Hansom cab

__NOTOC__A Hansom cab is a kind of horse-drawn carriage designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect from York. The vehicle was developed and tested by Hansom in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England. Originally known as the Hansom Safety Cab, its purpose was to combine speed with safety, with a low centre of gravity that was essential for safe cornering. Hansom's original design was heavily altered by John Chapman to improve its practicability, but retained his name.Fact|date=September 2008

"Cab" is a shortening of " cabriolet", reflecting the design of the carriage. It replaced the hackney carriage as a vehicle for hire; with the introduction of clockwork mechanical taximeters to measure fares, the name became "taxicab". Hansom cabs enjoyed immense popularity as they were fast, light enough to be pulled by a single horse (making the journey cheaper than travelling in a larger four-wheel coach) and were agile enough to steer around horse-drawn vehicles in the notorious traffic jams of nineteenth-century London. They were always seen as rather 'racy' and were not used by respectable ladies on their own.Fact|date=September 2008

The cab, a type of "fly", sat two passengers (three if squeezed in) and a driver who sat on a sprung seat behind the vehicle. The passengers were able to give their instructions to the driver through a trap door near the rear of the roof. They could also pay the driver through this hatch and he would then operate a lever to release the doors so they could alight. The passengers were protected from the elements by the cab itself, as well as by folding wooden doors which enclosed their feet and legs, protecting their clothes from splashing mud. Later versions also had an up-and-over glass window above the doors to complete the enclosure of the passengers. Additionally, a curved fender mounted forward of the doors protected passengers from the stones thrown up by the flying hooves of the horse.

There were up to 3000 Hansom Cabs in use at the height of their popularity and they quickly spread to other cities in the United Kingdom, as well as continental European cities, particularly Paris, Berlin, and St Petersburg. The cab was introduced to other British Empire cities and to the United States during the late 19th century, being most commonly used in New York City.

Hansom Cab Company

The Hansom Cab Company was organized to provide transportation in New York City and Brooklyn, New York, in May 1869. The business was located at 133 Water Street (Manhattan), at the offices of Duncan, Sherman & Co., which served as bankers to the firm. The enterprise was organized by Ed W. Brandon who became its president. Two orders for a cargo of cabs were sent to carriage makers in New York City. A fare of thirty cents for a single person was designated for distances not exceeding one mile, and forty cents for two people. A fraction of a mile counted as a mile.A rate of seventy-five cents was determined for one or two persons for a length of time not exceeding one hour. ["The Hansom Cab Company", New York Times, May 27, 1869, pg. 5.]

The cab enjoyed popularity in the United Kingdom until the 1920s, when cheap cars and the expansion of reliable mass-transport systems led to a decline in usage. The last licence for a horse-drawn cab in London was issued in 1947.Fact|date=September 2008

Ironically, the only surviving example of a working hansom cab in the world—owned and operated by the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London—is not permitted to enter any of the Royal Parks because it is considered a commercial vehicle. Both The Royal Parks Agency and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have refused to grant permission for the hansom cab to be driven along any of the park roadsFact|date=September 2008, though motor taxis have unrestricted access.

In popular culture

* Arguably most famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories feature hansom cabs almost ubiquitously, with Holmes and Doctor Watson hailing cabbies in order to travel around Victorian London between cases and while on the trail of villains. No adaptation of the stories for television or film is complete without the Hansom (save those displaced to a contemporary setting).

* Many versions of the Jack the Ripper story feature Hansom cabs, not merely to reflect the period of the real-life events, but because in many interpretations it is thought the Ripper himself employed a cab (possibly a larger, more enclosed coach) and even an accomplice cabbie to carry out his appalling murders.

*In The Magician's Nephew, part of the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, Jadis, the evil Queen, hijacks a hansom cab and rides it like a chariot during her brief visit to London. More importantly though, the cabbie gets transported to Narnia and later becomes King Frank, as does the horse pulling the hansom cab, Strawberry, later becoming the winged-horse Fledge.

