History
The first horse trailers were said to be horse-drawn ambulances created by city fire departments to take their wounded but savable horses from the scenes of accidents (which were common) back to the veterinarian at the firehouse.
Highly valued race horses were originally transported by specially outfitted railroad cars, but this transport was difficult to use due to issues of scheduling and delays. In December 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported on a new concept for transporting race horses in specially modified "Motor-Trucks" that eliminated these transport delays.
In World War 1, horses were used with infantry in France, and many were injured in the course of the war. If these animals could be transported back to animal hospitals, many could be saved. For this purpose a special horse ambulance vehicle was developed which could be rotated so that horses could walk forward both onto and off of the ambulance truck.
As horse-drawn transportation gave way to faster, mechanized transportation, there remained a need to transport horses themselves for work, sport, and other purposes. Thus, many types of trucks, vans, and trailers were developed or modified to transport horses on modern highways.
Read more about this topic: Horse Trailer
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)