58

I do this is pretty cool so uh, this is your first electric, all electric vehicle.

Don: 7:02

It is my first all electric vehicle. Quite a change from the, uh, the, the SUV that I used to drive. I used to get about 10, 10 miles to the gallon and uh, so, uh, so yeah, brave new world. But, uh, I thought I would tackle that one and and charge it. And actually, uh, while I was cleaning out my truck, um, going through the, the archaeology that is the center console and you know, the the bottom layer was was at least 10 years old.

Don: 7:30

I found a um one of those disposable film cameras and I have no idea what's on it so like you're uh it's why. Why it's what I thought when you were talking about uh wanting to go back to the actual media. So someday I'll get that developed. Yeah, you have to. That'd be sick.

Ron: 7:48

The center console is an amazing space. I went through mine in my Jeep a while back and I've had this car actually since high school. This was like my first car and I guess, my only car and I found like old AAA maps. I remember like going to AAA and being like I'm going to get a map for every near neighboring County so I'll never get lost, and those are just completely worthless now. Probably use them once.

Don: 8:13

Yeah, all right, my wife has a Thomas guide in her in her car. A real, a real, live, physical Thomas.

Ron: 8:20

I feel like those you should like be able to put those on eBay and the Smithsonian will buy it off of you for its upcoming the Way we Were exhibit or something.

Don: 8:31

But actually our topic today, what I want to talk to you about, what I brought to the table today, is transportation.

Ron: 8:37

Okay.

Don: 8:38

But you know, like usual, my shtick. We've got to get in the magic time machine, the magic time.

Ron: 8:44

Okay, so we're talking about like what's the? Oldest form of transportation. We're talking about dog-drawn sleds on the tundra. No, that's not the oldest form.

Don: 8:56

Okay.

Ron: 8:58

Canoes, finnish toboggans oh yeah, no, just walking would be the oldest.

Don: 9:11

Yeah, just to get on your feet about the invention of feet, um, but if we were to go back, I don't know. Let's say, uh, let's just pick a number. Let's say the 14th century. We're talking about the 14th century last time, if lots of rats everywhere if we were just, uh, regular, regular folk and we needed to get from one city to another, what would be our options?

Ron: 9:29

uh, we could well, we could walk. I I take it right, um, and we could. We could hop on a pony or a horse, I guess probably not a pony, we'd probably break its back.

Don: 9:37

But a horse. A horse if we were lucky enough to have one.

Ron: 9:40

Yeah, okay, yeah, our horses, big big, uh like aristocratic items back in the day.

Don: 9:46

No, uh, mostly agrarian, but uh, but if you were, the luxury of travel was was limited to the, the upper classes. So, uh, if we were farm workers and we needed to get somewhere else, it would have been because we were working, okay, but uh, but another, another way would be um water, so back in the 14th century, canals and rivers and things like that. But if we move forward in our school bus, our time machine and we get up to the 19th century, Not so far.

Don: 10:17

Industrial Revolution starting so early 1800s. Now what kind of choices would we have? Again, we're just regular Joes, so we're not super rich, but just regular people. What would be our options of getting around town?

Ron: 10:28

1800s we got wagons. Now there are wagons, coaches, still drawn by horses, I suppose there are. Do we have the first locomotive yet? No, when's the first locomotive? Later. Okay, so we're talking early 1800s. Um, maybe we've got when's the first, uh, moving sidewalk. Um, I guess wagons is my. I mean still more ships and boats and canals, right? So wagons are are all owned privately, though we don't have like a, like a cab company.

Don: 11:05

No, just like you own a wagon.

Ron: 11:06

Oh, like an island wagon. Okay, this is my four-door sedan wagon in hot red, cherry red.

Don: 11:17

First, just to finish out our conversation first locomotive in England is built in 1814, but the first railway is open in 1825 okay.

Ron: 11:26

Are those like public or are they predominantly like industrial railways? Are they like taking coal from the midlands down to the ports, for both passengers and freight.

Don: 11:35

Okay, so a combination, yeah, um, but uh, but it's that, uh, it's, it's that shift from uh private ownership of transportation to public ownership. So do you know what happened on July 4th 1829 in London, england?

Ron: 11:52

Definitely nothing to do with America. Probably every Englishman trying to ignore the word America. Probably, yeah.

Don: 12:04

That was the first horse-drawn omnibus. That was a public, uh, public transportation system. Uh, it was one route. It went from, uh, from paddington in london to bank okay, so I think this word omnibus you used like uh, like I know what it means, um, but I think there was a.

Ron: 12:22

There was a great shift, almost a vowel shift, at some point where an omnibus to me is like a big collection of books in one book. What was the original omnibus?

Don: 12:36

So it's a carriage. It looks like a stagecoach, but it's a little bit longer. So it's got multiple rows inside of it rather than just the two facing that a stagecoach or a carriage would have. So probably three or four rows could hold. Most of them held up to 12 passengers. Some of them later on could get up to 22.

Ron: 12:55

Okay.

Don: 12:55

Pulled by three horses.

Ron: 12:56

And what year was this? 1829. 1829. First big bus. With how many horses? Three, three, why three, that seems. Don't you want to even it's because you only need two, in case one dies.

