I was reading Maybelle the Cable Car to my daughter last night and was fascinated to learn the motivations that inspired our iconic San Francisco street cars. About 140 years ago, designer Andrew Hallidie was looking for a way to stop the cruelty inflicted on horses that were forced to pull carriages up the steep hills of San Francisco. Sure, cable cars would be more efficient, and faster, and might generate money for the city, but the core motivation was to mitigate pain.We tend to think of purposeful business as a newer wave gaining ground in the Bay Area and around the world, but as the cable car goes to show, we are not the first to leverage the corporate vehicle to affect positive social and environmental change.
Like the pain that our predecessors regularly inflicted on horses for transportation up the steep hills of San Francisco, we too accept cruelty to animals for our culinary and fashion pleasures. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for design and purposeful business to triumph over this injustice, as elegantly and economically viably as Hallidie’s creation of the cable car? There’s something compelling about this approach as a complement to more forthcoming activism, which in its rawest, most enthusiastic expression has the danger of bordering on proselytizing, rendering it quite ineffective.
These are Hallidie’s own words as he shared how he came up with the idea to propel street cars with underground cables:
