Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  America was not the only country contemplating superhighways. Most of the other Western democracies, however, were a good deal slower in implementing them. As early as 1902, British civil engineer B. H. Thwaite had argued for a four-lane toll road for cars and motorbikes ‘from London, through the centre of England’ to Scotland. His proposal was supported by the aristocratic motoring enthusiast John, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, who promoted it in the pages of his glossy magazine The Car. In 1905 Lord Montagu’s new periodical, The Motor Car Magazine, proposed a ‘great system of motor roads … linking all the principal centres of the United Kingdom’, which would begin with ‘a London to Brighton Motorway’. And in 1906 came the first proposal for a multi-lane superhighway with ‘cloverleaf’ intersections at grade, formulated by the French engineer Eugène Hénard. However, all these early schemes failed to find sufficient financial backing. In 1923 Montagu tried again, this time promoting the idea of a privately run London to Birmingham motorway,1 a scheme backed by Eagle Star Insurance, Shell Oil and, oddly enough, Coventry-based aircraft manufacturers Armstrong Whitworth. Yet even this powerful syndicate failed to lobby sufficient parliamentary support, and the scheme was deemed dead in the water even before the incoming Labour administration of 1924 dealt it its death blow. That year the wellknown writer Hilaire Belloc called for the creation of ‘a very few arterial roads joining up the main centres of population’, 100 feet wide and with intersections at grade – effectively, a modern motorway. However, the first superhighways in France and Britain were not completed until 1946 and 1956, respectively.

  Early cars, as manifestations of speed, style and wealth, invariably became symbols not just of status but also of implied sexual magnetism. The styling of cars from the late 1920s onwards exaggerated their carnal characteristics: the bonnets of luxury sports cars – Bentleys, Cords and Bugattis – became impossibly long; while the pointed nose – by 1937 almost all American cars had V-shaped front ends – and expanded front grille became aggressive tropes of macho aggression.

  Unsurprisingly, given this sexual context, the automobile was gendered from its first years. While ‘car’ was a masculine noun in France, in Britain and the US autos were emphatically feminine. As Autocar’s reviewer rhapsodized in March 1899, the ‘extreme tractability, the ready and pleasant response to my guiding hand, varied by occasional fits of moodiness, not to say stubbornness, disappearing as rapidly as they appeared, make the appellation of the gentle sex particularly suitable to the motor car’. While reinforcing sexual stereotypes, however, cars also served to liberate women from their Victorian roles and restraints. Sometimes they merely seemed to facilitate a journey from the frying pan into the fire: the Harmsworth Monthly Pictorial Magazine of July 1898 illustrated the story of the ‘Motor-Car Elopement’ of ‘heiress Kitty and fearless Jack’. More helpfully, Car Illustrated of August 1904 pointed out that the car enabled women to travel independently; women drivers ‘could shop 20 miles away, lunch 40 miles away and still have time to return home for dinner’. The introduction of the electronic starter, which became common after 1918, also made the process of driving much easier for women, who now did not have to grapple with stiff, heavy hand-cranks in order to start the engine.

  Women drove cars from the earliest years of the automobile age. (Interestingly, though, historian Sean O’Connell points out that only 13 per cent of British women possessed a driving licence as late as 1965.) Dorothy Levitt, the first woman racing driver, was competing in British road races as early as 1903. Levitt confounded the current stereotype of sportswomen: short, slight and shy, she proved that you did not have to be a loud-mouthed, virile male to drive a car well. Yet while the new Automobile Association happily admitted female members after 1905, the more aristocratic Royal Automobile Club refused, forcing the establishment of a ladies’ equivalent.

  By the 1930s not only were many cars specifically aimed at the female market – not just the perennial Austin Seven, but also newer models like the Hillman Minx of 1935 – but women were racing cars and driving them on endurance expeditions. In 1931 Barbara Cartland organized a race for MG Midgets at the famous Brooklands racing track in Surrey to prove that women could drive, and race, as well as men. And as early as 1935 the Daily Express was noting that women drivers were seen as better insurance risks than men.

