How taxis went from ancient Roman sedan chairs to Uber
Licensing Uber is the latest major shift in the taxi industry which has been evolving since ancient times.
Today in History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Today in History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
NSW’s taxi industry is about to get a shake-up with the legalisation of controversial app-based car hire service Uber. While the laws will force Uber drivers to undergo some of the rigorous checks applied to cabbies, it will also force traditional taxis to compete in the cyber world.
What won’t change is that people will need to get them from point A to B and cars in one form or another will be available to take them there.
People have been paying others to do the driving since ancient times, with many shake-ups along the way.
Ancient Romans who didn’t feel like walking through the muck of the city streets could hire a sedan chair which was carried by two or more people. While most sedan chairs were owned by the wealthy elite and powered by slaves, a fleet of freelancers lingered around popular spots in Rome offering their services.
There were also carriages for hire, some of which may have actually been fitted with a crude version of a meter as described by ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius in about 27BC.
In De Architectura libri decem (Ten Books On Architecture) he wrote of a device that was “a useful invention of the greatest ingenuity, transmitted by our predecessors, which enables us, while sitting in a carriage on the road or sailing by sea, to know how many miles of a journey we have accomplished’’.
He then describes how it works with a drum attached to a wheel with a projecting tooth striking the teeth of another drum which drops a stone into a reservoir when one mile has been passed. “The number of stones gathered from beneath and counted, will show the number of miles in the day’s journey.”
The competition between carts and sedans was intense, but the sedans had a victory when Julius Caesar banned carts in Rome during daylight hours to cut traffic.
Throughout medieval and early modern times people in larger towns and cities were able to hire carts or carriages. Those lucky enough to have waterways also had wherries, water taxis, a common sight on the Thames. A 1555 English act of parliament specified the length of wherries.
Hackney coaches available for hire plied their trade on the roads of England. Some were carriages owned by wealthy men who hired their carriages out when they weren’t using them to recoup some of the cost of running a carriage and horses.
As cities grew larger carriages became more specialised, competition more fierce and congestion more troublesome, so governments introduced systems of regulating the number of drivers able to hire themselves out.
By the 17th century the English had introduced a licensing system for the hackney carriages and coaches.
Further innovation came in the 18th century when the French invented the cabriolet, a lighter, faster two-wheeled carriage that could convert from closed cabin to open carriage to suit the weather. It became the standard for time and the word cabriolet was shortened to cab.
In 1834 English architect Joseph Hansom improved on that design with the hansom cab, in which the driver sat up behind the passengers.
Within a few years hansoms could be found in New York, but they did not arrive in Australia until the 1860s, because the omnibus seemed to do the trick in our smaller cities.
An equine virus in New York in 1872 brought transport to a standstill and gave more impetus to the pursuit of alternatives to horse-drawn taxis. By the end of the century steam, electric and petrol-driven cabs were operating.
Eventually petrol-powered cabs would win out, although a handful of horse-drawn cabs continued to cling on to a niche in the market such as the ones that still trundle their way around Cental Park in New York.
In 1891 German Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn unveiled his new invention called the taximeter, which could measure the distance travelled and the passenger charged accordingly.
By the end of the 19th century about 90 per cent of cabs in New York were electric. Built in the style of the Hansom cab they had a top speed of just 24km/h and a tendency to tip over while the batteries took eight hours to charge.
A fire at the depot destroyed most of the fleet in 1907 and they were soon taken out of service. London also flirted briefly with electric cabs. They were so quiet they were dubbed the “hummingbirds.”
Similarly the two-way radio, introduced to taxi services overseas in the late 1940s and in the 50s in Australia, changed the way the business ran, with a central dispatcher being able call out jobs to roving drivers instead of drivers having to return to base.
Originally published as How taxis went from ancient Roman sedan chairs to Uber
Gallipoli to D-Day: Aussie’s epic war story
George Dixon went ashore with the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, aged just 15 – and was shot. Three decades later he was fighting again, at history’s other most famous wartime landing.
Love story behind escape tragedy
An Australian murdered in the infamous wartime Great Escape died after swapping places with another man. And his story is still unfolding, 80 years on.