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

Chapter 2: Buying an Automobile

55 Chapter 2 Buying an Automobile As the nineteenth century drew to an end, people were getting excited about the next new thing: the horseless carriage. Unlike horses and humans, both of which had muscles, an automobile did not tire; if fed oil and gasoline, the endurance of this mechanical steed seemed limitless. Had not former bicycle maker Alexander Winton driven a horseless carriage all the way from Cleveland to New York in 1897 and then repeated the feat again in 1899? On that second trip, Winton took along a journalist who filed stories en route, spreading the word about the new technology and publicizing his newly launched Winton Motor Car Company. The horseless carriage was also fast, as Winton proved in 1902 by driving another of his machines, “Bullet Number 1,” ten miles around a racetrack averaging over fifty-five miles an hour, nearly twice what horseflesh could do.1 Nobody knew what the future of the automobile might be, but already in 1895, even before Winton’s accomplishments , the founders of the first automotive trade journal in the United States were optimistic enough to title it Horseless Age.2 Many ridiculed such optimism and thought the automobile a passing fad, never likely to supplant the trusty horse.3 Others were terrified by the noises emitted by internal combustion engines and thought it foolhardy to sit atop such explosions, a necessity given that the motors in early automobiles were usually directly under the seat of the operator and passenger . It also seemed unwise to sit in the open air while traveling speeds of twenty to thirty miles an hour without the protection of heavy steel all around one, as was the case in railway passenger cars.4 Indeed, so dangerous did automobiles seem that some people wanted to ban their use altogether, such as the residents of Eden and Bar Harbor, Maine, who suc- 56 user unfriendly ceeded in doing so within their jurisdictions.5 Many more municipalities and states passed laws restricting and regulating the use of the new technology , such as requiring cars to be licensed or establishing speed limits.6 Among those most hostile to the new technology were residents of the countryside. Many rural folks considered the automobile a moral menace or “devil wagon,” while farmers resented the affluent city slickers who drove them, roaring over rural roads, terrifying livestock, and causing horses to rear and bolt and sometimes overturn buggies and injure or kill the occupants.7 These rural constituencies were rumored to be responsible for the nails that occasionally turned up on country roads, puncturing the tires of automobilists and deepening tensions between city and countryside. In the cities themselves, residents of poorer, more congested neighborhoods, accustomed to congregating and playing in the streets in front of their tenements, fought the incursion of loud, fast-moving automobiles into what in effect were their front yards.8 These conflicts sometimes turned violent, and the New York Times regularly reported statistics on “automobiles stoned.”9 Everywhere, in fact, the newfangled invention fostered tension and class antagonism. “Nothing,” asserted Woodrow Wilson in 1906, then president of Princeton University and soon to be president of the United States, “has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles.”10 The doubt, skepticism, and hostility directed at the new invention did not, however, dampen people’s desire to have automobiles. From the moment they were offered for sale, buyers eagerly stepped forward. While Europeans had invented the horseless carriage, it was Americans who per capita adopted motor vehicles more rapidly and in far greater numbers than did people anywhere else. Already by 1910 the U.S. automobile industry produced more cars than the rest of the world combined.11 The first American firm to enter production was the Duryea Motor Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1895. The brothers Charles E. and J. Frank Duryea were only two of the many Americans who had been experimenting with motorized buggies, but they were the first to actually produce automobiles for sale. The thirteen identical machines they sold in 1896 represented the first production run of any American automobile firm.12 The industry expanded rapidly, however, and soon struggled to meet demand. By 1900, the first year for which we have statistics, consumers purchased forty-two hundred cars manufactured by thirty or so Buying an Automobile 57 firms...