Anyone who has visited San Francisco has no doubt experienced its notorious hills and valleys. Sometimes a challenge to cars, they were often a tear on horses. The Liverpoolian expatriate Andrew Hallidie witnessed a tragic case himself, as a team of horses struggling under merciless whipping to ascend the wet, slippery, cobblestone of Nob Hill slipped and were dragged down by the load to the bottom. Hallidie was an engineer by trade, and in his former life created a cable system to transport ore-laden mining carts to the surface. Employing them for San Francisco hills, he thought, would be little different.

On this day, August 2, in 1873, Andrew Hallidie — now Andrew Smith — tested out the first cable car company in San Francisco, on what would become Clay Street Hill Railroad a few months later.

His success prompted the launch of other cable car lines running to and fro just about every corner of the city, a system that proved much more effective than the horse-drawn carriage. By the 1950s when the automobile came to supplant the horse as the dominant form of transportation, automobile and oil interests pressed San Francisco to dismantle the cable car system, but residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of keeping them. Three lines of the system still run through the city today.