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Victorian anxiety and the second advent of the 'motorised carriage'
October 1999
The prime purpose of TransScan is to look forward and monitor change. With the world entering the new millennium, we decided to turn the scanning process back one hundred years to discover what people were expecting from the 20th Century - particularly in areas of mobility and the built environment.
Although people a century ago were not used to the term "mobility and the built environment", travel and living conditions were certainly a major preoccupation.
Here in Western Australia, the gold rush was still at it height - and so was the rush of people making the hazardous trip half way round the world to be part of it.
In 1901, Perth's population was nearly 44,000 - four times as many as ten years before and 70% of those newcomers had been born overseas.
All were very much part of the Steam Age - and if they were born in Britain, as many were, they had also been reared on a diet of Steam Age disasters, modern marvels and social inequities.
They had read, with awe, of countless attempts to build flying machines yet they seemed remarkably ambivalent to the efforts to construct "personal motorised carriages". What did concern them was travel safety and if they could afford it, they bought insurance every time they made a long journey.
Their anxiety was fuelled by newspapers like London's "Daily Graphic" which carried endless reports of lost ships and rail accidents, often with vivid artists' impressions of the victims and disaster scenes.
As historian Ralph Harrington puts it: "Just as the Victorian railway was a vast, dramatic and highly visible expression of technology triumphant, so the railway accident constituted a uniquely sensational and public demonstration of the price which that triumph demanded - "violence, destruction, terror and trauma."
In fact, there were so many accidents it had become necessary to equip every major railway station in Britain with its own "Breakdown or Wrecking Train" to provide assistance.
But beyond the smoke and steam and the dark urban slums of the Industrial Revolution, the first precepts of modern planning were being formed with visions of a greener, healthier future.
In 1898, London-born Ebenezer Howard published his book: "To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform" - reissued four years later as, "Garden Cities of To-morrow".
It was to mark the beginning of modern planning, and its ideas were to have a major influence on William Bold - the Lancashire-born engineer who in 1900 was to become Perth's Town Clerk and remain the city council's senior officer for 44 years.
When he started his job, May Vivienne was describing Perth as "a handsome and prosperous city, with noble buildings on all sides, electric light, tramcars, beautifying parks around it, and yachts dancing on the broad waters of the Swan River."
But the huge population growth was creating major problems and Bold adopted many of Howard's concepts for "garden cities" to shape Perth. After garden cities like Letchworth and Hampstead in England, and Margarethenhohe and Hellerau in Germany took shape, Bold created Perth's "garden suburb" of Floreat.
The end of the 19th Century also prompted intense speculation about the future - and what life would be like in 2000.
In Paris in 1900, commercial artist Jean Marc Cote, was drawing imaginative pictures of people in the 21st Century boarding flying taxis while above them the sky was full of personal flying machines.
At the same time in London scientist, Sir William Crookes, was speculating that 21st Century people would be living in domed cities. Across the city, Sir John Wolfe Barry, the engineer who designed London's Tower Bridge, had a radical proposal for keeping people mobile using "moving platforms" he had seen demonstrated at the Paris Exhibition.
What Victorians were uncertain about was the future of the "motor carriage".
In the late 1890s the prospect of small, self-powered road vehicles was creating public interest - but only the very wealthy were expected to be able to afford them.
In fact, motorised bicycles were seen to be the most likely form of popular private travel although even then the cost was expected to be prohibitive.
One estimate suggested that installing a motor on a bicycle would triple its cost (up from 15 pound Stirling to say, 45 pounds) and still leave the user with "a shilling or two a day" to pay for fuel.
Remarkably, the advent of private "motor carriages" was not seen as "new". As G.R. Fleming commented in the 1896 edition of Good Words, there had been numerous efforts as far back as the 1830s to introduce motorised road vehicles. What had stopped the technology said Fleming, was "too stringent laws, and the improvements in railway facilities which have hitherto satisfied the public."
It is interesting to speculate just how road transport might have developed had the original steam designs been given more encouragement in the 1830s.
But as the 19th Century closed, there was no turning back on the second advent of "motor carriages".
By 1900 Karl Benz had produced more than 2000 such vehicles using petrol engines; Henry Ford had been in business three years; and electric powered taxis were being tried in New York.
Less certain was whether anyone would ever be able to build a practical flying machine. In 1900 not even Wilbur Wright was convinced.
Then in Germany in July, Count von Zeppelin, watched by several hundred enthusiastic onlookers, successfully launched his 415 ft long air-ship from Lake Constance.
According to an eyewitness: "We heard the order 'Los!' - 'let go!' - and amid indescribable excitement, the monster air-ship majestically rose above us."
Powered flight had begun.
