The invention of buses - Works in Progress Magazine

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of running a bus service.

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world.

Ancient urban fabric of Damascus. Very few of these roads are wide enough for a carriage, and none is wide enough for two carriages to pass each other. This exclusively pedestrian urbanism marked most towns before 1600 in all countries.

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Google Maps.

The basic technology behind buses is, of course, the wheel. Potter’s wheels were developed in about 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia and wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious and slow, and road infrastructure was generally too bad for them to be very useful. For many centuries, carts played a rather modest role in human transport. People rode if they wanted to get somewhere quickly, used pack animals for freight, took sedan chairs or palanquins for luxury travel, and walked for all other purposes. Outside Europe, palanquins continued to be used well into the twentieth century: footage of 1930s Hong Kong still shows besuited young businessmen employing this ancient form of luxury transport.

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Sedan chairs were always slower than walking, and they cannot have been terribly comfortable. But they were useful for keeping clothes clean in dirty streets, and of course as a means of indicating status and avoiding unwelcome contact with people of lower social rank. They survived in some parts of the world well into the 20th century.

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Wikimedia Commons.

The use of carriages increased in early modern Europe, as suspension technology improved and a mixture of governments and private businesses laid out proper roads. Phaetons, broughams, landaus, gigs, and chaises replaced sedan chairs for luxury travel, and began to be practical for long journeys. Hire cabs became widespread, and large fleets emerged in cities like London, Paris, and New York, which could be hailed in much the way that motorcabs are today. By the nineteenth century, elite households maintained a private carriage, while middle-class people relied on a range of vehicle sharing and hire arrangements.

Intercity stagecoaches were physically quite similar to buses and already featured the two decks of seating that survive in London buses to this day.

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British Museum

A sophisticated system of commercial coaches also emerged for transporting both passengers and high-value goods like the post. But in several crucial respects, these stagecoaches or diligences were not like buses. Stagecoaches ran only between cities, never within them; seats had to be booked in advance; and they stopped only for rest or changing horses, not to pick up additional passengers along the way.<br>The first person to invent true buses was the polymath Blaise Pascal, best known for his eponymous wager. Apparently working from first principles, Pascal developed all the key principles of modern bus services: fixed intracity routes, fixed fares, fixed points for boarding and alighting. He launched a company that ran carrosses à cinq sols (five-pence carriages) across Paris. On 18th March 1662, the world’s first regular bus service began operating.

Unfortunately, Pascal had not reckoned with one of the historic enemies of successful bus services: bad regulation. The Parlement of Paris (a kind of municipal government) banned laborers and artisans from using the buses, apparently to ensure ‘the greater comfort and freedom of the bourgeois and meritous classes’. This turned public opinion against the carrosses, and Parisians started to protest against them and interfere with their operations. The authorities initially threatened severe punishments, but, then as now, Parisians were not easily subdued, and by 1677 the company gave up and discontinued its services. The very idea of a bus then seems to have been forgotten.<br>The second and lasting invention of buses took place 150 years later, in the small city of Nantes in Brittany. The inventor was a former soldier called Stanislas Baudry, a very different...