Made In America - Bill Bryson [110]
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 became 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