Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 is a notion in urban planning which stated that the greatest challenge of further urban development was a difficulty of removing horse manure from the streets, and more broadly an analogy for supposedly-insuperable problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies. The supposed problem of excessive horse-manure collecting in the streets was solved by the proliferation of cars which replaced horses as the means of transportation in big cities. The term Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 is often used to denote a problem which seems to be impossible to solve because it is being looked at from the wrong direction.[1][2]
Hoax[edit]
The story goes that by the mid-1890s the horse manure problem was gradually piling up, and was becoming unsolvable in the biggest cities, such as London and New York, were suffering the most from it.[2] The name refers to a supposed 1894 publication in The Times, which said "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure".[1] The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure. An urban planning conference in 1898 supposedly broke up before its scheduled end due to a failure to find an answer to this problem.
However, The Times never published this article. Instead it appears to have originated in a Canberra Times article in 2005. The supposed crisis has since taken on life as a useful analogy.[3] It has also been ascribed to a 2004 article by Stephen Davies in The Freeman.[4]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Johnson, Ben. "The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894". Historic UK.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Kolbert, Elizabeth (16 November 2009). "Hosed". The New Yorker.
- ↑ Wild, Rose (13 January 2018). "We were buried in fake news as long ago as 1894". The Times. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
- ↑ Viettelmetter, Georg; Sell, Yvonne (6 February 2014). Leadership 2030: The Six Megatrends You Need to Understand to Lead Your Company into the Future. Amacom. p. 199. ISBN 081443276X. Retrieved 16 May 2019. Search this book on
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