By Ann Norton Greene
ISBN-10: 0674031296
ISBN-13: 9780674031296
Historians have lengthy assumed that new business machines and tool resources eradicated paintings animals from nineteenth-century the US, but a bird’s-eye view of nineteenth-century society might convey hundreds of thousands of horses providing the strength worthwhile for commercial improvement. Horses have been ubiquitous in towns and on farms, delivering strength for transportation, building, production, and agriculture. On Civil battle battlefields, millions of horses worked and died for the Union and the Confederacy hauling wagons and mechanized weaponry. The techniques that introduced equipment to the leading edge of yankee society made horses the top movers of those machines for many of the 19th century. Mechanization truly elevated the necessity for horsepower through increasing the variety of projects requiring it. certainly, the only most important power transition of the antebellum period can have been the dramatic enlargement within the use of dwelling, respiring horses as an influence expertise within the improvement of commercial the US. Ann Greene argues for attractiveness of horses’ severe contribution to the historical past of yank power and the increase of yankee commercial strength, and a brand new figuring out of the explanations for his or her alternative as best movers. instead of as a result of the “inevitable” technological swap, it used to be americans’ social and political offerings approximately energy intake that sealed this animal’s destiny. the increase and fall of the workhorse used to be outlined by way of the categories of decisions that americans made and might proceed to make—choices that emphasised person mobility and autonomy, and assumed, in particular, considerable power assets.
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Additional info for Horses at work: harnessing power in industrial America
Sample text
Analogies between animals and machines were already well established in Western culture. The mechanical clocks of the thirteenth century and the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes in the sixteenth century promoted a new view of the relationship between living creatures and their environment. Descartes argued that animals were not simply like machines, but were machines, and their actions could all be explained mechanically. By the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment concept of a mechanistic nature governed by universal laws seemed fulfilled in a world of growing mechanization, where human artifice could replicate and improve upon the machinery of the natural world.
This sequence triggers the release of the elastic bicep (similar to that found in a grasshopper) that helps shoot the leg forward. At the same time, the joints, muscles, ligaments, and tendons act as springs, not only absorbing impact but also releasing kinetic energy that further enhances the pendulum effect. The shoulder and hip joints also augment the pendulum motion by allowing the legs to move back-and-forth in only a single plane. 18 h o r se s at w o r k This restriction gives the horse maximum leg extension, not only lengthening its stride, one component of speed, but also, and just as important, shortening the stride interval, or the speed with which the leg snaps forward and is pulled/swings back.
In the working relationship between humans and horses, the social temperament of the horse, its attention to hierarchy, and its responsiveness to humans con- w hy h o rse s 27 tributed to Americans’ general preference for them as working partners. In the context of nineteenth-century industrialization, the physical qualities of the equine machine, the social attributes of horses, and the long history of horse-human relations acquired new value. The conviction that American prosperity and democracy depended on high energy consumption, together with the continuing importance of animal power, increased the use of horses as prime movers.
Horses at work: harnessing power in industrial America by Ann Norton Greene
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