A Brief History of Motion Read online

  Map of Pompeii, showing its system of alternating one-way streets, much like that found in modern-day Manhattan (after Poehler, The Traffic Systems of Pompeii).

  A different approach to traffic management was imposed in Pompeii, a town 150 miles south of Rome. Pompeii was founded in the sixth century B.C.E. by the Oscan people and became a Roman colony in the first century B.C.E. It had a fairly regular grid of streets, but they had not been planned with vehicles in mind and were unable to cope with growing volumes of traffic as the town prospered, becoming a popular resort for wealthy Romans. So the local authorities introduced a series of traffic-control measures, including detours to alleviate pressure on particularly busy streets or junctions, and an increasingly elaborate system of alternating one-way streets, much like that found in modern-day Manhattan, to prevent blockages on narrow streets that were unable to accommodate two-way traffic. The rules of Pompeii’s traffic system, and the changing patterns of traffic flow, can be inferred from analysis of the shape of curbstones, particularly those at junctions, and the distinctive wear marks made on them by metal-rimmed wheels. Evidence from multiple Roman sites suggests that other towns introduced similar measures.

  Timgad, a later Roman city founded around 100 C.E. in Algeria by Emperor Trajan, was planned from the start to accommodate vehicular traffic in a way that Pompeii had not been. One third of the city’s area, more than twice the proportion in Pompeii, was given over to streets, which were on average more than fifteen feet across. They were all wide enough for two-lane traffic and were laid out on a regular grid. Many streets had colonnaded sidewalks to separate pedestrians and vehicles. An abundance of ramps, stable areas, and stone troughs to provide water for animals suggest that Timgad was built to support a higher density of traffic than Pompeii.

  And when it came to two-way traffic, Romans clearly preferred to drive on the right, judging by evidence from wear marks on curbstones and the positioning of ramps in Pompeii, Timgad, and other Roman sites. As with many other aspects of Roman life, the evidence is most abundant in Pompeii, as a result of the city’s preservation under a blanket of volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. About three quarters of Pompeii’s streets could accommodate only a single lane of traffic, but analysis of hundreds of wear marks on its larger, two-lane streets indicates that vehicles almost always traveled on the right. On the Via di Nola, for example, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, 89 percent of the wear marks are associated with right-side driving. Visual depictions of Roman funeral processions and chariot races, on funerary urns and in mosaics, also indicate a preference for driving on the right.

  This preference may have been practical in nature. Most people are right-handed, and when driving a cart or wagon being pulled by two or four horses, a right-handed person will prefer to sit on the left-hand side of the vehicle, or on the rearmost, left-hand horse, to be able to reach all the animals with a whip held in the right hand. And when sitting on the left, it is easier to drive on the right because it puts the driver close to the center of the road, providing better visibility of oncoming traffic and of vehicles passing on the other side of the road. For the Romans, right-side driving also had positive religious connotations. They likened life to a forked path where the virtuous choice was always on the right, and when entering temples and other buildings, they tried to ensure that their right foot was the first to cross the threshold. This is why sinister (the Latin word for “left”) also came to mean “evil” or “unlucky.”

  The need for rules and infrastructure to accommodate vehicles was starting to shape the layout of cities and the texture of urban life. In Rome, vehicles and pedestrians were segregated across time: the narrow streets belonged to people during the day and to vehicles at night. In Timgad, they were segregated across space, with raised and colonnaded sidewalks for people, and wide roads to allow traffic to circulate—an early manifestation of the mistaken idea that providing more space for vehicles is the way to prevent traffic jams. But a countervailing trend was the Roman preference, starting in the first century C.E., for wide, ornamental boulevards that were closed to traffic and served as grand, pedestrianized public spaces flanked by civic buildings, fountains, and public amenities. Pompeii’s system of traffic detours was necessary, in part, because of the closure of some of its main thoroughfares to vehicular traffic. The Romans were among the first to grapple with the challenges of traffic management, and the need to balance the provision of a pleasant environment for pedestrians versus the efficient flow of vehicles.