Don: 13:11

You only need two to pull it, but if the route gets steep they need the third one. So they always had the at the start they had three. As time marched forward it would become a two horse system. Okay, but the route from Paddington, what I found was interesting, the route from Paddington to bank. It ran four times a day. It cost a shilling to take, uh, to take the omnibus, um, and it would take about two hours.

Ron: 13:36

What's this distance in miles?

Don: 13:38

3.5.

Ron: 13:42

I'm walking man. I'm saving my shilling, I'm walking.

Don: 13:49

It's uh, it's because it's going through the, the heart of london, down what was called the new road uh, for our london listeners is now marlebone uh road, uh, but um, uh, what if you wanted to take that same route today? Um, it would take at least two buses and it would take you at least three hours so okay, it was faster back then using the horses than with our, with the current uh uh transport system.

Ron: 14:11

I knocked them too soon.

Don: 14:12

They knew what was up, you could get the underground. Underground tire requires two trains and at least 45 minutes and uh, several gaps yeah, that you will potentially lose your life, and I suppose you have to mind those yeah, yeah yeah, um, so so we, we have a population of London about 1.5 million people, okay, and uh, and we're using horses to transport freight and now, starting a 29, we're transporting publicly, transporting humans.

Ron: 14:38

Is this big? Are people like hell? Yeah, the omnibus is here. I'm living in a golden age it is.

Don: 14:44

It takes off by 1833, there are several routes, so it only takes a couple years for this to expand. Okay, yeah, but here's the question that I have is what is the motor that is driving the omnibus in 1829?

Ron: 15:04

Three horses.

Don: 15:04

Three horses, that's right and um what do you have to pay a horse?

Ron: 15:09

oh, this is the best part? Um, very little. I guess you're giving them oats, you're giving them hay and a room to sleep and lots of love and, uh, scratches on their neck. That's it. So have you ever owned?

Don: 15:22

a horse.

Ron: 15:22

No, I've never owned a horse. Horses are huge man like I think I would actually be. I I've ridden horses. I think they're cool. I'm not like an anti-horse guy, but no, no, I want no business. Do horses like you? I don't know I am. Is that a thing it is?

Don: 15:41

I think so because I don't think horses like me and I don't know, why?

Ron: 15:44

yeah, I'm such a likable person they're just always sort of like side eyeing you.

Don: 15:47

They do, yeah, like dogs love me I can give me a dog, I'm good, but yeah, horses always are like, not they're intimidated by your intelligence don it's most beasts feel. That's why doug is oh we, we kid, just because he's not here to defend himself.

Ron: 16:06

So we need to feed the horses.

Don: 16:08

Exactly. How much do you feed a horse? Bushels 40 pounds. Okay, 40 pounds a day. The trouble with feeding a horse 40 pounds a day is what's the horse going to give you back at the end of?

Ron: 16:19

that day. Ooh, it's going to return you for your kindness with uh some, some uh big old piles of horse return or horse dividends.

Don: 16:33

Dookie yeah, 30 pounds of Dookie.

Ron: 16:37

Okay.

Don: 16:38

All right, so uh, uh, by about 1840, we've had about 300,000 horses working in London To 1.5 million people.

Ron: 16:47

Yeah, it's about one horse for every five people.

Don: 16:50

All right, each producing 30 pounds of manure a day Sounds like my ex-wife, holy cow. So there's a lot of horse waste, waste I'm taking. There is a lot, yes, uh, up to a thousand tons of horse waste a day.

Ron: 17:14

So are we developing a sewer system? Is this something we can sweep into the gutter? Uh, are we employ? Is this a just an opportunity for employment? I'm, I'm just an old horse sweep like going up the. What was it the main way? Or?

Don: 17:31

the new road, the new road, the new road, yeah, um, well, kind of. So the it does turn into that. It starts off with just piles, and it was why you always had to be careful crossing the street, because there were so many horses that there was no way that the streets could be kept clean at all times. Okay, but there were contractors that were hired by the city to remove manure from the roadways, and they would then take that and sell it to farmers who were were raising hay. That would then the alfalfa that would then be fed to the horses.

Ron: 18:08

So it's a perfect system, right you?

Don: 18:10

see, and you just got to find that balance so that the horse production matches, the fertilizer sale matches, the alfalfa production matches the horse consumption match, right and yes, you just got to find the the right, uh, the right magic balance so that the whole system works and they did.

Ron: 18:29

No, they didn't. So which did they have excess? I'm willing to bet, okay, the one they didn't want. Excess of what? What do you think they had excess of? They had excess horse crap they did.

Don: 18:42

Do you know how much a thousand tons of horse dookie like what that looks like? Um, I can't tell you what a thousand tons of anything looks like A thousand tons is a is a cube of horse dookie, 62 feet on on each edge, so uh, so giant, and each horse produces up to two gallons of urine a day oh right, yeah, we're not even talking about the wet so, uh. So we got 300 000 horses excreting two gallons each. It's uh, 600 gallon, 600 000 gallons of urine, okay, this is like.

Ron: 19:18

This is the middle of the 19th century, right? I find this very fun contrasting. This is supposed to be right, like the, the what, the height of the british empire right, these are the most civilized people. Supposed to be right like the height of the British Empire, right, these are the most civilized people in the world. London is the most incredible city in the world and it just reeks of horse piss and shit. Well, and.

Don: 19:35

But we don't ever, like we don't hear about that.

Ron: 19:38

No, no, you're right, none of the literature mentions like.

