The horses have been broken well,
All danger is rescinded,
For some have broken both their knees,
And some are broken-winded.”
While these cabs were still running, several experiments were being made with patent carriages. One of these, placed on the streets for a short while, was the invention of Mr. William Boulnois. “It was a two-wheeled closed vehicle,” says Mr. Moore, “constructed to carry two passengers sitting face to face. The driver sat on a small and particularly unsafe seat on the top of it, and the door was at the back. It was, in fact, so much like the front of an omnibus that it was well known as the omnibus slice. Its popular name was the back-door cab. Superior people called it a minibus. This cab was quickly followed by a very similar, although larger, vehicle invented by Mr. Harvey. It was called a duobus.” These two cabs cannot have been very comfortable; the shafts were too short, and the knowledge that a possibly heavy coachman was sitting just above your head seems to have militated against their success.
Another cab, not wholly successful in itself, led the way to the widely popular hansom. This was a carriage invented in 1834 by Mr. Aloysius Hansom, the architect of the Birmingham Town Hall. Here the body was “almost square and hung in the centre of a square frame.” The driver, as before, sat on the roof, but had a small seat fixed there for his convenience. The doors were in front, on either side of the driver’s seat. And the wheels were of a prodigious height—being seven feet six inches. Mr. Hansom, who had obviously seen one of Francis Moore’s patent carriages of 1790,[51] himself drove this carriage from Hinckley in Leicestershire to London, and found financial support from Mr. Boulnois. Further experiments were made—in one model you had to enter the carriage actually through the wheels, the door being in this case at the sides—and it was found that the wheels could be made considerably smaller without danger or inconvenience. Whereupon a company was formed to purchase the invention for a sum of ten thousand pounds. Hansom, however, obtained no more than three hundred, the balance being used to perfect the far from satisfactory cabs which had been placed on the streets. Such improvements as were carried out were the work of Mr. John Chapman,[52] then secretary to the Safety Cabriolet and Two-Wheel Carriage Company, who produced a much safer vehicle, afterwards purchased by
Hansom’s company. This new cab was placed on the streets in 1836, and proved such a success that it was imitated by numerous other companies. Legal proceedings were instituted, but proved both expensive and not particularly successful, and the “pirate” cabs were allowed to flourish as best they could.
Then, in 1836, was made the first of those four-wheeled cabs,[53] which were not really cabs at all, but which will never be known by any other name. The first of these was built by the ingenious Mr. Davies. It bore superficial resemblance to the chariot. Two passengers could ride inside, and a third on the box at the coachman’s side. At this date the old two-wheeled cabs were “a source of acknowledged disgrace, of many alarming accidents, and of lamentable loss of life,” and a company was formed to provide “a cheap, expeditious, safe, and commodious mode of conveyance in lieu of the present disgraceful and ill-conducted cabriolets.” Two years later Lord Brougham was so pleased with the appearance of these new cabs that he ordered one for his own use. So was the first brougham constructed—the earliest private four-wheeled closed carriage to be drawn by a single horse.
“The original brougham,” says Sir Walter Gilbey,[54] “differed in many particulars of design, proportion, construction, and finish from the modern carriage. The body ... was several inches wider in front than at the back, and though both larger and heavier, was neither so comfortable nor so convenient.... [It] was held together by heavy, flat iron plates throughout, and the front boot was connected with the front pillars by strong outside iron stays, fixed with bolts. The wheels were at once smaller in diameter and much heavier. [The carriage] carried a large guard or ‘opera board’ at the back of the body to protect the occupants from risk of injury in a crush, when the pole of a carriage behind might otherwise break through the back panel—an accident now occasionally seen in our crowded streets. Like all other carriages of the time there was a sword case in the back panel for weapons. It was painted olive green, a very fashionable colour at that period.”