The introduction to Megan Garber’s excellent history of mechanical horses in the Atlantic:

“For most of human history, horses have been, primarily, a technology. An intimate technology, yes — people named their horses, and groomed them, and sometimes loved them — but horses were, for the most part, tools: They helped humanity to get around and get things done. Once steam power and internal combustion came along, though, that relationship changed drastically. As horses were eclipsed by more efficient methods of moving people and things — trains, cars, planes — their role in human culture shifted, as well. We quickly came to see horses more as what they had been, of course, all along: fellow animals. 

That shift is evident in a longstanding dream that is a little bit fanciful, a little bit practical, a little bit silly, and a little bit wonderful: the quest for the mechanical horse. While some creations — theScammel mechanical horse, the Iron Horse — imagined themselves as horses’ mechanized successors while not actually resembling them, many others have engaged in biomimicry of a more specific variety. While they are only one species we humans have seen fit to imitate with our machines — the world now hosts, among other automatons, the mechanical dog, the mechanical dinosaur, the mechanical pack mule, the mechanical elephant, the mechanical flea, and the mechanical shark — horses have held a special place in human hearts.”