Last week I looked at The Triumph of Steam and talked about the work Matt Edwards (www.mattedwardsbooks.tumblr.com) and I had been doing to restore it. The Triumph of Steam
I hinted too that there might be a horse connection – so here it is.
As the more horse-literate amongst us are no doubt well aware, and more than capable of imagining, horses and steam engines did not always mix. Henry Frith’s The Triumph of Steam provides us with an interesting insight into the sort of problems people (and horses) may have been party to when horse first encountered machine. Especially, perhaps, in the early days, before horses became accustomed to the noisy, fire belching beasts in their midst!
Recalling the early days of steam, Henry Frith tells us:
“We who live in days when to be near a railroad is considered the greatest possible advantage, increasing the price of property, and promoting in every way our comfort and convenience, cannot imagine the panic that the very name of a railway excited some sixty years ago. It was to bring ruin, destruction, death, to everything it came near. The air was to be poisoned with noxious smells of the engines! Cattle grazing in the fields would die with fright at its hideous shrieks and squeaks. It would be no longer safe to travel on any road near which a railway ran; for what horse could be trained to bear the sight of the infernal monster? There would be no end to the accidents and of the peril to life and limb…”
Soldiers and their Horses 