History
Conveyances for public hire are as old as the first ferries, and the earliest public transport was water transport: on land people walked (sometimes in groups and on pilgrimages, as noted in sources such as the Bible and Canterbury Tales) or (at least in the Old World) rode an animal. Ferries are part of Greek mythology – corpses in ancient Greece were buried with a coin underneath their tongue to pay the ferryman Charon to take them to Hades.
Some historical forms of public transport are the stagecoach, traveling a fixed route from coaching inn to coaching inn, and the horse-drawn boat carrying paying passengers, which was a feature of European canals from their 17th-century origins. (The canal itself is a form of infrastructure dating back to antiquity – it was used at least for freight transportation in ancient Egypt to bypass the Aswan cataract – and the Chinese also built canals for transportation as far back as the Warring States period. Whether or not those canals were used for for-hire public transport is unknown; the Grand Canal was primarily used for shipping grain.)
The omnibus, the first organized public transit system within a city, appears to have originated in Paris, France, in 1662, although the service in question failed a few months after its founder died; omnibuses are next known to have appeared in Nantes, France, in 1826. The omnibus was introduced to London in July 1829.
The first passenger horse-drawn railway was opened in 1806 between Swansea and Mumbles in South Wales, United Kingdom. In 1825, George Stephenson built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, north east England, which was the first public steam railway in the world.
Read more about this topic: Public Transport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)