  Do we still rely on Roman standards today? According to a popular internet meme, modern railway gauges in America are directly descended from the widths of the ruts in Roman roads, as found in Pompeii and other Roman sites. The American gauge was supposedly chosen to match the standard railway gauge in Britain, which in turn matched the standard gauge for horse-drawn carts and wagons—and that, so the story goes, was chosen to allow vehicles to run in the ruts in old Roman roads. American standard gauge (4 feet 8.5 inches, or 1.43 meters) does closely match the average Roman gauge (derived from wheel ruts) of 1.4 meters. But ever since the first wheeled vehicles emerged, their gauge has been consistent, falling in the range of 1.3 to 1.6 meters, with an average of 1.45 meters. Moreover, several gauges seem to have been in use in the Roman world, and the ruts in Pompeii (which were worn down by the passing traffic, rather than deliberately cut to act as tramways for vehicles) are wide enough to cope with a range of gauges from 1.3 to 1.6 meters. Also, multiple gauges were in use for farm wagons in Britain before the invention of railways, and both British and American railways used a variety of gauges before standardizing on 1.43 meters.

  So there is no direct line of descent from Roman wagons to modern trains. Instead, it is more accurate to say that for thousands of years vehicles had their wheels, on average, about 1.43 meters apart. Another problem with this theory is that it assumes that rutted Roman roads remained in continuous use in Britain until the eighteenth century. In fact, most Roman roads fell into disrepair after the end of Roman rule. In much of North Africa, roads and wheeled vehicles were abandoned altogether in favor of camels. In Europe, meanwhile, horses emerged as the most prestigious means of transport. The adoption of the wheel had hit another bump in the historical road.

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  Your Carriage Awaits

  Moreover, as Man is the most noblest of all Creatures, and all foure-footed Beasts are ordayned for his use and service; so a Cart is the Embleme of a Man, and a Coach is the Figure of a Beast; For as Man hath two legges, a Cart hath two wheeles … as much as Men are superior to Beasts, so much are honest and needfull Carts more nobly to be regarded and esteemed, above needlesse, upstart, fantasticall, and Time-troubling Coaches.

  —JOHN TAYLOR, “THE WORLD RUNNES ON WHEELES,” 1623

  WHY REAL MEN RODE HORSES

  When a giant statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was commissioned around 176 C.E., there was only one form it could possibly take if it was to reflect the majesty of the world’s most powerful man. Marcus Aurelius presided over a period of relative political stability during the era now known as the golden age of Rome. He was respected as a just ruler and a skilled general who oversaw successful military campaigns against the Parthian Empire, the kingdom of Armenia, and assorted Germanic tribes. And thanks to his writings, he came to be revered as a philosopher as well as an emperor. The statue, 4.25 meters (14 feet) tall, was made of bronze covered in a layer of gold. It depicted the emperor wearing a toga, raising his right arm in triumph—and sitting on a horse.

  Ever since cavalry had superseded war chariots on the battlefields, rulers had chosen to present themselves as heroic equestrians rather than charioteers, and horses had become the preferred means of transport for high-status men. In Rome, the emperor and his entourage would always take to the field on horseback, which both elevated them above ordinary soldiers and gave them a better view of the battle. (This was in an era before stirrups and rigid saddles, so they rode bareba
ck, or sitting on layers of cloth—something modern swords-and-sandals movies often get wrong.) A relief on a triumphal arch erected at around the same time shows vanquished enemies submitting to Marcus Aurelius as he towers over them on his horse. The giant statue may originally have featured a defeated enemy chieftain cowering beneath the horse’s raised front foot.

  While men rode horses, wheeled vehicles had come to be associated with Rome’s elite women. The prohibition on the use of passenger vehicles within Roman towns and cities was slowly relaxed from the first century C.E., starting at the top. Messalina and Agrippina, respectively the third and fourth wives of the emperor Claudius, were given special permission by the Senate to ride in a carpentum, an ornate two-wheeled cart with an arched covering, cushions, and silk curtains. This privilege was then extended to all emperors’ wives, then senators’ wives, and finally all well-to-do women. Carts and wagons were used to transport goods. But for Roman politicians and generals, the rules were clear: the only dignified way to travel was on horseback.

