Observations on the Horsey Horseless
June 2019
Submission // Log Magazine, Issue 47 (Rejected)
“To all whom it may concern…this invention relates to a new and original design for a vehicle-body; and it has for its object to provide a design of this character that shall be both useful and ornamental.”
-United States Patent No. 30,551: Design for a Vehicle-Body.
On March 13th, 1899, Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Michigan, filed a patent for a new design for the body of a motor-vehicle. The Horsey Horseless, as it came to be known, was an attempt to ease the anxiety of industrial and technological advances – of both the horse and human variety. For the citizen wary of technological change at the turn of the century, the Horsey Horseless aimed to transform the mystical – a self-driving horseless carriage! – into more familiar terms. For the agitable equine, it would allegedly put at ease all real horses passing by.
With its design, the Horsey Horseless presented a bold vision of past and future: a hybridic mashup of biomass and carbon form, half-figure, half-machine. Yet despite the clear distinction between its two halves, Uriah Smith was nevertheless interested in representing some synthesis between them, explicitly writing in the patent that the curvature of the horse’s back and neck would align exactly tangent to the outline of the boxed vehicle frame.
Perhaps inducing more anxiety than relief, the Horsey Horseless patent was sadly never put into production. As an idea, however, it helps display and define a moment of transition in our recent past. It is a moment not unlike today, as we shift from one paradigm of energy consumption and expenditure to another and search for suitable forms and formations. Like Uriah Smith, we can only imagine the bizarrely wonderful possibilities.
