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

Chapter 4: Tools, Tinkering, and Trouble

120 Chapter 4 Tools, Tinkering, and Trouble In 1908, a miss mcgaw, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia businessman , bought a Wayne roadster. “I tinker around a good deal,” she told a local reporter, “just to satisfy my curiosity” about “the working parts of my Wayne.” Tinkering, she went on to explain, helped her learn “what to do on the road” when trouble occurred.1 Like other early automobilists, she recognized an essential truth about the new technology: “Anyone of average intelligence can learn to run a car in less than a day,” as automotive writer Morris Hall put it, “but what to do on the road when anything happens is the nightmare of the untutored driver.”2 Like many other early motorists, Miss McGaw sought to tutor herself to avoid such nightmares. Women especially might feel vulnerable being stranded alone, perhaps far from civilization, with an inoperative machine; male automobilists seemed more concerned about social ridicule if stranded through a breakdown . “There is nothing so embarrassing to an automobilist,” one wrote, “as to take a few friends out for a ride and then have something happen which he is unable to straighten out.”3 Men felt pressured by the cultural stereotype that equated masculinity with an ability to handle tools and master machinery, yet most of the men who bought automobiles in the first two decades of the twentieth century were from the business or professional classes and did not work with their hands, have experience with tools, or possess much mechanical knowledge. Early car buyers, then, like those who earlier had purchased clocks, sewing machines, or bicycles, also had to learn the parts and systems of their machines and to use the tools that came with them to make adjustments and repairs. For some people, the mechanical obligations of car ownership were grounds for not buying one; while for others like Miss McGaw Tools, Tinkering, and Trouble 121 the automobile’s technical complexity was something found enjoyable and rewarding. Christine Frederick, the well-known scientific management expert, celebrated the way “spark, throttle, cylinders, gear, magneto and steering wheel have yielded their secrets to me” and “wrought my emancipation, my freedom.”4 Studying the automobile’s “construction and operation,” enthused a male motorist, constituted “a liberal education in itself,” so varied were the areas of knowledge and the intellectual challenges it provided.5 Save for the relatively few car owners who engaged chauffeurs, some tinkering and involvement with their vehicles mechanisms was unavoidable as garages and service facilities were few and far apart in the early motor age. It was this frequent need to tinker, to replace or clean a spark plug, say, tighten or replace a fan belt, fuss with the igniter on the acetylene gas headlights, or remove a wheel to change a tire—not just the operational challenges of starting, steering, shifting, and stopping early automobiles—that made the technology so user unfriendly. In this chapter, we look at car owners working “under the hood,” a phrase I use to refer generally to all of the mechanical and operating components of a car, including brakes and tires, which by giving trouble invited motorists to get out, unpack their tools, and set to work.6 The earliest automobiles did not even have hoods, of course, as their engines were mounted on the chassis amidship, beneath the driver’s seat; operators gained access to them by lifting the seat, raising the entire body off the chassis, or crawling beneath the car, the latter indignity memorialized in the chorus of the 1913 popular song “He’d Have to Get Under—Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile).”7 Already by 1905, however, engines had moved to their now familiar location in the front of the car, where they were covered with metal shrouds, or “hoods,” an arrangement allowing for easier access to whatever was under the hood. There was so much to know about these complicated machines, and the learning curve was steep. Owners acquired knowledge through a combination of reading, listening to others, and experience with machines . The automobile was commonly analogized to a sentient, living creature subject to ills and maladies that an alert owner-user might detect through careful observation. While in the nineteenth century, users sometimes attributed “spells” or “fits” to their sewing machines, automobilists pushed the metaphor of illness much further. In its title, Dyke’s 122...