The bus got its name from a hat shop sign in Nantes
In 1823 a miller near Nantes named Stanislas Baudry opened a spa heated by waste water from his corn mill, then ran horse-drawn coaches from the city centre to attract bathers. Hardly anyone went to the spa. Plenty rode the coaches, and a hatter's pun gave them the name that shrank to bus.
Baudry's vehicles set off from outside the shop of a hatter called Omnés, who had hung a big sign reading Omnes Omnibus. It played on his Latin-sounding surname: omnibus is the dative plural of omnis and means for all, so the shop promised everything for everyone. Locals started calling the coaches omnibuses. Baudry shut the mill and the spa, made transport his main business, and in April 1828 launched the first omnibus service in Paris. Manchester had a similar service by 1824 and London by 1829.
Steam soon challenged the horse. In the 1830s Walter Hancock and associates of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney ran reliable steam coaches between English towns, and the first mechanically driven omnibus rolled through London on 22 April 1833. Steam carriages were faster, cheaper to run and less prone to tipping over, and their broad tyres were kind to roads. Heavy turnpike tolls worked against them, however, and the Locomotive Act 1861 capped road locomotives at 5 miles an hour in towns, keeping powered vehicles almost off British roads for three decades.
Electricity came next. William Siemens floated the idea of an omnibus drawing current from overhead wires in 1881, and his brother Ernst Werner showed the experimental Electromote near Berlin in 1882, only to dismantle it that same year. Petrol followed in 1895, when a six-seat carriage based on the Benz Viktoria ran two short-lived routes in Siegerland.
Mass production began with the B-type double-decker, which Frank Searle drew up for London's biggest operator. From its debut in 1910, nearly 3,000 were built within ten years, and hundreds were shipped to the Western Front during the First World War.
Source: Bus
