hansom: [19] The hansom cab, the taxi of the second half of the 19th century, was the brainchild of James Aloysius Hansom (1803– 82), an architect, whose other main claim to fame is that he designed Birmingham town hall. In 1834 he took out a patent for a Safety Cab, which included many features incorporated into the hansom cab when it came into general use in the late 1840s. In the 1890s the word was used as a verb: ‘To think that I … a raging Democrat, should be hansoming it to and fro between my Ladies and Honourables’, Sabine Baring-Gould Armine 1890.