Don: 19:41

I can think of one instance in one book by Jane Austen where a character says oh, the horses have been here, but other than that it's like it's so sanitized that we don't even realize, Like of course it was quaint because they were pulling their buses with horses, and how nostalgic that must be. But the truth of the matter is it smells like poop.

Ron: 20:06

Yeah, we did that with a lot of our history, right? Like, uh, talking about like the Roman empire and ancient Rome is supposed to be like super cool, all these marble statues and beautiful architecture. And then like some realist weirdo comes in and tries to dispel the rumor, he's like you know, they ate anchovies, they would have reeked. They didn't bathe, you know, except but once a month or something. And then it's like thanks, man, I just wanted to live in fantasy Rome.

Don: 20:33

It gets so bad, actually, that that in 18, in the 1850s, benjamin Disraeli gives a speech in parliament where he is pointing out in 1850 that uh well, here's this quote he says the cost of maintaining our streets in a state of moderate cleanliness is becoming ruinous, while the health effects of this ever-increasing accumulation cannot be ignored, we must ask ourselves if there is not a limit to the number of horses a city can sustain well, okay, all right.

Ron: 21:01

So this is, this is once the he's the prime minister, right, uh-huh, uh, once the prime minister is is calling it out. So it's not just like a cosmetic problem.

Don: 21:11

This is they're ringing alarm bells and in 1850, so so there should be plenty of time to fix this problem, because it's been. It's been noted. Um, they, they actually were hired. There were private sweepers you could hire that. We'd hang out on the corner and if you wanted to cross the road and not have to walk through horse poop, you could pay the private sweeper to clear your way across the road. Yeah, how has that not been?

Ron: 21:36

depicted in a film or something right, that sounds quintessentially English Paying your valet to scrub the asphalt in front of you paying your ballot, to scrub the asphalt in front of you, um, and then we have another technological invention.

Don: 21:50

I guess that, um, that that comes to england um the fire hose. Now we're just pressure washing it all the fire hose existed back when, uh, when the Great Fire took place in 1666.

Ron: 22:05

A lot of good it did, though.

Don: 22:08

Now the horse-drawn railway. Okay, okay, all right. So this is like a trolley car. Yeah, so if you've been to Disneyland?

Don: 22:15

the uh, the carriage that gets pulled down the center, that's, that would be a horse drawn. Uh, uh, railway, um, so we opened this up between, uh, between London and Greenwich. Um and uh, we need, uh, 12 horses per mile. Yikes, that's getting worse Because the each horse can only work for about four hours. So even on the buses it's 12 horses per mile because you can run a horse for about four hours and then you got to switch that horse out for the rest of the day and they ran 16 hour days. But as we bring in the railway now, we're running longer distances requires more horses. And guess what? More horses produce More waste. They do, yeah. Then in 18, well, in 1831, but then again in 1848, we have a cholera outbreak. Oh, and cholera, of course, is spread by Poop, Poop, okay, poop when it comes into water, okay, so we've got all of this horse waste.

Ron: 23:14

Luckily, it never rains in London, that's right.

Don: 23:18

And we have you know, 600,000 gallons of horse urine that are washing everything into the Thames. So do you know how much 600,000 gallons is?

Ron: 23:26

That's an Olympic-sized swimming pool every day of horse urine just being distributed across the streets of London. I'll never look at the London Olympics the same way again.

Don: 23:41

So by then it's exceeding 50 pounds per year to remove horse manure per horse in the city of London.

Ron: 23:49

Wow, okay. So is that outstripping, like how much it costs to even like feed them? It must be right, like I'm taking it like.

Don: 23:56

It's getting close. It doesn't outstrip it until a few more years down the road.

Ron: 24:01

And so all this kind of like Benjamin Disraeli was saying this is being, this is all money that's falling on the local government, right, Like they're the ones in charge. The municipality has to take care of this, not the actual owners of the horses.

Don: 24:14

They're not they're not okay. Um, so what can we do? We? Our streets are full of horse poop, right, what like? How would you?

Ron: 24:23

solve the problem. I mean, uh, get all those orphan kids out of those all over. Yeah, I mean I don't like uh. So my my answer earlier, you kind of, I feel like, already swept it away. I was like hey, this is free fertilizer, this must be, this must be fantastic. Like you know, this is not a useless resource, right? But it sounds like we are already using that and we're we're outpacing, but I guess you have to move it also, right?

Don: 24:51

So right and I take it.

Ron: 24:53

The horses are moving it to the Midlands or wherever right they are.

Don: 24:56

And there's another limitation here, because the hay and the alfalfa that well, the hay the horse needs for bedding is increasing the waste, but the alfalfa that they're eating has to be grown somewhere. So it takes about one and a third acres of land to grow the alfalfa for one horse, and we've got at least 300 000 horses that are working in london, probably more than that. Now we've moved halfway through the the century, um and uh, there's not enough land in the surrounding areas within 100 miles to feed the horses that are right. So the, the, the overproduction of waste in the city is not, has nowhere to go because the farmlands can't take it. The farmers are buying as much as they can, um, so a couple of a couple of technologies, uh, come along. Um, the first is invented by a guy named Joseph Whitworth, uh, who creates the first large scale mechanical street sweeping system.

Ron: 25:52

Sick. Yeah, I'm gonna imagine this is like a big Zamboni, like just going around with the spinning wheel on the top and the guy can just go to so it's got rotating brushes.

