Horsebus: The Bus That Pooped — Pilcrow Magazine

On March 18, 1662, the first public bus service began promoted by Blaise Pascal. It operated in Paris as the Carosses a Cinq Sous until 1675. From the article:

"Horsebus: The Bus That Pooped — Pilcrow Magazine

The world’s first bus was invented by a genius, and it was a terrible failure.

Today, Blaise Pascal is recognized as a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, author and inventor. He developed probability theory, explored the behaviour of liquids and gases, and posited the existence of a Supreme Deity via a mental exercise called Pascal’s Wager, which is taught in Philosophy 100 classes to this day.

And, in 1662 Paris, he decided to dabble in public transit. Pascal launched the first bus line, the Carosses à Cinq Sous, or Five-Penny Coaches. Each coach carried six or eight passengers. Some sources claim there were three routes; others say six, with one of them being circular. What everybody can agree on is that Pascal’s idea sucked.

Despite being a brilliant polymath, Pascal failed to realize that rich people don't ride the bus.
Despite being a brilliant polymath, Pascal failed to realize that rich people don't ride the bus.

French society was strictly feudal at the time - these were the days of King Louis XIV - and Pascal’s horse-drawn buses only accepted members of the nobility and gentry. Peasants and soldiers were not allowed to mix with these esteemed personages. Pascal had funding from rich friends and a monopoly declared by the Sun King himself, but it wasn’t enough to keep people’s interest. Noble riders enjoyed the novelty for a while, but it soon wore off. The buses struggled to keep operating and, by 1675, had shut down completely.

It would be more than a century before anyone tried buses again.

In 1826, a man named Stanislaus Baudry launched a bus line in Nantes with two spring-suspension carriages, each capable of carrying sixteen people. By this time, French society was more mixed; the middle and lower classes were allowed to ride. As a result, Baudry’s service was a huge hit. In 1827, he hired an Englishman, George Shillibeer, to design a more comfortable, reliable coach. Then he moved his business to Paris. The Age of the Horsebus had arrived in full force.

Baudry’s buses were hugely popular. Soon, he had one hundred buses on the road, with eighteen different itineraries. They ran from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, and a trip cost twenty-five centimes. In their first six months of operation, Baudry’s buses transported more than two-and-a-half million people. Before long, the streets of Paris were filled with competitors.

But by 1830, things weren’t going so well for Baudry. The problem came down to fares. There was no system in place to reliably track and collect payment. Baudry’s bus-drivers pocketed huge portions of the fares for themselves, and as a result, the company was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Despairing, anticipating professional and financial ruin, Baudry committed suicide.

But the buses lived on. By 1845, thirteen companies were operating twenty-three lines. In 1855, Napoleon III amalgamated them all under the head of Compagnie Générale des Omnibus, and gave it a monopoly. Horsebuses became a public service. They would continue to serve the French public until the age of the automobile. The last horsebus in Paris ran on January 11, 1913, between Saint-Sulpice and La Villette.

Remember George Shillibeer, the guy who designed a better bus for Baudry? He liked the idea so much that he brought it back with him to London. In 1828, Shillibeer launched his own service there. Several adjustments he made to the original business plan vaulted him to widespread popularity and success. For one thing, his buses ran to a strict timetable, no matter whether or not they were full. They also dropped off passengers at any point requested along the route. And Shillibeer figured out a way to collect and keep track of fairs without being robbed by his employees. His service was so popular that for a while Londoners were referring to buses as “Shillibeers.”

The spirit of innovation being what it is, others decided to copy Shillibeer’s idea. Soon, as many as ninety buses could be seen running the same route, with a new one arriving every three minutes at a stop. Competition was fierce. Drivers raced one another through the streets in an effort to pick up as many passengers as possible. After people complained, Shillibeer organized the heads of the other companies into the Omnibus Company, standardizing practices and reducing competition. The streets became safer.

Regarding the horsebus experience: If you climbed on a bus, you were usually sitting inside, protected from the elements - unless you were poor. Some buses offered cheap “knifeboard” seats in the form of long, narrow benches installed on the roof; riders ascended via an iron ladder attached to the outside of the bus. Later models would feature forward-facing “garden seats,” reached via a spiral staircase at the back.

Even though the carriages had suspension, it was nowhere near as cushy as what you find in cars today. On top of that, the streets were made of uneven cobblestones and often littered with refuse. The ride couldn’t have been smooth. Also, passengers - sixteen to twenty-two of them - were packed into spaces far less ample than those found on public transit today.

A pair of horses could work pulling a bus about four to five hours before being taken off-duty. They had to be housed, shoed, fed, watered, groomed and cared for by a vet. Horses were the number one source of overhead for bus companies; estimates point to fifty-five percent of British companies’ expenditure going toward horses.

And then there was the poop. Horses poop a lot. Your average horse produces fifty or sixty pounds of poop a day, in eight to twelve installments (every three or four hours). London’s streets were so covered in animal feces that, in order to cross the street, a 19th Century Londoner might hire a crossing sweeper, an individual - often a child - whose job was to clear a poop-free path to the other side.

Buses were expected to pick up after their horses, though. It was a big job: A contemporaneous writer estimated that, annually, bus horses consumed a quarter of a million acres of feed, converting it into one thousand tons of poop per day. That’s one thousand tons of poop that had to be scooped up and removed from the streets by hand. What was one to do with all this excess effluvia? City planners had it figured out: Professionals worked to cart the crap off the streets and into the poorest parts of the city, where it was gathered in giant mounds and allowed to gradually break down.

Commuting on public transit today can be stressful. In the past, it was also bumpy, cramped, wet (if you were sitting outside in the rain) and overwhelmingly poop-scented. Still, buses were a popular form of transport. Unlike Pascal’s design, London’s buses were open to everyone and anyone; their rapid proliferation meant that, soon, competing companies were able to offer affordable rides to even the poorest labourers.

For the first time in history, city-dwellers no longer had to live and work within the same neighbourhoods. They could travel by bus to the industrial district every day, and spend their evenings and Sundays somewhere less polluted with coal smoke. Early mass transit lay the groundwork for the types of cities we have today, and led to the development of the first suburbs. Thanks to innovators like Pascal, Baudry and Shillibeer, members of Europe’s growing, industrialized middle class were able to ride into the 20th century - and they did it on board a bus that pooped."