The Chicago photographer who took this photo and stamped his name on the back assumed that any idiot would know what he/she was looking at. This idiot does not!
More than a century after the fact, this “strange” to our eyes exercise has several perhaps far-fetched theories that have occurred to me, all of them fraught with flaws:
1. Is this training for a firefighting team?
Early fire companies did indeed pull hand pumpers manually (before the days of steam pumpers, and don’t ask me why a hand pumper couldn’t be pulled by horses?) with large crews dragging the heavy machine through the streets, but the images I have seen show an extremely long wooden wagon tongue with lateral crossbars that the pairs of men pushed against – not a harness like we see here! Obviously extricating oneself from a harness when you reached the fire was not conducive to getting down to the business of putting out the fire.
(Indeed, firefighting was about the most extreme macho vocation around in the years before mechanical pumpers; there was fierce pride in the stamina needed to drag a pumper through the streets and pump the machine to maintain pressure in the hoses – so much so that the crews absolutely refused to use the steam pumpers at all, delaying more effective firefighting sometimes for decades! So much for the search for intelligence in the universe.)
2. Is this research into human pulling power?
How many men are needed to replace an ordinary team of horses, perhaps? Hardly scientific. The wagon does not appear to be loaded with weights, and what is the superstructure meant for, and why are there men manning the wheels. I think I’ll opt for a little horse sense!
3. Is this some sort of sophomoric team training for a bizarre competition, along the lines of bed or bathtub races?
University students since the middle ages have been known for seeking the most non-intellectual activities they could think of as relief from their studies, to raise the ire of professors and administrators, and dispel any popular notion that higher education was something it made sense to pursue. There is a high solid board fence around this enclosure, so perhaps these men were considered a threat to public safety!
4. Fill in the blank: _____________________________________________________.
If you know what the hay is going on here, please enlighten the rest of us. And thank you!