This is NOT the "World’s Oldest License Plate"!!!!

"bun fight": a heated altercation, but one that is ultimately of no importance.

The No. 6 license plate shown above was issued by the City of Victoria to operators of "Hired Vehicles" (i.e. automobile taxis and horse-drawn carriages) in 1913 and was manufactured by the McClary Manufacturing Company of London, Ontario.

Unfortunately, in October of 2010, the venerable Guinness World Records was persuaded that this plate had actually been issued almost 30 years earlier when the City passed its first bylaw (No. 100) to regulate the operation of hackney carriages within Victoria and, therefore, constituted the "World's Oldest License Plate"!

This claim flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which for decades had held that the first automobile license plates were issued by the Department of the Seine under the Paris Police Ordinance of August 14, 1893, which stated that:

Each motor vehicle shall bear on a metal plate and in legible writing the name and address of its owner, also the distinctive number used in the application for authorization. This plate shall be placed at the left-hand side of the vehicle - it shall never be hidden.

The requirement for motor vehicles to carry license plates was extended to the rest of France under a decree passed on September 30, 1901 and was applied to any vehicle capable of exceeding 30km/h.

The oldest surviving license plate issued to an automobile is reported by the "Robertson's Book of Firsts" to be the No. 1 plate from the German State of Bavaria, which was issued to the brothers Hermann and Daniel Beissbarth - local automobile manufacturers - for use on their Wartburg car by the Royal Bavarian Police on April 14, 1899:

The first porcelain license plates only appeared ten years later when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Philadelphia used the material in 1903.

Upon review, the evidence submitted in support of the World Record claim proved dubious and failed to provide a direct link between the 1884 City of Victoria Bylaw and the issuance of the porcelain plates.

Conversely, the weight of historical evidence that the No. 6 plate dated from 1913 was significant and prompted Guinness to revoke the "World Record" for the oldest licence plate in January of 2011, and to retire the category.

While a more detailed account of this episode is presented in Chapter 8 of Tales from the Back Bumper: A Century of British Columbia Licence Plates (available in fine on-line bookstores everywhere), readers of this web page are asked to consider the following:

The two plates shown at left were photographed together in order to show the similarities between the City of Victoria issue (at top), and the BC motorcycle license plate issued by the Provincial Police in 1913 (at bottom).

As can be discerned from the photo, the basic materials used are the same (being a porcelain cover on a heavy gage steel base); the sizes are identical; the bolt hole placement and rivets in each corner and slot hole placement along the top all correspond; as does the alignment of the two vertical lines found to the left and right of each plate.

On closer inspection, it is also possible to match the font used on the numbers as well as the letters:

BC - 'C' Vic - 'C'   BC - '2' Vic - '2'

The typeface used for the letters shows the same outward cut on the ends of the letter 'C' - although the Victoria 'C' has been condensed to allow for additional letters.

Saskatchewan - 1912

There also exists an interesting piece of correspondence from 1913 at the Provincial Archives in which the Superintendent of Provincial Police has written to his counterpart the Secretary of State in Sacramento, California, wanting to know what material was currently in use on their licence plates and whether officials and motorists were pleased with it?

This was because, as he wrote, “this year (1913) we are using enamel and find that many automobile owners complain that they chip very easily and become disfigured.”

Had the City of Victoria been using porcelain plates since 1884, this issue of chipping and disfiguration would not have come as a surprise to the Superintendent, who was a resident of the City.

Prior to the revocation of the "Record" by Guinness, it came to light that a number of other carriage plates were known to exist and were decidedly older than either than 1913 porcelain plates issued by the City of Victoria, or its 1884 Bylaw regulating hackney carriage operators.

These include examples of a "Royal Postal Plate" purportedly affixed to carriage carrying mail during the reign of King George III in the late 1700s or early 1800s; a dated 1860 carriage plate from St. Petersburg, Russia; as well as another carriage plate from New Orleans, Louisiana from the 1870s:

As all of these examples are from carriages, it is questionable if they can even be considered as representing the first modern license plate, which would generally be associated with an automobile.

An advertisement was also placed on the on-line classified site: UsedVictoria.com a few months after the record was revoked (March of 2011) offering the princely sum of a $100 "reward for old photo of Victoria carriage licence plate, 1800's".