Don: 26:01

It clears a seven foot swath of of street at once. Um, it can clear 1500 yards of street in one hour, so almost a mile, not quite. Uh, accomplishing the work of 20 men in one hour, okay, so pretty good. Um guess how it gets pulled down.

Ron: 26:20

Oh no, the horses was whitworth like look, I tried experimenting with cats with dogs, but they ain't got it in them. You need 45 dogs or three horses. What, what do you want?

Don: 26:33

governor so he can clear the street. But it's adding to the complication because you've got more horses that need to clear the streets.

Ron: 26:44

Bring in even more horses. Okay, this is starting to. The sheer viciousness of this cycle is starting to kind of rear its head.

Don: 26:51

I'm starting to get where the prime minister was all. So then we need to invent processing plants, because the the wet manure is obviously heavy to move, and and and more has more volume. So it's it's it's a more difficult task to get it to the farmers. So we start processing inside the city which can reduce the one ton of of of manure down to like a 20 pound block are we talking like sort of like?

Ron: 27:21

we're taking it into a big machine that is like a, like a trash compactor, and we're crushing it. We're pulling all the liquid out of it. It's like a dehumidifier okay little manure nuggets.

Don: 27:34

But guess where all that moisture goes? That is evaporated from the manure? It goes into the air. Oh, okay, so if you live next to a manure processing, plant.

Ron: 27:50

Guess what it smells like. Everyone's mad now, right, Well, and right.

Don: 27:54

So the city is just not a good place to be.

Ron: 27:59

Right. So like everyone's taking their holiday in London and they're like, good God, elizabeth, look at the streets. And then so then the tourism board's like, okay, we'll clean the streets and but we need to make like waste plants to to take all the waste. And now they're pumping the sulfur and everything into the atmosphere.

Don: 28:26

And now everyone's like, good god, elizabeth, the air in london is terrible, okay, so same thing is happening in new york okay, all right, new york is about a tenth the size of london in the time okay uh, same thing is happening in boston, um, but uh, these the? The trouble is that the cities continue to grow and as the city grows, there's a greater dependence on horses to provide transportation for people in cargo.

Ron: 28:56

Um, so it's uh is it sort of like a, like a, an often overlooked, I feel like the. When we're learning history and we're talking about, like, the industrial revolution, it seems like a very linear like. And then they started, you know, developing these machines and some, you know, proto-automation, and then people moved in the cities and everything like moved very like sort of uh uh, linearly and the way you would expect, and it evolved and now we got, now we got pcs, um, but there must have been like vestiges of the old world that were sort of like, you know, like horses right, that are not catching up or or evolving at the same rate as the other society changing things, right right, and it's because society has to to realize at some moment that an evolution is possible yeah and and up to this point, like horses have been the primary, I don't know, uh, mechanism of work.

Don: 29:54

I, I guess, right Since, like anyone can remember, like literally thousands of years. So like, why are we going to move away from the horse? We just need to figure out how to make the horse work in the this industrial environment that we've created.

Ron: 30:07

Right, you can get your steam donkey to, like you know, process some textiles, but you still need your normal donkey to walk to. Or, you know, pull people to the office. Right, right, right.

Don: 30:19

So so there are some, some ideas coming along to uh to try to adjust for the, the maintenance of these animals. So, um, stables we were laughing, I think, earlier today. But uh, big stable, um, uh, but uh, they were big like they. There were five story stables in Chicago like parking garages right. With vertical elevators to move horses and to move um, to move hay up and down, um the um. All right, then we have, uh like everything we're going to have equine influenza.

Don: 30:53

So, just like the bird flu is affecting egg prices today, when all of our cities are dependent on horses and all of a sudden the horses get the flu. Bad day, bad thing the whole city stops um. There actually were men in boston that had to pull the the streetcars honey, they just called me.

Ron: 31:12

I'm a horse today, so uh so and then um.

Don: 31:17

But I gave you, the problem is the, is the waste, um, so, uh, berlin, uh, an engineer in berlin comes up with the idea of um, of pneumatic system to remove waste okay a vacuum. Basically, a vacuum runs pipe underground and uh, and it can, can move the waste from one place to another does he ever get to employ this, or is this merely theoretical?

Don: 31:40

I'd love to know what the crap vacuum did in berlin um, the proposed system would require 87 miles of underground tubing, so this is uh, if it were employed in london. Um, and 4,000 horsepower of steam energy. So it's using a steam engine at 4,000 horsepower, so not actually 4,000 horses, but the calculations showed only processed 22% of the current waste production, a cost exceeding the entire city's annual budget.

Ron: 32:12

I'd love to be at that meeting. And they're like well uh, mayor, we could just uh build the city of the future, but it still won't take all the crap away.

Don: 32:23

Just like 20 percent yeah, um, the best system. I came out of paris, um, they had a rail-based system, uh, where they had night soil men who it's a great band name night soil which has been a job for a long time. Most uh prior versions of night soil men would come and remove human excrement from cesspools okay um, but the paris system involved a night system.

Don: 32:54

um, where they could, they would come in and scoop up piles that had been made during the day, and they were moved out of the city by rail rather than by cart. But that still was only able to handle 40% of the daily accumulation. So we have this like less than half.

