Today, let's ride a gig, or a hack, or a phaeton.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Never was I so struck by the
erasure of an epoch in American life as I was the
evening I recently spoke at the Carriage Museum in
Stony Brook, New York. I had little idea what to
expect when I entered. I hadn't known I was about
to see one of the finest collections of horse-drawn
vehicles in the world.
I'd hardly given a thought to horse-drawn
transportation and now I faced beauty and variety
far beyond anything I'd imagined. It made me wonder
what a visitor from the 23rd century would think on
his first visit to a museum of 20th century powered
vehicles. What a shock all that variety of Mack
Trucks, Duesenbergs, Fords, golf carts and fire
trucks would be!
So it is with carriages. The array of carriages is
newer than you might think. Riding alone on
horseback couldn't give way to three and four
wheeled vehicles until Europe began developing
extensive road systems. The closed carriage
probably came out of a Hungarian town whose name
was spelled K-o-c-z and pronounced, coach. That was
in the 15th century, and the name, coach, stuck.
A century later, vehicles had evolved leaf spring
suspensions and better seating arrangements. Still,
English carriage builders didn't form their first
guild until 1677. By the 18th century, carriages
were forcing the development of greatly improved
roads. In 1815, MacAdam invented his bituminous
macadamized road surface.
All this was sophisticated technology. We didn't
begin serious carriage building this side of the
Atlantic until shortly before the American
Revolution. The first uniquely American rig was the
pleasure wagon, a light basketlike vehicle. Next
was the American buggy, the 19th century Model-T of
personal transportation.
We also built closed coaches, but utility seems
to've marked American building. I see the greatest
beauty in the lightness and buoyancy of those
modest buggies, shays, and phaetons. (A phaeton had
a light convertible top over a front seat, with an
open rumble seat behind.)
Oliver Wendell Holmes celebrated that delicacy in
his poem about the The
Wonderful 'One-Horse Shay', which was
designed so perfectly that it lasted a hundred
years and then fell into dust all at once. Holmes
was a doctor, wishing the human body could work
that way.
One of the notable 19th century buggy makers was
the Studebaker company. But few other makers
survived the transition to motor cars. The new
engines were far more powerful than horses and they
soon devalued the lightness and grace of the old
carriages. As a child, I saw the last horse drawn
vehicles on my city streets. They were, by then,
shabby and worn.
And I didn't know, before I entered this museum,
all the functional beauty that vanished in a blink
during my parent's lives.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
The Carriage Collection. Stony Brook, NY: The
Museums at Stony Brook, 1986 (no author given.)
19th Century American Carriages: Their
Manufacture, Decoration and Use. Stony Brook,
NY: The Museums at Stony Brook, 1987 (no author
given.)
The Carriage Museum. Stony Brook, NY: The
Museums at Stony Brook, 1987 (no author given.)
I am grateful to Amanda Meyers and Bill Ayres, from
The Museums at Stony Brook for their help with this
episode. The correct name of this particular museum
is "The Dorothy and Ward Melville Carriage House."
Check out the informative website of The Museums at
Stony Brook, at:
http://www.museumsatstonybrook.org/
Image courtesy of the Carriage
Collection, Stony Brook Museums
A Buckboard Phaeton, after 1880
Image courtesy of the Carriage
Collection, Stony Brook Museums
The end of an era: A Stanhope Buggy built by
Studebaker
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1998 by John H.
Lienhard.
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