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By Root 2676 0

the affections of humanity or more radically transformed the way the world looks, behaves and operates. Look at any urban scene and notice how totally our world is dominated by the needs of the car. Building, repairing, selling and servicing cars now accounts for between one-fifth and one-sixth of all economic activity in the nation. Yet only about a century ago, this marvel of the age didn’t even have a name. Motorized vehicles have been around for longer than you might think – as early as 1770 a Frenchman named Nicholas Cugnot had a steam-powered behemoth called the Fardier lumbering through the streets of Paris at just over 2 m.p.h. (considerably less than walking speed) – but most authorities agree that the first real, working car was one devised by the German engineer Gottlieb Daimler in 1884. He called it a Mercedes, after his daughter. Unaware of Daimler’s creation, another German, Karl Benz, invented a second and very similar car at almost the same time. But in fact by this time the concept of an automobile was already patented in America. A sharp patent lawyer named George B. Selden had had the prescience in 1879 to take out a patent on a largely notional vehicle he called a ‘road engine’. Selden was first not because he was a gifted inventor or even an inspired tinkerer – indeed, he never built a working vehicle – but because he was an opportunist who shrewdly anticipated the limitless possibilities inherent in controlling the patent on this budding technology. As there was no money in ‘road engines’ in 1879, he managed by various legal manipulations to delay the issuance of the patent for sixteen years until the market was at last poised to take off, and thus was positioned to enjoy royalties for the next seventeen years on a technology to which he had made absolutely no contribution. (He didn’t do a great deal for the honour of patent lawyers either. The law was changed soon after his patent expired.)

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