On September 10, 1897, a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pleaded guilty and was fined 20 shillings.
Smith became an unlikely footnote in automotive history when, at 12:45 a.m. that morning, his electric cab lurched off the road and crashed into a building on New Bond Street in Mayfair, breaking a waterpipe and the heading of a window, according to a news report in London's Morning Post. The article noted that a police constable spotted Smith’s vehicle weaving erratically through the early-morning streets, a pattern later linked to the driver’s admission that he’d had “two or three glasses of beer” before getting behind the wheel.
