I’ve been on a lot of buses.
In grade school, I was fortunate enough that we only lived one mile from school, and we walked it. Unless it was pouring down rain, or terribly frigid, and then we’d pile in the station wagon and get a lift.
A “lift” is a funny word when applied to riding in a car or bus. A lift in England is an elevator. And here, it means to raise to a higher position, in some form or another. So, a lift in a car would imply such. And yet, when someone comes to get us in a car, they “pick” us up.
Anyway.
Buses. Yes, buses. Once high school rolled around, I had to walk to Main Street and stand there on the corner of Main and Maplelawn Avenue, waiting for the Number Seven to pick me up and take me downtown. It was about a twenty-five-minute ride, with all the stopping and starting. The bus followed Main all the way to my stop on Franklin Street. I’d then walk over to Ludlow, to the high school, Chaminade-Julienne.
I didn’t mind riding the bus most days. And mostly, if you kept to yourself, things were fine. But I didn’t like riding the bus after dark when I’d have a late-game or a student council meeting.
Buses have been around for a long time, believe it or not. It was on this date, back in 1662, when the first bus began operation. Hard to believe, I think.
The service was introduced in Paris and was the brainchild of Blaise Pascal. This is the same Blaise Pascal, who was a physicist, philosopher, mathematician, inventor, and author. Apparently, at some point, he thought people should be pooling their carriage rides, so he began promoting the idea.
He convinced the higher-ups of this too. The Governor of Poitou (that is an old-time region of France) thought it was such a good idea that he decided to back the concept. He laid out the money to have seven horse-drawn carriages built, each capable of carrying eight passengers.
The scheme received the royal blessing when King Louis XIV granted the Governor a monopoly on the plan. So, if any competitors came calling, they would face having their horses and vehicles confiscated.
So they planned a tremendous grand opening ceremony of this newly found bus service on March 18. The buses were called the “Carosses a Cinq Sous.” And if you wanted to take a ride on a bus, it would cost you some money. A “sous” was the least valuable coin in the French currency back then. I imagine like less than a penny, or a tiny bit of nothing. A ride on the bus would cost you five tiny-bits-of-nothing.
To start off, it was wildly popular. Probably because of the novelty aspect. And, as far as I can surmise, it lasted for at least a decade. But, eventually, the enterprise faded away. The bus idea was abandoned in 1675, and public transportation did not return to the streets of any major city until 1895.
Pascal is also known for some other achievements, like an early calculating machine and work on atmospheric pressure (Pascal’s Law). He was quite a great philosopher and is considered by some to be the second greatest mind in all of France, in all of time. That, right behind René Descartes.
Despite all his headiness, he was frail his entire life and died at the age of 39, in the year 1662. So he barely got to see the buses rolling out. With all the passengers hanging out the windows, smiling and waving. Having only paid five sous for a lovely, lovely ride.
And so it goes.
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“Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”
― Sue Grafton
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“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
― Peter Drucker
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“The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them.”
― Bill Maher
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Hop on the bus, Gus. You too, Blaise.
