required by the front wheels when turning tightly, the floor was lowered to permit greater internal headroom. This was achieved by cranking the back axle downwards as in a float, an idea first employed by a Mr Purdy. The well thus formed was long and wide. The lowered floor also saved some of the lifting which was a feature of using normal horse-drawn lorries and vans, which needed a deck high enough to fit the steering mechanism below it. Access was obtained through hinged doors at the rear. Outside these, the tailboard was hinged upwards from the level of the well. Use Some pantechnicons were drawn by two horses in tandem. This seems to have been so as to allow entry to relatively narrow town lanes and such places as the warehouse doorways. To give the driver a clear view of obstructions and to enable him to control the lead horse, he was usually seated on the front of the roof. When horses were replaced by traction engines the vans gained a new lease of life, being easily adapted to the new form of traction. From the early 1900s onward lift-off container bodies were introduced which could be lifted off the chassis and transferred to a rail wagon or to the hold of a ship. The value of these vans seems to have been quite quickly appreciated so that removal firms other than The Pantechnicon operated them, sometimes over long distances between towns, a business which was eventually superseded by the spread of the railways. Popular culture Charles Dickens mentions the Pantechnicon as a place to buy carriages in Pictures from Italy and The Uncommercial Traveler. William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) mentions the Pantechnicon as a storage service: The house was dismantled; the rich furniture and effects, the awful chandeliers and dreary blank mirrors packed away and hidden, the rich rosewood drawing-room suite was muffled in straw, the carpets were rolled up and corded, the small select library of well-bound books was stowed into two wine-chests, and the whole paraphernalia rolled away in several enormous vans to the Pantechnicon, where they were to lie until Georgy's majority. An adventure with a runaway pantechnicon is one of the episodes in the Arnold Bennett novel, The Card (1911). M.R. James mentions the fire that partially destroyed the Pantechnicon in his ghost story Count Magnus, as having probably destroyed some of his