  The car also had its own complex etymology by 1930. The very word ‘car’, adapted from the railways and the carriage trade, had been in use since the 1880s. ‘Automobile’, ‘autocar’ and ‘motor car’, particularly common terms in America and France, had also survived from the carriage age; whereas ‘locomobile’, a term coined for the car in the 1890s, had not (the word survived into the twentieth century in Britain and France only as a designation for steam automobiles; confusingly, there was also an American car manufacturer called Locomobile, which survived until 1929.) Despite much subsequent mythologizing, the phrase ‘horseless carriage’ was never officially adopted on either side of the Atlantic. Indeed, in October 1895 the London Daily Chronicle was bemoaning the fact that ‘a name has not yet been found for the horseless carriage’. That same year, an enterprising Chicago newspaper held a competition for the best name for the car, offering a $500 prize to the winner. Among those submitted were ‘self-motor’, ‘petrocar’, ‘autobat’, ‘autogo’, ‘autowain’ (shades of John Constable), ‘diamote’ and ‘pneumobile’, which would have been interesting challenge for English speakers. The winner was – ‘motocycle’.

  Neither ‘motocycle’ nor ‘locomobile’ stuck. The first popular word for the car on both sides of the Atlantic was ‘automobile’, a word first recorded in France in 1876, nine years before the appearance of the first true car. In 1899 the New York Times raged against this pernicious French appellation: ‘The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if nothing else, have evolved “automobile”, which being half Greek and half Latin is so near indecent that we print it with hesitation.’ At first, the word was anglicized in a manner of which the New York Times would have approved, neatly separating its Greek and Latin roots, as ‘automobile’. But by 1895 the London Daily News was referring to the arrival of a new ‘automobile carriage’ from Milan.

  Soon ‘automobile’ and ‘car’ were being employed interchangeably. The English word ‘car’ had long been used to denote a wagon, chariot, carriage or railway carriage. By 1896 the term ‘autocar’ was being used by both the British and the French to denote a petrol-powered vehicle; and by 1900 the British had simply shortened this term back to ‘car’. In America, however, ‘car’ remained in use solely for railway carriages. Confusingly, by the late 1890s both Americans and British were using the term ‘motor car’ (sometimes hyphenated as ‘motor-car’) to describe both a powered railway vehicle and a highway automobile. By the 1920s, ‘motor car’ had become standard in the UK, if not in the US. ‘Automobile’ was shortened to ‘auto’ in Germany and Italy, and stuck – although the forward-looking Italians came to prefer macchina (‘machine’), while the more traditional Germans also used the old word for carriage, Wagen.

  Many early types of car borrowed their nomenclature from the carriage forms of the nineteenth century. Car makers used familiar carriage terms in order to lend the product status and lineage, or simply because many automobile coachbuilders used the old carriage terms with which they were familiar. A ‘landau’ – from the Rhenish town of that name – had been a light, four-wheeled, convertible carriage, first made in the mid-eighteenth century and highly fashionable across Europe by 1840. The landau carriage featured facing seats either side of a dropped footwell, all of which could be covered with a soft folding top, divided into two sections, and its lowslung nature made it a popular choice for ceremonial occasions. By 1900 the term ‘landau’ was also being employed by the first car makers to indicate a convertible car. But generally the landau configuration, with the hood in two sections, was not a style that transferred well to the automobile. The expression was disinterred by American manufacturers i
n the 1920s to denote a fixed-roof sedan in which the rear quarter of the glasshouse was covered with fabric in an attempt to make it look like a real convertible. By the 1950s the word had become completely meaningless and was used indiscriminately by GM and Chrysler merely to give their models some vaguely European chic.

  As landaus grew rarer, their half-landau cousins, ‘landaulets’, enjoyed a brief vogue. A landaulet’s body had a convertible top over the back seat – the rear half of the landau’s two-part folding top – while the front seat was either roofed or left open. Since a landaulet was always intended to be a chauffeured car, the style was never popular in the mass market, and after 1918 was reserved for celebrity or official transport. Since the 1960s Mercedes have made special landaulets for the popes John XXIII, Paul VI and the German pontiff, Benedict XVI. As recently as 2007 their Maybach division displayed a ‘landaulet concept car’ at the Middle East International Auto Show, which found itself added to the production roster in 2009.

