User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers

Chapter 5: Reading the Owner's Manual

147 Chapter 5 Reading the Owner’s Manual It is out of the question to send an expert with every vehicle shipped,” explained the editor of Motor Age in 1902, “but the instruction book can go as a silent instructor.”1 His comment captured an essential truth: unlike purchasers of traditional goods, technology consumers desperately needed help—in learning to use a complex machine, in diagnosing its troubles, and in getting it working again. The solution was the silent instructor, or owner’s manual. Representing a machine in words, diagrams, and illustrations, an owner’s manual created a simulacra of the technology itself. Readers could study the printed (or more recently, on-the-screen) version of their technology whenever they had questions or problems. The practice of including instructions with machines had started in the early nineteenth century, and, as noted in chapter 1, by the time of the Civil War, with the advent of sewing machines, the brief labels that came with clocks had morphed into small booklets, the first true owner’s manuals. By the time the horseless carriage appeared at the turn of the twentieth century, consumers had come to expect instruction books with any machine they bought. If an automaker inadvertently forgot to supply a manual with every car, as Studebaker once did in the 1920s, purchasers raised a ruckus.2 Instruction books were essential because of the automobile’s complexity . Cars had many more individual parts than the few dozen or hundred of earlier consumer technologies, and their components were subjected to greater stresses in ordinary usage and, as we have seen, often broke down. Finally, because some of the car’s systems were electrical and chemical rather than just mechanical, as on earlier personal tech- 148 user unfriendly nologies, consumers struggled learning the new knowledge required to operate battery-powered ignitions or acetylene-gas-illuminated running lights. The relationship between automotive technology, new learning, and instructional texts was summed up cleverly by Andrew L. Dyke, an early advocate of horseless carriages, erstwhile automobile manufacturer , and publisher. He reformulated the old cliché linking knowledge and power to read, “Knowledge is Power (H.P.),” the letters standing for “horse power.” Coined to promote a handbook he compiled, Dyke’s Diseases of a Gasoline Automobile and How to Cure Them, the aphorism meant that only by acquiring new knowledge, often by reading, could one obtain “power” from or over an automobile or any other complex personal technology.3 Consumers often found the first manuals automakers provided to be inadequate and demanded additional information. “If you have not already done so,” Charles Henry wrote the maker of his new 1905 Winton automobile, “please send me some kind of directions how to adjust the new ignition battery and all about it; also directions in regard to the oiler and the carburetor.”4 Another early automobile owner claimed his instruction book was so opaque that it might as well have “been printed in Choctaw or Sanskrit, so far as understanding its quiz-compendious manner ” was concerned, a reference to the way early manuals were sometimes organized like catechisms, providing answers to randomly posed questions.5 Even the editor of Motor, an early automotive periodical, believed that “better instruction books” were imperative if “a man who does not know the exact difference between a four-cycle engine and an eightday clock” was to learn how to operate a motor vehicle.6 Confused and frustrated, motorists often sought out more “definite and understandable information” in works authored by people unconnected to the automobile manufacturers.7 One of the earliest such volumes was Dyke’s Diseases of a Gasoline Automobile, which first appeared in 1903 and remained in print until the 1940s, going through many editions . During the first quarter century of the auto age, at least seventy-five such independently written volumes were published in the United States. The popularity of books like The A-B-C of Automobile Driving (1916); Auto Repairing Simplified (1918); First Aid to the Car (1921); and Everyman ’s Guide to Motor Efficiency (1920) signaled the consumer’s craving for more accessible, easily understood information.8 One of these volumes, Reading the Owner’s Manual 149 Gasoline Automobiles (1915), was a “technical best seller” for publisher McGraw-Hill, selling 83,500 copies in its first eight years.9 Another major publisher of technical literature, Norman W. Henley, of New York City...