Part Played in Economics.
Time is likewise life under some circumstances, and because of this fact, the professional men who were first to make practical use of the automobile were physicians, commandeering it in behalf of life itself. How many lives have been saved by the automobile, which would have been lost through the slow going gig or phaeton, it is not possible to say, because there is, of course, no exact record, but the number is large. The mortality of today among people is greatly reduced from that of twenty years ago. The advance of science has, of course, brought this about, but the automobile is an important instrument of medicalscience, just as are the X-ray, the stethoscope and the pulmotor.
And the same cause—the element of time—which operated in the adoption of the automobile by the physician to the human body, has forced the veterinarian to use the automobile. This is irony—for the horse—and another nail in the equine coffin, but it is at the same time another demonstration of the automobile’s superiority in efficiency over that animal.
The farmer demands that the veterinarian shall come in an auto to attend his sick horses or cattle, because he will not take the chance of death through delay. And this is scarcely gratitude—by the farmer to the horse—but it is economic pressure.
At every turn in the road of the automobile’s advance, we see its economic value. We see in cities that the big department store is able to cut down its delivery expense from $990 to $350 a day by using a fleet of motor trucks instead of horse drawn wagons; that coal, ice, groceries, feed—practically all commodities in cities—can be delivered by motor trucks at a large saving of cost. Contractors, plumbers, plasterers, tinners, and craftsmen in substantially all lines, have figured it out and concluded that with the facilities of the automobileavailable, the horse is a distinct economic waste in their businesses.
The possibilities of similar economy by the farmer in the substitution of motor power for horse power have been indicated by many progressive farmers who have by experiments demonstrated that the cost of hauling and cultivating with motor wagons and machinery is less than by using horses, but the general economic saving by the use of the motor vehicle in hauling cannot get its fullest and conclusive demonstration until better roads are more numerous. Where roads are nearly perfect, results have shown the cost of horse hauling to be 30 cents a ton, against 14 cents a ton by motor truck, by the mile, figuring everything.