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US senator: “[Automobiles are the future but] I cannot conceive our active Americans in carriages moved by any other motor but the horse”

by carltonreid / on May 03, 2013 / / posted in 1890s, Automotive history

“I imagine that one fine morning we shall wake up with apparatus ready to take us to our offices by an automobile carriage…But…I cannot conceive our active Americans adapting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in carriages moved…by any other motor but the horse. What has made the bicycle so universally popular but the one fact that it permits of action on the part of the rider, that it affords excitement?”

Chauncey Mitchell Depew
US senator, 1899 to 1911
Quoted in ‘The Horseless Age’ by Henry W. Fischer, Munsey’s Magazine, May 1895.

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The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.

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