by Bill Bryson
Only by merest chance do Americans call this central component of their lives an automobile. Scores of other names were tried and discarded before automobile hauled itself to the top of the linguistic heap. Among the other names for the early car were self-motor, locomotive car, autobat, autopher, diamote, autovic, self-propelled carriage, locomotor, horseless carriage, motor buggy, stink chariot (presumably coined by a non-enthusiast), and the simple, no-nonsense machine, which for a long time looked like becoming the generic term for a self-propelled vehicle. Automobile, a French word concocted from Greek and Latin elements, was at first used only as an adjective, not only to describe cars (’an automobile carriage’) but also other self-propelled devices (’automobile torpedo’). By 1899 the word had grown into a noun and was quickly becoming the established general term for cars – though not without opposition. The New York Times sniffed that automobile, ’being half Greek and half Latin, is so near indecent that we print it with hesitation’.25 Before the year was out, the word was being shortened to auto. Car was first applied to the automobile in 1896, and by 1910 it had more or less caught up automobile in popularity.
Although the early technological developments were almost exclusively German, it was the French who became the first big manufacturers of cars and thus gave us many of the words associated with motoring – chassis, garage, chauffeur, carburettor, coupé, limousine and of course automobile itself. Chauffeur was a term for a ship’s stoker and as such was applied to drivers of cars in at least a mildly sarcastic sense. Limousine was originally a heavy shepherd’s cloak from the Limousin region of France. The first chauffeurs, forced to sit in the open air, adopted this coat and gradually the word transferred itself from the driver to the vehicle. By 1902 it was part of the English language.26
The first car most Americans saw was one designed by Karl Benz, which was put on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Before the year was out, two brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts, Charles and J. Frank Duryea, had built America’s first gasoline-powered car, and the country never looked back.
No technology in history has taken off more swiftly, more breathtakingly, than the car. And nowhere did it take off faster than in America. In 1898, there were not thirty working cars in the whole of the United States. Within a little over a decade there were not just 700 cars in America, but 700 car factories. In just the first four months of 1899 – just the first four months – American investors provided no less than $388 million of start-up capital for new automobile companies.27
They came from every walk of life. John F. and Horace E. Dodge had run a Detroit machine shop. David D. Buick made plumbing supplies. Studebaker was the world’s largest producer of horsedrawn carriages. Pope, Winton and Rambler all started out as makers of bicycles. A striking number of the first manufacturers were from the Midwest and particularly from Michigan – Ransom Olds, creator of the Oldsmobile, from Lansing; David D. Buick and Henry Ford from Detroit; William C. Durant, founder of General Motors, from Flint – which helps to explain why Detroit became the Motor City. As well as the celebrated names of the early years like Packard, Duesenberg and Cord, there were scores of companies now almost entirely forgotten – Pathfinder, Marmon, Haynes, Premier, McFarland, Ricker (which held the world speed record of 26 m.p.h. in the late 1890s*23), Maxwell, Briscoe, Lexington. Many of the early cars were named for explorers, reflecting the sense of adventure they imparted: De Soto, Hudson, La Salle and Cadillac (named for a French nobleman, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who would almost certainly have been long forgotten except that he had the good fortune to found Detroit). But buyers could choose among a positive galaxy of names now sadly forgotten: the Black Crow, the Bugmobile, the Averageman’s Car, the Dan Patch, the Royal Mail, the Lone Star, the Premier, the Baby Grand, the Hupmobile, the Locomobile.
It is not easy to conceive from this remove just how improbable was the success of the car. In 1900 cars were costly, unreliable and fearsome. ‘You can’t get people to sit over an explosion,’ remarked one observer sagely. Being in control of several hundred pounds of temperamental metal was a frightening challenge that proved too much for many. On her first attempt to drive, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, a wealthy Boston socialite, switched on the engine and promptly ran over a servant who had been stationed near by should she required assistance. As the man struggled dazedly to his feet, Mrs Fish threw the car into reverse and backed over him. Panicking, she changed gears and mowed him down a third time. At this Mrs Fish fled to the house in a pique and never went near a car again. I suspect the servant didn’t either.
All the infrastructure necessary to support an automotive society – petrol stations, traffic signals, road maps, insurance policies, drivers’ licences, parking lots – was entirely lacking in the first years of this century. Cars were not just unnecessary but, since there was almost no place to go in them, effectively pointless. As late as 1905, America possessed not a single mile of paved rural highway. Such roads as existed were unmarked dirt tracks, which became swamps in the wet months and were hopelessly rutted for much of the rest. In many parts of the country even a dirt track would have been welcome. To drive through Nebraska or Kansas often meant to cross a trackless prairie.
