alt Hacker News> cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly
Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?
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> Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h).
That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.
[1] https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/world-endurance-record-...
That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse. Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft horses.
According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
No one said it was a rational objection.
More to the point (horses obviously can't do that for very long), trains were doing ~130km/h by the middle of the 19th century.
In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the ways the eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways, allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been technologically possible it would have been very expensive.