  The disdain for wheels was not limited to the Roman world. Heroic depictions of Persian and Assyrian rulers had switched to showing them on horseback, rather than driving chariots, centuries earlier. And in the post-Roman period, camels replaced wheeled vehicles across North Africa, and as far east as modern Afghanistan; unlike carts or wagons, camels did not need roads and could easily cross deserts. After the fall of Rome wheels held on in Europe, at least, in the form of carts and wagons that carried agricultural loads. But in the centuries that followed, high-ranking European men aspired to the ideal of the valiant knight on horseback and came to see riding in a cart or wagon, rather than on a horse, as humiliating and shameful, and to be avoided at all costs. Einhard, a ninth-century scholar in the court of Charlemagne, mocked earlier Frankish kings for riding “in a cart, drawn by a yoke of oxen driven, peasant-fashion, by a plowman.” Charlemagne, he implied, was a proper king because he rode a horse. Similarly, Jordanus Ruffus, knight farrier to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, observed around 1250 that “no animal is more noble than the horse, since it is by horses that princes, magnates and knights are separated from lesser people.” A lord, he declared, “cannot fittingly be seen among private citizens except through the mediation of a horse.”

  The Knight of the Cart, a twelfth-century poem by Chrétien de Troyes, a French writer, illustrates the low regard in which wheeled vehicles had come to be held in the medieval period. It tells the story of Lancelot, a legendary Arthurian knight, on a quest to rescue Queen Guinevere. Having lost his horse, Lancelot encounters a cart-driving dwarf. At the time, Chrétien explains, carts were used as tools of punishment: any man convicted of a crime was placed on a cart and paraded through the streets, losing his honor and all his legal rights. So when the dwarf says he will only tell Lancelot what has become of the queen if he boards his cart, Lancelot hesitates. But such is his love for Guinevere that he overcomes his reluctance and climbs aboard. He then finds that people will not help him in his quest because by riding in a cart he is taken to be a lowly criminal, while knights mock him for having traveled in such a dishonorable manner. He is told, “Any knight is disgraced throughout the land after being in a cart.”

  The tale reflects the view of the time that a man is not truly a man unless he is riding on a horse. For women, however, the opposite was true: riding on horseback was considered indecent (not to mention impractical, given women’s clothing at the time). Instead, continuing the Roman tradition, the appropriate manner for high-status women to travel over long distances was in an enclosed wagon, away from prying eyes. Four-wheeled wagons had by this time become much easier to maneuver with the addition of steerable front wheels, a Roman innovation. Such a wagon would be driven by a postilion, or by a male driver who was not a member of the elite; any men accompanying the wagon would be on horseback. Particularly ornate vehicles were used as bridal conveyances at weddings—a stereotype that lives on in fairy tales in which knights on horseback fall in love with princesses who travel in bejeweled carriages. Consider, for example, the arrival of Beatrice of Naples in Hungary in 1476:

  The Princess, then bride-elect to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, came to Buda in 1476 with a large suite. The bridegroom-King, accompanied by three thousand mounted noblemen, went to meet her at Fehérvár where she arrived in a gilded coach covered with gold-embroidered green velvet. The members of the Princess’s suite travelled in seven richly gilded coaches, each of which was drawn by six horses; the coachmen wore velvet suits with gold buttons.

  But this was hardly an everyday occurrence. By the year 1500 the majority of wheeled vehicles, in the parts of the world where they were still being used at all, were lowly two-wheeled agricultural carts. Five thousand years after the invention of the wheel, it was still not in widespread use. In North Africa and much of the Middle East it had been abandoned altogether; medieval Arabic and Persian do not even have words for wheeled vehicles, and travelers’ accounts as late as the eighteenth century remark on their total absence in the Arab world. In Europe, meanwhile, wheeled vehicles had come to be seen as socially unacceptable by elite men. But then, during the sixteenth century, European attitudes toward wheeled vehicles underwent a sudden turnaround. You might call it a revolution.

  HOW COACHES BECAME COOL

  The clue to the trigger for this change in attitudes, and its geographic origin, lies in a single word: kocsi. Kocs (which is pronounced “coach”) was a Hungarian village on the road from Buda to Vienna. Somehow this village gave its name to a kind of four-wheeled vehicle, the kocsi (pronounced “coachee”), and as the adoption of this vehicle spread westward to other European countries, the name traveled with it and was incorporated as a loanword into other languages: first into Czech and Serbian, and then into German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, and English. Something new about the coach meant it was deemed an acceptable form of transport for high-status men, who put aside their disdain for wheeled conveyances. Yet there was nothing particularly new about its design: although coaches had steerable front wheels, and various forms of suspension, both of those innovations were hundreds of years old. Instead, some other factor prompted the coach’s rapid adoption, by persuading men that riding in one was just as manly as riding a horse. So what was it?