Those who made long journeys were deemed heroic or insane, often both. In 1903, the year that the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, Dr Horatio Nelson Jackson of Vermont, accompanied by a mechanic named Crocker and a dog named Bud (who, like his companions, wore goggles throughout the trip), made the first transcontinental crossing by car in a two-cylinder, open-top Winton. It took them sixty-five days, but it made them heroes. For the most part, cars of the period simply weren’t up to the challenge. Those who tried to drive through the Rockies discovered that the only way was to back up them; otherwise the fuel flowed away from their engines. Not only were there almost no decent roads but no prospect of them. The federal government long refused to provide highway funds, arguing that it was a matter for the states, and the states likewise showed the deepest reluctance to subsidize what might be a passing fad. In 1912, twenty of them spent not a penny on highway construction.
But the absence of highways didn’t stop anybody. America’s 8,000 motor vehicles of 1900 had jumped to almost half a million by 1910 and to 2 million by 1915. Infrastructure began to appear. Licence plates made their first appearance in 1901. Four years later, Sylvanus F. Bowser invented a workable gas pump and, with some prescience, called it a Filling Station (though the term would not become common for gas stations until the 1920s). In the same year, the Automobile Gasoline Company of St Louis began the first chain of gas stations – already people were casually shortening gasoline to gas – and people everywhere were singing Gus Edwards’s ‘In My Merry Oldsmobile’:
Come away with me, Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile,
Over the road of life we’ll fly
Autobubbling you and I.
An exciting new vocabulary emerged. Not everyone could yet afford to go autobubbling (dated to 1900, a racy if short-lived term for a pleasure spin), but soon most people were bandying about expressions like road-hog (a term originally applied to bicyclists in 1893), self-starter (1894), station wagon (1904), spark plugs (1908), joy ride (1909), motorcade (1913), car crashes and blowouts (1915), to step on the gas (1916), to jaywalk (1917), jalopy (1924), hitchhike (1925) and rattletrap (1929).29 As early as 1910 people were parking in order to neck or pet (words that date from the same period). As time went on, slightly more sinister linguistic aspects of motoring emerged. Speeding ticket entered the language in 1930, double-parking in 1931 and parking meters in 1935. (The first ones were in Oklahoma City.)
Some words came into the language so quickly that no one seems to have noticed where they came from. Jalopy – in the early days often spelled jolopy, jaloopy and in many other similar ways – is wholly unexplained. It just emerged. Much the same is true of Tin Lizzie (1915) and flivver (1920). Flivver was sometimes used in the general sense of being a failure before it becam
e attached to Henry Ford’s Model T. Mary Helen Dohan notes that ‘human flivver’ appeared in the novel Ruggles of Red Gap in 1917,30 but that would appear merely to muddy the question of how it originated and why it became attached to a car that was anything but a failure. Tin Lizzie, Flexner asserts, arose because Lizzie was a common name for maids, and both maids and Model Ts were black and made to look their best on Sundays.31 If this is so, then it appears to be unattested. An alternative theory is that it may be connected in some way to lizard, a kind of sledge. Nobody knows.
The two million cars of 1915 rose to ten million five years later. By 1920 Michigan alone had more cars than Britain and Ireland. Kansas had more cars than France. Before the decade was half over, America would be producing 85 per cent of all the world’s cars and the automobile industry, which hadn’t even existed a quarter of a century earlier, would be the country’s biggest business.
Most of the credit for this can go to a single person, Henry Ford, and a somewhat oddly named vehicle, the Model T. Ford always used initials for his early cars, but in a decidedly hit-and-miss manner. For reasons that appear to have gone unrecorded, he disdained whole sequences of the alphabet. His first eight models were the A, B, C, F, K, N, R and S before he finally produced, on 1 October 1908, his first universal car, the Model T. (When, nineteen years later, he ceased production of the Model T, he succeeded it not with the Model U, but with another Model A.)
By 1912, just four years after its introduction, three-quarters of the cars on American roads were Model Ts.32 Ford is often credited with introducing the world to the concept of the moving ‘assembly line’ in 1913. Though the word may be his, the idea wasn’t. For decades scores of other industries, from vegetable canning to meat wholesaling, had used assembly line methods, but had referred to them as ‘continuous process manufacturing’ or ‘flow production’. Ford simply adapted the idea to a much larger manufacturing process.33 With his revolutionary methods and by keeping the car basic – ‘You can have any colour you want as long as it’s black’ was his oft-repeated quip – Ford cut the time it took to produce a Model T from fourteen man-hours in 1910 to just two man-hours in 1913,34 and with it of course the price fell. The first Model T cost $850 and rose the next year to $950, but after that, with Ford’s novel and wondrously efficient production lines and increasing economies of scale, the price fell continuously. By 1916 a new Model T cost as little as $345. Even so, that was far more money than most people could get their hands on. A new system of financing arose and with it came a raft of ominous new expressions: instalment plan, time payments, one-third down, downpayment and that perennial invitation to ruin, buy now, pay later.
