The Washington Post has an article this morning about the early history of the automobile that contains this telling quote:
D.H. Killeffer had a dire warning for gasoline-greedy Americans. The chemical engineer had crunched the numbers — he compared the country’s production of crude oil with its thirst for gasoline. “Estimates based on the most complete data now available place the end of our gasoline supply between ten and twenty years, with the odds in favor of ten rather than twenty,” Killeffer, secretary of the New York division of the American Chemical Society, wrote in the New York Times.
The year was 1925.
Gasoline-powered travel was still new enough, Killeffer thought, that it was possible to break an incipient addiction to the fuel. “The general public is not necessarily committed to the gasoline-operated automobile for its transportation,” he wrote. “It need not worry if it should become more economical in the future to fall back on steam or on electricity to get itself and its goods from one place to another. Even horses might again come into use in such a way as to supply the necessary transportation.”
The lesson — don’t believe the predictions of so-called experts.
August 13th, 2006 at 10:20 am
The article said a horse cost 3.9 cents per mile to operate in 1910. Using two different methods I figure that works out to from $0.66 to $0.79 per mile today.
And if you think cars take up a lot of room, consider what the equivalent carrying capacity in horses would take.