Don: 33:13

So everyone's on this, though, right like it, this is a worldwide problem, or at least a uh like a a western metropolitan issue right, and all of the cities are here, like so paris is here, berlin is here, london is here, chicago is here, new york is here, boston's here, like everybody has the same problem okay, and all the brains best and brightest. You got all the brains in the room. Somebody should like. This should be fit Like. This is the time to fix it.

Ron: 33:38

Yeah, yeah Right.

Don: 33:39

It's been a problem. I mean, it was noted in 1850 and now the the meeting we're talking about taking place in 1894.

Ron: 33:46

Okay.

Don: 33:46

Yeah, so it's been half a century and and, and you can imagine, in 1850, they noticed there was a problem like how big the problem must be in 1894. We have, interestingly, since 1850, solved the problem of human waste in the cities.

Ron: 34:05

Okay, what's the solution? Are there treatment plants already? We just have sewers, sewers.

Don: 34:12

Yeah, so there were sewers in the early 1800s, but they all just dumped into the Thames Right.

Don: 34:17

And then there was a heat wave in 1858 and the Thames didn't flow as much as a heat wave and a drought. So the Thames didn't flow and everything was fermenting on the surface. The accumulated human waste on the banks was six feet deep. They had to cancel parliament because parliament couldn't stand the smell. Queen Victoria had to cancel her river cruise. No, yeah, not the Victoria river cruise. So so they hired an engineer named Basilgate who invented the, the sewer system. That was all enclosed and rather than just dumping open sewer into the, the thames uh is taken away to treatment plants, and it's actually still in use today same one.

Ron: 35:03

Yeah, the ancient treatment plants of the thames river it's only 150 years. Uh, that's, that's old enough to get a youtuber to go down there and film some weird videos, you know.

Don: 35:14

So I think that a lot of the the infrastructure of it has been replaced, but it runs along the same route. So, yeah, so so we've solved.

Ron: 35:22

The human race realizes a problem but this is because you can tell people where to put their waste right and and it is tougher to tell a horse yeah, yeah that is true, they're very inconsiderate indeed, so, um, so what do we do, right?

Don: 35:34

so we can't, if we can't, uh, figure out a way to mechanically remove the, the horse manure from the cities that is being accumulated by the bounty of horses that we need to do our work, how can we? How can we cut it back? How can we trim it down a little?

Ron: 35:50

bit. I just figured it out. Oh, I can't believe no one thought about this. Why can't they make like some sort of big horse diaper? Obviously it's not a diaper, somebody still has to empty it.

Don: 36:00

It doesn't take away the waste.

Ron: 36:02

Then we throw it in the new sewer. If we're already throwing everyone's waste down the Thames. We have this big net behind every horse. At the end of the day, throw it in the Thames.

Don: 36:16

I think they actually do do that in new york city today. I think the uh the, the cards they have in the uh in central park that you can. I think they have little like baskets under the yeah, yeah like catch your basket man I should have been a 19 1894 change the trajectory of our entire can we stop the bus here and leave me here? For a second.

Ron: 36:36

I feel like my life will take a more productive route.

Don: 36:42

So Chicago comes up with the idea. Okay, the Chicago delegation proposes strict horse licensing system with population caps and mandatory waste collection requirements.

Ron: 36:54

Yes, this would work. I'm all for this would work, right? So you're you're saying the people who own the horses and the companies that are running these public transportation uh, you know routes and things. They're responsible. We're putting a limit on how many horses they can have, so we're just trying to minimize the problem.

Don: 37:11

So we're like, okay, no, we're stopping growth, right no more horses and and you are you're artificially making it more expensive to own a horse by putting a licensing fee on it right, so you you wouldn't have too many horses, encouraging them to you would need to be more careful with how many horses you are using right and divest of unnecessary horses that's right okay, um, but that doesn't sound like it'll work.

Don: 37:33

Hmm, so uh, from the the proceedings of the conference. Uh, this the answer was the mathematics of commerce render population caps impossible. Each horse removed creates an economic opportunity that demands two more horses be added. So we can't regulate our way out of this crisis. Right, cause they're too essential. Right To what every like right. If you just take the horse away, the work that that horse was doing remains but, there's nobody there to do it.

Ron: 38:03

Yeah, you can't just employ more Boston guys to do what the horse did, right.

Don: 38:07

So we can't regulate it through.

Ron: 38:10

And Boston guys also. Just shit on the street, so it's not going gonna help either.

Don: 38:18

Um, vienna also has a regulation to propose. Vienna says uh, they are just going to create stable zoning laws okay and stable, meaning like a place to hold a horse, not like, oh sure, not changeable they kind of do that in london today.

Ron: 38:34

Right, they've got. The last time I went to london the taxi guy was uh really was really angry and just complaining to us about the uh, the the zoning laws that they have in different parts of london and what kind of cars you can drive there. Otherwise you have to pay a tax right right.

Don: 38:47

If you go through the, the centered parts of the city, you have to pay additional fees, unless you're in a ev or hybrid vehicle, right it's.

Ron: 38:55

I don't know that that's I'm pretty sure I could drive to london.

Don: 38:58

I have an ev now yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ron: 38:59

Exactly that's why he was complaining, because he's like they're trying to get us to buy these cars.

Don: 39:03

Well, so, uh, vienna's idea, uh, uh is, uh is also not doesn't work out. So the viennese, the viennese city planning board, uh says that our attempt to regulate stable locations has resulted in horses traveling further to reach their work sites, thus requiring more horses to compensate for the increased transit time each regulation seems to worsen the very problem it tends to solve is this what the island of dr moreau is about?