Of course, we here at BCpl8s.ca consider such a request a nonsense as there would have had to have been a rupture in the space-time continuum over Victoria sometime in 1913, thereby allowing an unsuspecting taxi driver with a 1913 City licence plate on their vehicle to fall in and re-emerge in 1884 Victoria where, miraculously, they would be photographed - quite by accident ... and, well, you get the "picture". It is a highly unlikely, if not impossible scenario ... Hopefully, UsedVictoria.com does not charge too much to post and renew a listing on their site ...

An unfortunate aspect of this story is that the dissemination of information on the internet has made it very hard to stamp out the notion that the City of Victoria was issuing license plates in 1884 and that these were the first such plates of their kind.

Another instance occurred with a DRAFT of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) study entitled; Best Practices Guide for Improving Automated License Plate Reader Effectiveness through Uniform License Plate Design and Manufacture, that was released in July 2012:

Luckily, this was rectified prior to the formal release of the document, however, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles did not fact check the information in their License Plate Study: An Assessment of the Current State of License Plates and Their Potential to Promote Public and Highway Safety and to Contribute to Transportation Funding in Virginia, which was released in November of 2012:

Thanks to the work of John Potter of NSW, Australia, we now know that the City of Sydney sought to regulate the operation of hackney carriages within its city limits as early as 1845 (almost 40 years before the City of Victoria!) and in the ensuing debate, it was pointed out that municipal corporations in England (namely Brighton and Liverpool) already had regulations covering hackney carriages - and these likely served as the template for the drafting of regulations in Sydney.

The "Hackney Carriages Sydney Act 1847" received Royal Assent on September 22, 1847, and of the 52 regulations contained within the Act, two make specific reference to the requirement for "number plates" (as our Aussie cousins refer to them). Specifically:

Section XIX

That tin plates, with the number of the license of the carriage painted thereon in figures not less than two inches in height, and of proportionate breadth, white upon a ground black, shall be affixed to the outside of every such carriage, in a conspicuous place on each side of the same, provided, that in lieu of affixing plates, the number aforesaid may be painted on any such carriage in such conspicuous place as aforesaid, such number being painted in figures not less than two inches in height, and of a proportionate breadth, in white upon a black ground, and such numbers being legible and undefaced during all the time the carriage shall ply or be used for hire;

Section XX

That the number of the license of the carriage painted on a card six inches by three, in clear legible figures, shall be affixed at the top of the carriage inside, and there shall also be painted on such card under the number, the following words ...

At the Council meeting of May 9, 1848, it was announced that 75 hackney coach proprietors and nearly the same number of drivers had applied for licenses.

On July 18, 1850, an almost identical Act was given Royal Assent in order to allow for the regulation of hackney carriages in Melbourne, which was still governed by the Legislative Council in Sydney at this time.

It is also now known that the City Council of San Antonio, Texas, passed an "ordinance" (or bylaw) on April 1, 1879, “requiring all vehicles used for public hire to have affixed to them a metal plate with a license number and the number of horses required to pull the vehicle.”

At the end of each year, the license number on the plate was to be repainted in a different colour to indicate payment of the fee, thus saving the cost of issuing new metal plates annually. The number also had to be painted in the same colour in a prominent place on the vehicle itself.

Back in 1884, Bylaw No. 100 had made reference to the requirement to obtain two badges from the City, the smaller of which was to be displayed in a conspicuous place inside the vehicle.

In 1901, Bylaw No. 362 amended this so that a driver now had to display the badge "on his arm or some other conspicuous position".

Bylaw No. 1313 provides us with the best hint as to its origin as it required that "the badge shall be elliptical metal enamelled badge, 2 1/2 inches in diameter, and the letters shall be not less than 3-4 inches in height, and shall be blue or black on a light ground, and held by a small trap through the buttonhole."

Of even more interest, Bylaw No. 1313 was amended by the City Council on May 21, 1913, by Bylaw No. 1553, so that the badge would henceforward be "a round solid nickle badge 1 3/4 inches in height and shall be held by a pin affixed in the back thereof and shall be worn on the outside of the lapel o the outer coat and shall contain the words and be in the form of the design thereof which is a schedule to this By-law."