History of a bus
The omnibus (bus), the first organized public transport system, may have originated in Nantes, France, in 1826, when Stanislas Baudry, a retired army officer who had built public baths (run from the surplus heat from his flour mill) on the city's edge, set up a short stage line between the center of town and his baths. The service started on the Place du Commerce, outside the hat shop of M. Omnes, who displayed the motto Omnes Omnibus ("Omnes for all") on his shop front. When Baudry discovered that passengers were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as in patronizing his baths, he shifted the stage line's focus. His new voiture omnibus ("carriage for all") combined the functions of the hired hackney carriage with the stagecoach that travelled a predetermined route from inn to inn, carrying passengers and mail.
His omnibus featured wooden benches that ran down the sides of the vehicle; entry was from the rear.
We can also find a claim from the United Kingdom where in 1824 John Greenwood operated the first "bus route" from Market Street in Manchester to Pendleton in Salford.
In 1828, Baudry went to Paris where he founded a company under the name Entreprise generale des omnibus de Paris, while his son Edmond Baudry founded two similar companies in Bordeaux and in Lyons. A London newspaper reported in July 4, 1829 that "the new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this morning from Paddington to the City". This bus service was operated by George Shillibeer.
In New York, omnibus service began in the same year, when Abraham Brower, an entrepreneur who had organized volunteer fire companies, established a route along Broadway starting at Bowling Green. Other American cities soon followed suit: Philadelphia in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844. In most cases, the city governments granted a private company-generally a small stableman already in the livery or freight-hauling business-an exclusive franchise to operate public coaches along a specified route. In return, the company agreed to maintain certain minimum levels of service-though one of these standards was not upholstery. The New York omnibus quickly moved into the urban consciousness.
The omnibus had many repercussions for society, particularly in that it encouraged urbanization. Socially, the omnibus put city-dwellers, even if for only half an hour, into previously-unheard-of physical intimacy with strangers, squeezing them together knee-to-knee. Only the very poor remained excluded. A new division in urban society now came to the fore, dividing those who kept carriages from those who did not. The idea of the "carriage trade", the folk who never set foot in the streets, who had goods brought out from the shops for their appraisal, has its origins in the omnibus crush.
The omnibus also extended the reach of the emerging cities. The walk from the former village of Paddington to the business heart of London in the "City" was a brisk one for a young man in good condition. The omnibus offered the nearer suburbs more access to the inner city.
When motorized transport proved successful after c. 1905, a motorized omnibus was for a time sometimes called an autobus.
Bus lines proliferated in the U.S. as streetcar lines were torn out of the major cities by "bus manufacturing or oil marketing companies for the specific purpose of replacing rail service with buses." This was accompanied by a continuing series of technical improvements: pneumatic "balloon" tires during the early 1920s, monocoque body construction in 1931, automatic transmission in 1936, the diesel-engine bus in 1936, the first acceptable 50+ passenger bus in 1948, and the first buses with air suspension in 1953.