* Also in Laurie R. King's series of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes books, cabs feature as a declining means of transport. Particularly in the second book of the series, "A Monstrous Regiment of Women" set in 1920, one of the crucial opening scenes of the narrative features Russell following Holmes across the less-reputed streets of London when the latter took up the role of a hansom cab driver for one night:

:The alarming dip of the cab caused the horse to snort and veer sharply, and a startled, moustachioed face appeared behind the cracked glass of the side window, scowling at me. Holmes redirected his tongue's wrath from the prostitute to the horse and, in the best tradition of London cabbies, cursed the animal soundly, imaginatively, and without a single manifest obscenity. He also more usefully snapped the horse's head back with one clean jerk on the reins, returning its attention to the job at hand, while continuing to pull me up and shooting a parting volley of affectionate and remarkably familiar remarks at the fading Annalisa. Holmes did so like to immerse himself fully in his roles, I reflected as I wedged myself into the one-person seat already occupied by the man and his garments.:"Good evening, Holmes," I greeted him politely.:"Good morning, Russell," he corrected me, and shook the horse back into a trot.

*"The Adventure of the Hansom Cab" is the third and final story in Robert Louis Stevenson's " The Suicide Club" cycle (1878). Retired British Soldier Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich is beckoned into the back of an elegantly-appointed hansom by a mysterious cabman who whisks him off to a party:

:And immediately, at a pace of surprising swiftness, the hansom drove off through the rain into a maze of villas. One villa was so like another, each with its front garden, and there was so little to distinguish the deserted lamp-lit streets and crescents through which the flying hansom took its way, that Brackenbury soon lost all idea of direction.

*In 1886, Fergus Hume published his novel "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab", set in Gold Rush-era Melbourne, Australia. It opens: "On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o'clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station in Grey Street, St. Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man who he had reason to believe had been murdered." The story was filmed in Australia in 1911, under the same title.

*The 1889 film "Leisurely Pedestrians, Open Topped Buses and Hansom Cabs with Trotting Horses", photographed by William Friese-Greene, shows Londoners walking along Apsley Gate, Hyde Park, with horse-drawn conveyances passing by. It is a sequence of still photographs shot on a 20-foot strip of celluloid, but at a frame rate too slow for a realistic depiction of movement.

*In 1895, "Gentleman Joe, The Hansom Cabbie", a farcical musical comedy with music by Walter Slaughter and a libretto by Basil Hood, opened in London.

*In the Seinfeld episode "The Rye," Cosmo Kramer drives his friend's hansom cab around New York City for the duration of the episode. He attempts to act like a tour guide while driving the cab, but makes up most of the facts.

*In the movie "My Man Godfrey" (1936) starring Carole Lombard and William Powell, there is a scene in which the maid tells Alexander (Carole Lombard's character's father) "There's a hansom cab driver at the door. He wants $50 and his horse." Carole Lombard's character, after a night of partying and drinking, rode it up the steps of their 5th Avenue mansion and parked it in the library.

*In the comic series "Scarlet Traces" Britain has developed advanced mechanical hansoms based on reverse-engineered Martian technology.

*George Orwell's famous essay "Politics and the English Language" mentions "preferring... hansom cabs to aeroplanes" as one example of an archaism to which fretting about the state of the English language might be compared by some people, with whom he disagrees.

See also

* Cart
* Taxicab
* Horse and buggy

References

*"Carriage Terminology: An Historical Dictionary" by Donald H. Berkebile, Don H. Berkebile (1979) ISBN 0-87474-166-1
*"A Dictionary of Horse Drawn Vehicles" by D.J.M. Smith (1988)
*"Looking at Carriages" by Sallie Walrond (1992)

External links

* [http://americanhistory.si.edu/ONTHEMOVE/collection/object_33.html America on the Move | Hansom Cab.] National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
* [http://www.caaonline.com/caa_content.asp?PageType=Dept&Key=15&MCat=7 Illustration and information] on Carriage Association of America website.
* [http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/society/hansom-cab.html The Hansom Cab of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, London] Sherlock Holmes International Society.
* [http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/news/james-purnell.html Correspondence between the Sherlock Holmes Museum and James Purnell MP] The Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport
* [http://www.sherlockpeoria.net/Hansom_pages/HansomCabs.html Hansom Cabs] Sherlock Peoria.
* [http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/hansom+cab Hutchinson encyclopedia article about hansom cab] Farlex, Inc.
* [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/mhnsc10.txt Fergus Hume, "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab"] Project Gutenberg.
* [http://www.laurierking.com/monstrous_reg-excerpt.php Laurie R. King : "A Monstrous Regiment of Women" Excerpt] Official website for Laurie R. King; features a cab-driving scene.
* [http://www.historyofyork.co.uk/themes/victorian/joseph-aloysius-hansom Joseph Aloysius Hansom]