  A ‘brougham’ was a light, four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage of the nineteenth century. Originally designed in 1830 for Britain’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham and Vaux, it was smaller and nimbler than the usual heavy coach, with an enclosed, twodoor body which usually sat only two people (though it sometimes carried an extra pair of foldaway seats in the front corners), a glazed front window allowing its occupants to see forwards, and a box seat for the driver and companion in front. The ‘brougham’ car of the Edwardian era was basically the same, with an outside seat in front for the chauffeur and an enclosed, hard-top cabin behind for the passengers. Cadillac first used the name in 1916 and kept reusing the term throughout the century. By the 1930s, though, a ‘brougham’ simply meant – for Cadillac as well as its American imitators – a well-appointed, twodoor sedan. Cadillac’s GM stablemate Oldsmobile sold a Regency Brougham until the demise of the marque in 2004, and even Ford used the term during the 1970s.

  Other motor-related words soon entered the everyday vocabulary. The American word ‘limousine’ – meaning, literally, from the Limousin region of France – indicated, by 1902, a car with a closed passenger cab but an open driver’s seat, later covered by an extension of the roof.1 By 1930 the word was being applied more generally to larger automobiles, and after the Second World War to large or long cars with a chauffeur, whose seat could be portioned off from the rest of the interior. Limousines were soon being connected with service to and from US airports.

  By the end of the 1930s, that peculiarly Anglo-Saxon invention the ‘station wagon’ (a phrase first used in the US in 1929), ‘estate wagon’ (used in both the US and the UK) or ‘estate car’ (UK only) indicated a car that was large enough to accommodate both people and goods. The ‘station wagon’ took its title from the horse-drawn buggies or carts that used to greet passengers from railway stations. The British ‘estate car’ was later called the Traveller or Countryman by Morris and Austin. A ‘shooting brake’ was a peculiar, British term for a twodoor estate car, used up until the 1930s. The single word ‘brake’ had been used for large country wagons in the late nineteenth century, and was used by francophone countries to denote their (fairly rare) versions of ‘estate cars’ (un break) until the 1960s. In 2012, Jaguar issued a ‘Sportbrake’ estate version of its XF luxury saloon.

  Some of the new words and phrase stuck. The name popularly used in America to describe a fixed-top car with two rows of four or more seats, ‘sedan’, comes from the covered, transportable chairs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and not, it seems, from the French city of the same name. The US periodical Motor World was using the word ‘sedan’ in 1912, and it soon became common in America. The equivalent British term, ‘saloon’, derived from the Georgian name (itself derived from the French ‘salon’) for the most elegant public room of the house. This rather overused word was by 1840 also being employed for a large, well-appointed room on a ship or train and, by 1908, for an expensive car. The French persisted with a term derived from the age of the carriage, ‘berline’, from the fast Berlin carriages invented in the late seventeenth century. The Germans, confusingly, stuck with die Limousine. The window area of a saloon or sedan was by the 1930s termed a ‘turret top’ or a ‘glasshouse’ – an industry term that caught on mainly in America. The supports for the roof were called pillars and were lettered from front to back; thus the framing supports for the windscreen were the A-pillars, those behind the front door the B-pillars, and those framing the rear window the C-pillars.

  As the automobile industry grew more diverse and complicated, so did its terminology. By 1930 a sedan or a saloon car had ample room for passengers, and accordingly featured a trunk (US) or a boot (UK), or a coffre (France) or Kofferaum (Germany). The impact bar at the front of the car was either a ‘bumper’ in Britain (a usage derived from wooden logs used to protect ships’ hulls from damage) or, in America, a ‘fender’ (which originated as another nautical term, describing pieces of cork designed to protect the hull).1 The American slang term ‘fender-bender’ was already in use by 1884, to denote a carriage accident, while the house magazine Morris Owner was in February 1926 describing ‘the front face of the bumper bar’. Above the bumper or fender lay the bonnet and windscreen (UK), hood and windshield (US), capote and pare-brise (France), or Motorhaube and the onomatopoeic Windshutzscheibe (Germany). Below was the gearbox (UK) or transmission (US and France). The engine was powered by petrol (UK) or gasoline (US).1 Emissions came from the tailpipe in the US, the exhaust pipe in the UK, the pot d’échappement in France and, delightfully, the Auspuffrohr in Germany.2 But a cabriolet was a convertible coupé in Britain, France and America – although ‘coupé’ lost its acute accent when it travelled across the Atlantic.

