Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1891 — A Crank’s Invention. [ARTICLE]

A Crank’s Invention.

The St. Louis JMobe-Demor.rat tells about a cranky invention of a Western man who thought that horses are worked too hard. It was a carriage which ran on four very high wheels. The driver sat in front and the passengers on each side, like those on an Irish jaunting car. The horse was underneath the affair, and wiggled along with only his head sticking out like a turtle’s. The beauty of the arrangement was a four-foot belly-band that went underneath the horse, and when the concern started down hill the driver turned a crank and lifted the horse off the ground, and the whole business, horse and all, rolled on together till a level road was reached, when the crank was again turned, the horse lowered till his.feet reached the ground, when business was resumed in the old way. The advantage of the invention was that it enabled the horse to ride down hill; the disadvantage was that it could not foresee and follow the windings of a road. There is no knowing how much might come of it, though, had it not happened that the machine ran off the track one day when going down a winding hill, ran into a gulch, killed the horse, smashed the whole contrivance to pieces, and huit the man so badly that when he got well he declined the construction of another.