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:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)