Life in the early 18th century was a necessarily slow-paced affair for the average citizen. They would walk to school, to work, to market, to church and to the pub, in all weathers. Life was uncomplicated, monotonous and time-consuming. Steam-powered trains had only just begun to be used and even they were confined to industrial settings, unavailable to anyone other than rich industrialists and hobbyist lords. Rather like first-class travel today. Whilst there were other inventions waiting to be discovered such as aeroplanes and computers, Samuel Johnson didn’t invent the dictionary until 1755 so they wouldn’t have known what to call these new-fangled devices anyway.
One chap, however, was brimming with ideas. Cuthbert Smugbeard was a skilled blacksmith, always working away at his forge to come up with new ideas for improving his life. He’d recently been looking into the problem of donkeys moving at, well, a donkey’s pace. Whilst this was all well and good if you were transporting goods to market or ferrying kids along Blackpool Beach, Cuthbert wanted a faster way to get to the pub after a hard day at the forge. And a faster way to get home after a hard evening at the pub. Drunk in charge of a Donkey was not yet on the statutes.
Being a farrier as well as a smith, he was well used to shoeing hooves of various beasts, and hit upon the idea of inserting a thin slice of wavy steel between the iron shoe and the hoof. This, he determined, would impart extra spring in the step of the beast which would enable a longer stride, a higher step, and an ability to leap a five bar gate at even the easiest of canters.
Upon seeing Cuthbert riding his newly invigorated donkey with the special shoes, a nearby landowner, Lord Slooty, invited Cuthbert to fit two pairs of his marvellous new device to all four hooves of his prize stallion, thereby enabling the lord to win that year’s 50 guineas race by several lengths (and due to a minor metallurgical miscalculation by Cuthbert, several heights too).
Slooty invited Cuthbert to go into business together to manufacture the device, but they needed a snappy name for it. Cuthbert wasn’t too good with words (nobody was until 1755 when Johnson invented them), and wanted to call it the Springing Stallion Slither O’Metal but Lord Snooty eventually came up with a much snappier name for it, the…
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Answer: > bouncy horse shim <
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