Ron: 39:31

are they trying to like create a better horse? I can see someone being like if only we could make a better horse, like a leaner, quicker smarter being.

Don: 39:41

I think this is an interesting uh, both of these are historically interesting components for me, though, because, uh, it's like the idea that we can regulate a solution to a huge societal yes, yeah, yeah right and and we always turn to our, our, our politicians and our and as regulators, to like we'll, you know, change the, change the law so that this doesn't happen if we tweak the parameters of what's acceptable, then behavior will change or new solutions will have to be discovered right, but in this particular case, the the horses are pooping, regardless of licensing fees or zoning laws, how many stables there are.

Don: 40:21

It doesn't. There's no way to stop, though you can't bet the cork in the horse right um there was, they tried it there were.

Don: 40:28

There were discussions about changing what horses were fed, right to see if it would reduce the volume of waste. Um, but I don't think they ever let's give them eels. What does that do? So here's the final assessment from the committee. This says we have examined 53 distinct proposals, from mechanical street cleaners to underground waste networks. The hard truth is, none of these solutions, even in combination, can match the pace of waste accumulation in our growing cities.

Ron: 40:58

Dang. So they? They said it's time to throw in the towel. We're giving up on Western civilization.

Don: 41:05

That's right, and so that's why. That's why civilization, the Chinese, can have it. So a Colonel, john Howell, a British railway engineer, delivered an, an address, an unscheduled address, and he said gentlemen, we have spent two weeks attempting to solve the wrong problem. Our crisis is not one of waste management, but of dependence on animal power at a scale that has become unsustainable. We must look. Look beyond the horse To the stars.

Ron: 41:37

I'm proposing we colonize Phobos.

Don: 41:42

And that's why the British were the first on the moon. Yeah, exactly In 1895.

Ron: 41:47

We've got a great alternate history sci-fi novel series here Don.

Don: 41:53

No, but he's right right.

Ron: 41:55

And this is starting to sound, quite frankly, chillingly relevant.

Don: 42:01

What? What do you mean? We don't use horses like this anymore. We don't have 62 foot cubes of horse manure being produced in our city every day.

Ron: 42:10

Thank God we made the horse extinct to solve the problem and then invented the automobile, um which I'm assuming was the solution to this right, but the one that no one could foretell right, right.

Don: 42:22

So so the solution is already in play because, um, carl benz uh has patented his, uh, his automobile, his vehicle powered by a gas engine, in 1886. But it's not right in any kind of wide use no one's got one in their, in their shed, in their stable and and the ones that are being produced are super expensive, so it's not something that could feasibly economically replace the horses.

Ron: 42:52

Yeah, was there anyone at this conference being like, let's just wait 25 years and see if we're all still here. Um, but uh like they must have been at least aware, right? But again like, uh, easy for us to say just wait for the car, idiots um, because we know it's coming.

Ron: 43:07

Yeah, we know it's coming, but they don't right and and uh, they don't even know if it would be adopted right or adaptable to like public use, right? Maybe it is just a thing that, like the queen, instead of going on the river Thames, she takes a car holiday.

Don: 43:23

Um so Benjamin Woods, in his closing address, says uh, we depart without solutions. Yet Perhaps this very failure is necessary. Only by accepting the impossibility of our current path can we open our minds to radical alternatives that we cannot yet imagine. Dang, and then they crossed the street through the horse yeah, back to their hotels.

Ron: 43:50

Yeah, hit the pub together. What do you got? What do you guys think of africa? Anyone interested in that place? Um, okay, so so they really they have to throw in the towel, they give up and and they just business as usual. Right, everyone goes back.

Don: 44:09

The horse remains a staple of life in london until and all the other cities new york comes back and they implement an emergency night soil only policy um, which restricts horse traffic during daylight hours in manhattan okay but everybody realizes that doesn't solve any of the problems. It just makes the nighttime the problem, because now you've got twice as many horses at nighttime on the same streets. London introduces stable ventilation systems, even though that doesn't do anything for the problem and do anything for the problem.

Don: 44:47

So then there is a problem in I'm checking today, 1895. We have a winter temperature inversion, that happens, and so there's Also very common today A cloud of aerial manure dust that hangs over the city for nine days. I'm never going back to london and hospital wards overflow with respiratory cases um, jesus, because of this, and so it was a.

Don: 45:21

It was a moment when people realized this wasn't just a waste manager, this is a health crisis. Right, right, right, this is a public health crisis. That has it transforms the debate from just being about waste management to being about how this is a direct threat to our human health. So the Manhattan street railway company declares bankruptcy, okay, despite increasing ridership. So it's not because they're, not because they don't have customers, but it's because they're spending so much money removing the horse poop Right, and they can't make money. The London's Metropolitan Board of Works also projects bankruptcy within three years if the waste management costs continue to rise. And so by 1898, everybody's doom and gloom that this is, this is a it's, it's reached a point where these.

Don: 46:14

The sustainability of horse-based transport is financially unsustainable, right, right, yeah, um. So what can we do? What's going going to happen?

Ron: 46:26

Oh well, world War I first.

Don: 46:31

No, not World War I first.

Ron: 46:34

Spanish-American War. Berlin does it. What's Berlin doing?

