A closer look
Gottlieb Daimler built the world's first motorized taxi in 1897, featuring an incredibly terrifying contraption called the 'taxi-meter' to calculate the fare based on distance and time. This mechanical invention single-handedly birthed the universal anxiety of watching a little number rapidly increase while you sit in unmoving traffic, silently calculating if you can afford to eat dinner that week. Before this, horse-drawn carriage drivers would just wildly guess a price based on how wealthy your coat looked, which was honestly less stressful than the modern ticking clock of financial doom. Over a century later, we replaced the mechanical meter with a smartphone app that actively surges the price by three hundred percent just because it happens to be drizzling outside
