The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

Stephen Davies, a history lecturer in Manchester, England, did an excellent piece recently in the magazine of the Foundation for Economics Education. It was entitled "The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894" and it explained how innovation in a free marketplace solved the problem urban planners of that day said was unsolvable. You see, in the 1890's horses were the primary means of moving things around, including people, and as the cities grew the number of horses grew. It was estimated that New York City had 100,000 horses producing 2.5-million pounds of horse manure every day, and they couldn't just let it pile up. London's problem was even more critical. So, in 1894 an international urban planning conference was held in New York to see how planners could solve this problem.

There was, no doubt, talk about passing laws to halt the growth, and even laws limiting the size of horses that could be used for various purposes. Certainly governments should keep those pesky cars and buses out of the city because they scared the horses. Eventually, the urban planners went home in a gloomy mood. Their mistake was that they assumed, as planners usually do, that the trend would go forward as in the past, and that only new laws limiting the number of horses could solve the horse manure crisis.

But out in the free marketplace innovators and entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity ... Henry Ford, Gottfried Daimler and others. And as it became more costly to maintain a horse in the city, cars and buses and electric trolleys did what urban planners could never envision: they solved the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. Every now and then I think we've got something we can learn from history.

This is Gordon Sawyer, from a window on historic Green Street.