Don: 46:40

Berlin begins a large-scale trial of electric trams.

Ron: 46:43

Oh, okay, okay.

Don: 46:46

And so people look at the electric tram. It does require a significant infrastructure investment. Oh, okay, okay, because, yes, it's an expensive investment in infrastructure to start, but once it's in place, you've eliminated the crippling problem that is threatening to bring London and all the other cities to a poop-entrenched standstill, and I presume this is only feasible because of advancement in technology, right, right, not only do they, you know, can they now harness electricity, but they can harness it at the capacity that they could power these railways and they're using it to turn motors to make trams go forward.

Don: 47:38

Paris tries something with compressed air buses. I don't know how that would work. Seems like that would like you could go, ooh.

Ron: 47:44

Like the car we made in Boy Scouts, like the pine car derby Boy Scouts. I can't.

Don: 47:49

The pine car derby. Then you got to get out. Okay, everybody Pump, pump on the, and then in London we start using motor wagons.

Ron: 48:03

Okay.

Don: 48:04

And then, of course, in 1908, another famous American figures out a way to produce those automobiles invented by Carl Benz in a more efficient and cost effective way, and that's Mr Ford. Mr Ford with the Model T. So just waiting about 10 years. The horse problem seems to resolve because now there's a widespread adoption of motor vehicles to take that place, and that's why the world is so much cleaner today.

Ron: 48:32

Yeah, thanks, horses. Thanks for stepping to the side and letting the incredibly clean automobile take your place. But this is what I was saying earlier. Right, I can see, maybe, why this grabbed your imagination. Who doesn't like talking about horse cooters? No, it's bawdy and, uh, it is kind of astonishing to me that I've never heard about this until now. This seems to me like a like an important uh story in the sort of narrative of the advancement of human civilization right like it's not so clean and there are constantly issues that arise and sometimes, uh, you know, seemingly civilization threatening issues and health crises, right.

Ron: 49:19

Um, and obviously that, like I'm seeing a clear parallel here between the current climate crisis, right, it seems like we're kind of back in a in a, our, our, our city is full of horse, uh poop, uh world. How do you see that? Instead of the horse poop, what if the horses were farting? And what if? What?

Ron: 49:38

if the horses were steel beasts. And what if everyone had one or more of these in their uh stable attached to their house? Right, um, obviously, the the pollution created by fossil fuels, um is creating, uh, both health crises and, uh, you know, weather crises and you know ecosystem crises. Uh, the world over, right, um, and we it sounds like similar to 1894, right, this big conference. We've had several of these. Right, we have climate conferences between nations to try and address this problem and it would seem, thus far we have unsuccessfully addressed it like to talk about.

Don: 50:29

Why, like what? What do you think? Why that is so. In 1894, at the, the conference that we've been talking about, there was a representatives of 43 cities from across the world talking about the, the manure crisis. Um, in 2015, the paris climate conference, we had 196 nations there, so three times as many yeah, uh in 1894, the new New York City air quality crisis, we had 1,200 deaths from bad air, yeah, right.

Don: 50:55

2015, global air pollution deaths was 4.2 million, right, right. So the problem is way bigger than the problem was 120 years ago. Yeah, yeah. But why are we choosing to not solve the problem when we have the technologies to do it, right?

Ron: 51:10

Yeah, well, it sounds like a similar on the face value. This is not my ending hypothesis, but on face value it would seem like there's a similar reliability. Or we're stuck on our reliability on fossil fuels as energy right, like that. We cannot find cheaper sources of energy. And, yeah, we've got wind turbines, we've got solar uh cells and batteries right to provide those clean energy sources. But thus far we have not seen the necessary or requisite investment in those uh technologies. To uh, like you, you know, power, berlin, right, we, we like the, the horse has still got to be there. The automobile is still going to be there and, uh, you know, not even just the automobile but, like you know, fossil fuels are utilized in the power generators. Uh, the power, almost all of our cities et cetera, our cities, etc.

Ron: 52:08

Right, um, so it seems like we haven't yet taken that step to make that infrastructure switch or investment that you said berlin took back in. What, 1895, or when was it?

Don: 52:18

1894? Yeah, and it's. It's that infrastructure piece that is is the stumbling block, I think, because if we go back to to 1850, when benjamin disraeli first noticed the poop problem, um it there was a resistance to wanting to change, because no one could fathom right that there would be a world where the, where the horse was not the primary mover of goods and people. And I think what you're saying. We are also living in a world where we cannot imagine a future that doesn't depend on fossil fuel. But I wonder how much of that resistance is manufactured by corporate interests in maintaining a level of profitability in a system that is is polluting the world where, if we would switch those to investing in cleaner energies, right that at some point it would be cheaper.

Don: 53:22

Just just how running a car is cheaper than paying for a horse, cause you don't have to feed a car as much, no, and the maintenance is cheaper. But when that switch was happening in the early 20th century, there was resistance to. You know, there were jobs in hay storage, there were jobs in manure processing, there was jobs in fertilizing sales.

Ron: 53:45

There was jobs in farming, the guy driving the.

Don: 53:47

Zamboni. So there's lots of employment that is behind that, but it doesn't mean like it wouldn't make sense for us today to say, well, a solution to the climate crisis would be to go back to horses, right right, right exactly. You always have to take that step forward, and that step forward is an economic opportunity.

