The camel experiment is a neat reminder that good ideas often fail not because they are wrong but because institutions cannot adapt around them. And Emily Davison stepped onto that racetrack knowing the risks: the voting rights she fought for arrived five years after her death.
The United States Army once solved its transport problem by ordering camels from Egypt. This is not a metaphor.
On 4 June 1855, Major Henry C. Wayne boarded the USS Supply in New York harbour, bound for Egypt with a government brief and, presumably, a great deal of optimism. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had persuaded Congress that camels were the logical answer to moving supplies across the arid American Southwest. Horses struggled in the heat; camels, famously, did not.
The Camel Corps That Never Was
Wayne selected dromedaries and Bactrian camels, and the field trials running from Texas to California went rather well. The camels performed exactly as advertised. The problem was everyone else. Soldiers hated them. Horses panicked around them. Mules, who have a finely developed sense of personal dignity, refused to cooperate at all. Then the Civil War arrived, the experiment was quietly abandoned, and some of the camels were simply released into the wild. Feral camels were still wandering the Arizona desert decades later, which must have been a startling thing to encounter on a Tuesday morning.
It is a tidy little parable: a genuinely sensible idea, killed not by failure but by culture. The camels worked. The institution could not keep up.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere on 4 June
The same date carries some remarkable company.
In 1784, Élisabeth Thible became the first woman to fly in a free hot air balloon, travelling four kilometres over Lyon whilst singing operatic arias. At 1,500 metres, that is a committed performance in any era.
In 1411, King Charles VI of France, a man who occasionally believed he was made of glass, granted the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon an exclusive cheese-ripening monopoly. That monopoly is still protected today, which makes it one of the more durable decisions of a monarch who was not, by most accounts, reliably rational.
On 4 June 1913, suffragette Emily Davison stepped onto the Epsom Derby racetrack and was struck by the King’s horse. She died four days later, never having seen the voting rights she had campaigned for. Women gained the vote in 1918.
And in 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds into its maiden flight, brought down by a software conversion error that cost approximately £500 million. The error came from reusing code without checking whether it still matched the new specifications. An expensive lesson in reading the small print.
This episode has it all: institutional stubbornness, operatic daring, medieval cheese law, political courage, and a very avoidable explosion. Ten minutes. Worth every one of them.