The origin of taxis (2)

One day in early July 1894, two entrepreneurs from Hamburg, Bruhn and Westendorf, attended a meeting at the Board of Trade in London concerning their recently introduced device, a taxameter-fare indicator.

 According to The Illustrated Police News, the two men explained that the instrument showed how many passengers were being carried, the fare to be paid, the number of trips made by the cab and the miles traversed in the course of the day.

They claimed it had already been adopted in cities such as Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen and Dresden and that local authorities were making its adoption a condition for granting licenses.

The wheels turned slowly in the Board of Trade, and it was not until March 1899 that the first cabs fitted with them came into regular use in the capital.

The delay was partly the result of opposition by the London Cab Drivers Union, which was deeply suspicious of the potentially adverse implications for their members’ livelihoods of accurately recording drivers’ takings.

Northern cities such as Liverpool, Bradford, Manchester and Leeds were ahead of London (as were New York and Buenos Aires). General public satisfaction with the meters was reported.

Passengers preferred the new taxameter-fitted cabs because they obviated arguments with bullying cabbies about fares. Cabbies were happy, too, as relations with customers had improved, their takings had gone up and the level of tips had remained the same.

The German name of Taxameter, at first adopted in Britain, was taken from Taxe, a charge or levy. After the device became common in Paris (another city that was well ahead of London), the French created the term taximètre for it, from taxe, a tariff (the e changed to i through the influence of the famous Hellenist Théodore Reinach).

Partly in consequence of patriotic feelings, coupled with anti-German sentiment (the Yorkshire Post commented sourly in June 1894 that it trusted that a system for charging fares might be introduced “without it being found necessary to resort to a German arrangement”), the French term proved popular.

The Anglicised spelling taximeter was used in a London newspaper in 1898 even before the metropolitan meters, of the German type, had gone into operation. Taximeter soon permanently replaced the German name.

These early devices were, of course, fitted to horse-drawn hansom cabs or growlers (so-called because of the noise their iron-hooped wheels made on London cobbles). There was some argument over what to call these new metered vehicles.

While the official designation for any vehicle plying for hire was hackney carriage, everybody called them cabs (a short form of cabriolet, the French name for a light horse-drawn two-wheeled vehicle.

By November 1907 the Daily Mail had begun to refer to a “taxi”, in inverted commas as befitted a colloquial term not yet admitted to the standard lexicon. In February 1908, the Daily Chronicle noted that the issue had been resolved: “Within the past few months the ‘taxi’ has been the name given to the motor-cab.” Since then, of course, it has spread greatly, though never ousting cab from the language.

There has generally been a legal struggle concerning the certification of motor vehicles to be taxicabs, which take much more wear than a private car does. In London, they are additionally required to meet stringent safety specifications.

In the 1960s in Europe, Mercedes-Benz and Peugeot offered diesel taxicabs. With concerns over the high cost of fuel and fuel economy, many cabs in the United States have begun switching to diesel engine and hybrid fuel sources.

Alternate fuel cabs, such as ethanol and propane-powered vehicles are becoming more and more popular.

The medallion system has also proven successful as the taxi industry stabilised and remained a vital part of urban transportation.  New York City continued to improve taxi conditions and consumer protection through the order of the standardised yellow taxi in the 1960s. 

This effort helped to distinguish unlicensed cabs and private livery services from true, medallion cabs. 

These efforts continued into the 70s and 80s as crime against taxi drivers grew; a bulletproof partition between the front and back seats became more and more common. With the advent of Über, Lyft and other “freestyle” taxi services, who knows what the future holds?