Putting the car before the horse

Uriah Smith and the Horsey Horseless

One of my favourite places on the internet is the Autoshite.com forum, a little corner of the web where those who appreciate old and unloved cars gather to share their mutual interest. Like all good communities it has its own collection of memes and in-jokes that outsiders wouldn't understand, one of which involves regular mentions of a mythical veteran car called a Horsey Horseless. I had assumed this was something that had been made up by a forum member some time before I joined, but it turns out the Horsey Horseless was a real car - well, sort of: it certainly existed on paper but there is no proof any were actually built.

The only known image of the Horsey Horseless. Would this mutant horse-car fool our equine friends?

In the early days of motoring around the turn of the last century, there was uproar that these new-fangled horseless carriages were racing along the roads recklessly terrifying horses and causing accidents among horse-drawn traffic. The Horsey Horseless was proposed in 1899 as a solution to this problem by one Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Michigan, himself an interesting character: he was a Seventh-Day Adventist who principally wrote religious texts for his church, but was also known for satirical writings and dabbled in mechanical tinkering. It has become something of an automotive unicorn (apt perhaps given its relationship to a horse) and frequently appears in lists of the world's worst cars, despite there being no conclusive evidence it ever really existed other than in theory.  

The Horsey Horseless was basically a typical turn-of-the-century motor buggy, but with one important difference: on the front was mounted a life-sized model of a horse's head and neck! The purpose of this adornment according to its inventor was that, as it flashed past them, horses would see the contraption not as a motor vehicle but as another horse and thus wouldn't take fright at the sight of it. A novel idea, but how well this would have worked in practice remains a mystery as there is no evidence that it ever left the drawing board; there are a few odd mentions of the car here and there and only one sketch appears to exist, which has done the rounds of the internet but its origins are unknown so it may or may not have been drawn by Uriah Smith. He never indicated what material the horse's head would be made from but did suggest, as well as forming a wind-break for the occupants, it should be hollow and used as a fuel tank, which sounds distinctly unsafe even by the standards of the time.

Given Smith's background as a satirist, it's easy to dismiss the Horsey Horseless as nothing more than one of those spoof inventions that are created purely to mock a news story and have no serious intent. This was the assumption of many commentators but the story seems to run a little deeper. There is a patent on file at the US Patent Office that was granted to Smith in April 1899 for a vehicle body featuring a horse's head of exactly the design described for the Horsey Horseless, and a Horsey Horseless Carriage Company is listed as active in 1899, albeit based in Kokomo, Indiana, around 180 miles from Battle Creek. All of this suggests Smith was either deadly serious about his invention or took his joke to ridiculous lengths.

Smith's patent for a horse-headed car body. Does this mean he was serious?

So was the Horsey Horseless spoof or serious? No one can be sure as it all happened so long ago and the full story has been lost in the mists of time. If it is just an urban legend, it's certainly a persistent one that has survived over a century and is still providing much amusement to the members of Autoshite. Although there is no proof, I'd like to think just maybe one or more Horsey Horselesses were actually built and made it onto the roads of early 20th century America to bemuse horses and humans alike, but the experience was so traumatic that they were destroyed and erased from history and that's why so little trace remains.