  Many other motor terms happily crossed national linguistic boundaries. A ‘Spider’ or ‘Spyder’ was an Italian term which originally meant a twoseat sports car with a folding hood – a vehicle that could also be called by most of the world’s nations a ‘roadster’, though this usually signified a convertible with four proper seats and (sometimes) four doors. Convertibles with hard tops were called, unsurprisingly, ‘hard-tops’.3 The French word ‘tonneau’ was, and is, employed across the world for the soft or hard covers used to protect the empty seats of convertibles, roadsters or Spyders. And the English term ‘sports car’ means the same in any language.

  Looking back at the automotive vocabulary of the pioneer years, some terms have, inevitably, disappeared; while the fact that some others were ever considered at all now seems incredible. There are no more ‘berlines’ or ‘landaulets’, and the ‘locomobile’ and the ‘petrocar’ have been consigned to history. Some expressions, though, have managed to survive: American luxury marques still occasionally use the term ‘brougham’, and even the ‘shooting brake’ has made an unlikely comeback. Meanwhile, we have a new set of terms to absorb, from crossovers and mini-MPVs to hybrids and e-cars. And while the English term ‘sports car’ is still in widespread use, today most sports cars are actually made not in Britain or even America but in Japan, a statistic that would have been unthinkable in 1939. When the Second World War broke out that year, the world was to change forever – and it was a change that would be largely shaped by the car.

  1 Singh was deposed by the British for his extravagance and corruption in 1933 and died in exile in Paris four years later.

  2 Designed by classical architects Mewes and Davis and completed in 1911.

  1 The same piece of legislation also introduced registration plates, the driving licence and a minimum driving age of seventeen.

  2 By 1913 there were 175,300 cars on British roads, almost double those in France (88,300) and Germany (about 70,000). But the French still boasted Europe’s largest car industry, making around 45,000 cars in that year, compared with Britain’s 26,238 and Germany’s 17,162.

  1 The basic concept had actually been patented by a Utah policeman two years earlier.

  1 The flashing lights were a later addition.

  2 Subsequ
ently a reforming, though controversial, minister of war; in 1940 he was sacked from his post, largely as a result of widespread anti-Semitic feeling in both the army and the government. Six years earlier, it was Hore-Belisha who had been responsible for raising the speed limit to 30 mph.

  1 A publication that traced its origins back to 1912 but did not survive the 1930s.

  1 Le Corbusier’s 1922 plan for La Ville Contemporaine envisaged a wholly car-dependent metropolis, comprised only of tall tower blocks.

  1 Black workers were still denied jobs at some Detroit plants. When three African-Americans were hired for skilled posts at Packard in 1943, all of their white colleagues downed tools.

  1 The highway itself was, of course, named after the most celebrated of American presidents.

  1 This road was, eventually, to be extended northwards to Salford and Liverpool.

  1 The tortuous etymology of the term suggests it originated from the Limousin-style cloak worn by the car’s exposed chauffeur.

  1 In French the word for ‘bumper’ or ‘fender’ is plural, les pare-chocs (although the English ‘bumper car’ translates as une tamponneuse); in German the term is Stojistanger.

  1 L’essence or pétrole in French; das Benzin across the Rhine. The Italians followed the Germans, with benzina, while the Spanish followed American practice, adopting gasolina.

  2 Auspuff means ‘emissions’.

  3 By 1960 ostensibly fixed hard-top roofs could often be electrically retracted; today the practice is common and threatens to smother the demand for soft-top convertibles.

  5

  The People’s War

  Adolf Hitler adored cars – though he never learned to drive. In 1936 the New York Times reported that the German dictator was believed to ‘reel off a higher annual motor mileage than any other ruler or head of state’. On becoming chancellor in 1933, Hitler made three symbolic gestures to raise the status of the automobile in Nazi Germany: he personally opened the annual Berlin Motor Show (a task he cheerfully repeated every year until 1939); he declared that his government would begin a state-sponsored programme to create a ‘people’s car’; and he announced that his Nazi administration would help Germany’s luxury car makers to dominate world motor racing. Three years later Hitler used the platform of the Berlin Motor Show to announce (somewhat prematurely, as it turned out) that Germany had ‘effectively solved the problem of producing synthetic gasoline’ and never need be dependent on foreign oil imports. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, then echoed his master by declaring that ‘politics shows the direction applied science is to take’ and that ‘the twentieth century is the era of the motor car’.