  Perhaps it was simply speed: coaches may have been particularly light and fast compared with previous forms of four-wheeled wagon. But it seems more likely that, like chariots before them, coaches came to be held in high regard because of their military connotations—and, in particular, a novel military use for wagons that emerged in the late fifteenth century. Facing the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire, Hungarian commanders adopted a new tactic: arranging wagons on the battlefield in a ring and chaining them together to form a wagon fort, a mobile defensive fortification that could resist cavalry charges. The wagons, equipped with gunports, also acted as protected platforms from which men could fire a small cannon or an early form of gun called an arquebus. This cutting-edge combination of wagons and gunpowder weapons made armored knights on horseback look suddenly old-fashioned. And that may explain why men across Europe decided that riding in fancy wagons was not so embarrassing after all—provided they were referred to as coaches, a name borrowed from the country where this new idea had emerged.

  By 1560, the thriving city of Antwerp, which had emerged as the financial center of Europe, had more than five hundred coaches. (There were said to be just two coaches in London at the time, and three in Paris.) Enthusiasm for coaches spread quickly, starting with European royalty. A chronicler in England recorded that in 1564 Walter Rippon—who had supposedly built “the first coche that ever was made in England,” for the Earl of Rutland, in 1555—constructed “the first hollow turning coche for Her Majesty [Elizabeth I], being then her servant.” This vehicle was covered (hollow) and had a pivoted front axle (turning). Fancy coaches were favored gifts between European monarchs: in 1582 Henri III of France gave Elizabeth an “exceeding marvellous princely
coche” as a gift, after she had sent him some English hunting dogs. This was not merely an act of generosity: it was also a display of one-upmanship because the coach was the pinnacle of transport technology, and Henri wanted to demonstrate the skill of his French coachmakers.

  Coaches rapidly became status symbols and “coaching” (driving for pleasure in a coach) emerged as a leisure activity, and a means of showing off, among people wealthy enough to own one or more coaches. This raised concerns in some quarters that noblemen might lose the ability to ride horses, which would make them less useful in a military conflict. In 1588 one German prince, Julius von Braunschweig, introduced rules to discourage coaching, on the grounds that “the manly virtues, dignity, courage, honor and loyalty of the German nation were impaired, as carriage-driving was equal to idling and indolence.” But this did little to stem the popularity of coach driving, or the competition between coach owners to impress onlookers with the luxury and opulence of their vehicles.

  For those unable to afford their own coaches, the new vehicles could be hired for short journeys within cities. In London, as the roads began to fill up with coach traffic, a bill was debated in Parliament in 1601 “to restrain the excessive use of coaches.” By this time the Moroccan embassy in London had four coaches and the Russian embassy had eight; in 1603, at the accession of James I, the French delegation consisted of thirty coaches. Traffic jams, one Londoner observed, were so bad at times that coaches were “like mutton pies in a cook’s oven, hardly can you thrust a pole between.” Many parts of London were “villainously pestered” by the new vehicles. Watermen, who had traditionally ferried Londoners around in hired boats on the Thames River, saw a dramatic drop in their income as coaches ate into their business. John Taylor, a London waterman who rowed actors and playwrights across the river and subsequently became a poet, denounced the rise of coaches in his 1622 poem “An Arrant Thief.” He observed that in 1558 “when Queen Elizabeth came to the crown, A coach in England then was scarcely known.” But now, for him and his fellow watermen, “all our profit runs away on wheels” because of the rise of the “upstart Hell-cart-coaches.” The following year he complained in another poem of “upstart four-wheeled tortoises,” “damming up the streets and lanes”; this was, he declared, “the rattling, roaring, rumbling age, and The World runnes on Wheeles.” A law passed in 1662 limited the number of such “hackney carriages” to four hundred, but this proved inadequate, and the limit was raised to seven hundred in 1694. And the number of private carriages was far higher.