Sunday, December 06, 2009

Environmental Hazard!

Many decades back, cities like New York and London was growing exponentially but needed a means to improve communication and efficiently and quickly transport people and goods from point A to point B. The solution they found quickly became popular, but also created serious problems that threatened to overrun cities - street jams, fatal accidents, noise, toxic emissions affecting health and environment, and even food shortages and price increases as more and more food crops were replaced by "biofuels".

Guess what this problem "invention" was?

Not, it was not an automobile, it was the horse! Horse drawn carriages were extremely difficult to handle on roads, and caused more fatal accidents as a factor of the city's population than automobiles today. The dung was so all-pervasive, that certain "dung storage areas" had dung piled up to sixty feet high, and lined city roads like banks of snow. In the rains, the dung mixed with water and ran down every street and into people's basements, and emitted methane, a deadly gas that contributes most significantly to global warming. And of course, not to mention the million of flies, rodents and other insects it provided a wonderful breeding ground for!

Finally, the cities had enough, and adopted a wonderful new invention that was even more efficient, clean, environment-friendly and safe. You got it right this time - the automobile!

Solutions of today are problems of tomorrow...

(Based on a chapter in Super Freakonomics)

2 comments:

Ray said...

Fantastic trivia..didn't know that.

Harsha Kumar said...

Super freaky indeed! :)