This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Up next, a story from Miles C. Collier, the founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida,

a former race car driver and an expert on all things transportation. Heck, all things automotive.

Today, Miles shares with us the story of why cars might have saved the city from the four-legged beasts known as horses.

What people don't realize is we think of the industrial revolution, and we think of the

advent of steam, and it's often described as the age of steam, as well as possibly the age of electricity, because street trolley cars

and electric light bulbs and things were all invented in the late 19th century. But in fact,

if you look at the data, that period was really the age of the horse. The horse was omnipresent. The horse was critical

for the working out of modern industrialized society. Now, why is that? Because if we want to think

about steam and electricity as being wholesale forms of energy, there were no retail sources other than the horse.

So a train load of goods could arrive at the station of a city and it came over hundreds

of miles and it was hundreds of tons of stuff, but then you had the problem of getting it

from the depot to the doorstep.

And that required individualized or retail transportation to do it.

And there was no other retail transportation other than the horse.

So it's counterintuitive, but as steam and electricity became more and more prevalent in the 1880s,

90s, 1900s, and 1910s, the population of horses living in the urban fabric increased concommodately. Totally counterintuitive.

The highest population of working horses in the United States was in 1910.

There were 26 million working horses.

I'm not talking about my friend Flicka sticking his head over the fence that you give two cubes of sugar to.

I'm talking about horses that lived in high-rise stables in the middle of the urban fabric

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