Ron: 54:07

As long as you can let go of that opportunity you're you currently have and you've landed on on my hypothesis I was alluding to earlier too, which is I think it's it's predominantly a corporate one right, which is, um, right now, if you are exxon mobil, if you're shell, if you're bp right, your money comes from taking a free resource from the ground and turning it into gold, essentially right. And whereas a lot of these companies do make investments in other forms of energy, right, wind turbines and you know, et cetera. But it's very minimal. And you know, because they say look until we receive returns on those investments similar to the kinds of profits ExxonMobil expects to make based on, you know, all the oil that we've been extracting. We're not going to make that transition, right. And that's just because those companies are not, you know, like the big stables of yore, right, they're not very interested in having to completely switch their entire business model when the current one seems to be working just fine.

Don: 55:20

Depends how you measure it. It's working just fine in their profitability, like you say. But you know, if you look back at the transition from horse to motor vehicle, it looks like about 70% of London stable owners and horse industry transitioned to motor vehicle services by 1910.

Ron: 55:44

So it didn't take that long, right? No, yeah.

Don: 55:47

And they found success in the new technology. So it wasn't something that like yes, it was a change in a transition, but it wasn't something that was, it didn't obliterate.

Ron: 55:57

Right, right. It wasn't entirely destabilizing, or?

Don: 56:00

anything like that.

Ron: 56:01

Yeah, and you were saying earlier, like that the people of 1894 had a hard time like envisioning this world right, like how, how they could be unshackled from the you know the manacles of the horse, and I'm not sure that is the problem. Today, though, right Like I do think it's a lot of people can imagine a world right that is less reliant on fossil fuels. We've done this before in like more recent memory, to like leaded gasoline was like a huge public health crisis issue that, uh, you know doesn't.

Ron: 56:35

It doesn't exist anymore, right Um, but through regulation, but it didn't take away gasoline. Exactly Right it didn't require the sort of right, uh, massive transformation from these sorts of, you know, powerful companies that this uh problem awfully uh obviously will require Right Um. But, like you said, we've got the technologies right Um. I think there's a lot of public will, or we just sort of seem to lack, uh, you know, the ability to budge these uh, these large groups right the ability to budge these, uh, these large groups.

Don: 57:10

Right, that, and? And it's a, it's a, it's a global issue, Right, and? And if you owned a horse and we could pile up the manure that your horse produced outside your house, like you would say oh, that's gross. And I don't want that in front of my house.

Ron: 57:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don: 57:23

Right, but when you're driving, we're driving your car down the street and, like the pollution, doesn't follow you like it it, you know and it's invisible right and it disperses, and it spreads, and, and so there's no. It's not easy to quantify how much effect me as an individual is having on the environment where, if I could watch my horse poop, I would be, and, and it's also, like, you gave us some figures about the uh number of people who die from air pollution, right, was it?

Ron: 57:52

last year and recently, 2015, 2.2 million, yeah, um, those are also deaths where people don't just oh my gosh, my lungs, ah. Right, like those are multitudinous diseases and it's hard to link those to right actual quality of air, right, even though those are probably the most likely sources of those diseases, right? So, like, it is just a, it's a harder thing for a normal person to sort of see and feel right, especially when you're saying like, hey, your car the thing that you rely on to get to work, because this is how we've designed our society so that everyone is super far apart, at least in america, right, and the public transportation isn't really there.

Ron: 58:33

Um, the way it could be. Uh, it's hard to say. Like, these are parts of the problem, right, right, the electricity, that everything runs on right it's not even like I don't really like putting the onus on people who own cars to be like, hey, switch to an ev, that's going to fix the problem, like it's not, because your ev is still drawing electricity from a power plant that is utilizing fossil fuels. Right, um, it requires not just like, personal change, it requires societal change.

Don: 58:59

And I wish that I, our society, would support that change faster. I hope that it doesn't get to the point that the 1894 conference arrived at, which is basically we can't solve this problem.

Don: 59:11

And you know, from our perspective, like you pointed out, like we can say well, it wasn't that bad, because, you know, a few years later a new technology came along and solved that problem for them, or changed the problem to an invisible one, to an invisible one, and uh, but, uh. But if we get to to another point where we, we can't solve the problem anymore, like that's kind of scary, for me.

Ron: 59:34

I do think there are a lot. This is, this is an issue I used to kind of uh volunteer my time and my activist energy for, uh for a long time, um, and I do a little less now than I used to, but it's something I feel fairly informed about. But I do think there are a lot of people who believe, oh, we just need to wait for the next car to be invented. Right, there will be a technological solution. We'll have, you know, nuclear cold fusion, exactly right, and these technologies will save us. But the only problem is like those are really big ifs right To hedge our bets on right Like the, the, the horse, people were lucky that Mr Ford showed up to to help them out. So, so well, um, uh, and this presence uh problem maybe seems a little bit larger and more all encompassing than than the. The status of the really rotten streets in London.

Don: 1:00:35

Well, thank you Ron.

Ron: 1:00:36

Appreciate talking poop with you today, yeah, I really wasn't expecting that coming over here, don, and now that I know that's on the table, I'm going to be a little bit more reticent to show up for these conversations, but I can't say that it wasn't entertaining and it wasn't a fun time.

Don: 1:00:49

Watch your step on the way home.

Ron: 1:00:51

Thank you.