History of Travel

Throughout the Middle Ages, when Europe's roads are little more than tracks, wheeled vehicles are used only for the laborious process of carting goods from place to place. When going on a journey, the able-bodied ride; the infirm are carried in a litter. This changes in the 17th century, when there is some improvement in the paving of roads. Carriages are available for hire in the streets of London from 1605. By the second half of the century there are traffic jams. Samuel Pepys, conscious of rising in the world, considers it embarrassing in 1667 to be seen in London in a common hackney carriage which anyone can hire. The next year he happily acquires a coach and a liveried coachman of his own.		kwb
Coaches gradually become more comfortable. The most common design, developed in Germany in about 1660, is known as the berlin. The compartment for the travellers has the shape of a shallow U, with a protective roof above. There is a door on each side and the coach can seat four people, in pairs facing each other. The coachman, driving the horses, sits above the front wheels. From 1680 glass windows keep out the weather, where previously there were only blinds. The first simple suspension, protecting the occupants against the bumps of the road, consists of leather straps on which the compartment hangs from the framework. The berlin introduces curved metal springs, which absorb the shocks more effectively.		kwc
A much lightier and racier two-wheeled vehicle, the gig, is introduced in Paris during the late 17th century. Relatively cheap, pulled by a single sprightly horse, driven by its owner and alarmingly easy to overturn, the gig is the first type of carriage to make driving an enjoyable activity. At the other extreme from the gig, the more sedate citizen in 17th-century European capitals often uses human rather than animal power for short journeys. He hails a sedan chair and is carried, in elegant comfort behind glass windows, to his next destination. A sedan with wheels, known in Paris as a brouette, is pulled through the streets in the same way as a rickshaw in the east today.		kwd
The sedan chair soon goes out of fashion, but the carriages introduced in the 17th century evolve into the wide range of vehicles - many of them extremely beautiful - which are familiar on the streets of Europe and America until they are finally replaced in the 20th century by the car. Among the best-known of such vehicles, featuring as they do in so many prints of the era, are the lumbering stage coach and its more effective successor, the mail coach.