First drunk driving arrest

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.

Smith was one of a handful of drivers employed by the London Electrical Cab Company, whose battery-powered taxis—the first self-propelled vehicles for hire in the city—had only been in service a few weeks when the incident occurred. The new horseless carriages had a battery range of 30 miles and reached a top speed of 9 to 12 miles per hour; it is not recorded whether Smith was carrying passengers at the time of the accident.

Taken before the Marlborough Street Police Court, Smith pleaded guilty to the charge of operating his cab while intoxicated—the first recorded arrest and prosecution for drunk driving anywhere in the world. The magistrate fined him 20 shillings and admonished him for the reckless conduct that had startled Londoners and damaged property, noting that controlling a horseless carriage while impaired was a very different challenge than managing a horse. Although the scientific tools to measure intoxication were decades away, the case set an early legal precedent by extending existing laws against being drunk in charge of a carriage to the burgeoning age of motor vehicles.