A month before the first Model T was produced, another great name of the industry was born: General Motors. The company, which had begun life as the Flint Road Cart Company, was founded by William Crapo ‘Billy’ Durant, a mercurial figure described by one friend as ‘a child in emotions, in temperament and in mental balance’. Durant knew nothing of engineering and was not a gifted innovator. Indeed he wasn’t even a particularly astute businessman. He was simply a great accumulator. He bought companies indiscriminately, not just car makers, but enterprises that were involved with the automobile business only tangentially, if at all – companies like the Samson Sieve-Grip Tractor Company (which built tractors steered by reins on the dubious grounds that farmers would find them more horse-like) and a one-man refrigerator company that would eventually become Frigidaire. Many of his automotive acquisitions became great names – Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Chevrolet – but many others, like Cartercar, Sheridan, Scripps-Booth and Oakland, were never more than highly dubious. His strategy, as he put it, was to ‘get every kind of car in sight’ in the hope that the successes would outweigh the failures. They didn’t always. He lost control of General Motors in 1910, got it back in 1916, lost it again in 1920. By 1936, after more bad investments, he was bankrupt with debts of nearly $ 1 million and assets of just $250.35
Many of his best people found his imperiousness intolerable and took their talents elsewhere. Walter Chrysler left to form the Chrysler Corporation. Henry and Wilfred Leland departed to create Lincoln (which later came back to the GM fold). Charles Nash went on to build Nash-Rambler. Others were dismissed, often for trifling transgressions. In 1911 Durant hired a Swiss mechanic/racing driver named Louis Chevrolet. Unfortunately for them both, Durant couldn’t abide smoking. When, shortly after joining the company, Chevrolet wandered into Durant’s office with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Durant took the instant decision that the only thing he liked about the Swiss mechanic was his name. He dismissed Chevrolet, who thence dropped from sight as effectively as if he had fallen through a trapdoor, but kept his melodic moniker and built it into one of the great names of automotive history. (Durant was also responsible for the Chevrolet symbol, which he found as a pattern on wallpaper in a hotel room in Paris. He carefully removed a strip, took it home with him and had his art department work it up into a logo.)
As the opening years of the twentieth century ticked by, two things became clear: America desperately needed better roads and they weren’t going to be paid for with government money. Into this seeming impasse stepped Carl Graham Fisher, one of the most remarkable go-getters of his or any other age. A former bicycle and car racer (for a time he held the world speed record over two miles), founder of the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, hugely successful business-man,and perennial daredevil – he once rode a bicycle along a high-wire stretched between two of Indianapolis’s tallest buildings to publicize a business venture – Fisher was, as you may surmise, something of a dashing figure. His fortune came from the Prest-O-Lites car headlight company – early cars didn’t have sufficient oomph to run headlights, so these had to be powered, and purchased, separately – but his fame came from creating America’s first coast-to-coast highway.
In 1912 Fisher proposed spending $10 million on a gravelled two-lane road from New York to San Francisco, and to raise the money through donations. Thousands of people sent in money – President Woodrow Wilson patriotically gave $5, though Henry Ford refused to cough up a penny – and by 1915 the pot was sufficiently full to make a start. Two problems soon became evident. The first was what to call the highway. A good name was important to galvanize support. Fisher’s proposed name, the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway, was apt but rather short on zip. Fisher toyed with the Jefferson Highway, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway or the American Road before finally settling on the Lincoln Highway, which had a solid patriotic ring to it, even if it alienated many southerners. The second problem was that even with all the donations, there wasn’t nearly enough to build the necessary 3,389 miles of highway. Fisher hit on the idea of constructing what came to be called ‘seedling miles’. He would find a section of dirt road roughly midway between two towns and pave it. The idea of building a mile of good road in the middle of nowhere may seem odd, but Fisher reasoned that once people got a taste of smooth highway they would want the whole concrete banquet. Soon towns all along the route were enthusiastically raising funds to connect themselves to that tantalizing seedling mile. A new slogan arose: ‘See America First.’
In 1923 the Lincoln Highway – the first transcontinental highway in the world – officially opened. For the next forty years, it hummed with life as a daily cavalcade of cars and trucks brought commerce and the intoxicating whiff of a larger, livelier world to the hundreds of little towns (it mostly avoided cities) standing along its pleasantly meandering route. Almost overnight it became, as the postcards proudly boasted, America’s Main Street.
Eventually the federal government decided to make money available for interstate highways, though it continued to consider the matter such a low priority that it handed the task to the Secretary of Agriculture as something to do in his free time. With the help of federal money, other great roads were built: the Jefferson Highway from Detroit to New Orleans, the Dixie Highway from Bay City, Michigan, to Florida, the William Penn Highway across Pennsylvania. The D
ixie Highway was yet another Fisher inspiration, though here the motivation had more to do with self-interest than patriotism. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished for a time to call it – would make a splendid resort.
