Made In America (32 page)

With the arrival of train travel, the stagecoach was instantly eclipsed, and little wonder. Trains were not only faster and increasingly more comfortable, but also cheaper. From coast to coast the trip took eight to ten days at an average speed of about 20 m.p.h. (rising to a giddy 35 m.p.h. on the faster stretches). The one-way fare from Omaha to Sacramento was $100 first class (plus $4 a night for a berth in one of the new Pullman sleepers), $75 for second class, $40 for third.

Pullman cars, originally Pullman Hotel-Cars, were named for George M. Pullman who developed them in 1865 and dining-cars in 1868. To accommodate his 12,000 workers, Pullman built a model community, Pullman, Illinois (now part of Chicago), where workers lived in company houses and shopped at company stores, thus ensuring that most of what they made returned to the company. That Pullman porters were nearly always black was not a result of enlightened employment practices, but a by-product of abysmal pay. The custom of calling porters ‘George’, whatever their name, was apparently taken from Pullman’s own first name.
¹⁹

Among railway terms that have passed into general familiarity were
caboose, iron horse, cow catcher, jerkwater town, to featherbed, to ball the jack, to ride the rails
and
to ride the gravy train.
A
gravy train
was a good run, either because it paid well or wasn’t too taxing. Surprisingly it isn’t recorded before 1945. To
featherbed,
meaning to employ more workers than necessary, is also recent. It isn’t found before 1943.
Caboose
is much older. From the Dutch
kabuis,
it was used to describe various parts of a ship, notably the galley, long before it was appropriated by the railways. A
jerkwater town
was literally that – a place, usually desolate, where trains took on water from a trackside tank by jerking on a rope.
To ball the jack,
to travel quickly, even recklessly, is entirely uncertain. It may have some connection with
high ball,
a signal to proceed.

Two other terms more loosely associated with railway travel are
bum
and
hobo. Hobo
was first attested in a newspaper in Ellensburgh, Washington, in 1891, but no one has ever come up with a certain explanation of its etymology. Among the theories: that it is a contraction of ‘homeward bound’ or that it has something to do with the salutation ‘Ho! Beau!’, which sounds a trifle refined for vagrants, but in fact was a common cry among railway workers in the nineteenth century and would certainly have been familiar to those who rode the rails.
Bum
in the sense of a tramp appears
to be a shortening of the German
Bummler,
a loafer and ne’er-do-well.

Though we tend to associate urban congestion with the automobile and the shortcomings of our own age, horse-driven traffic clogged cities long before cars came along. In 1864 New York City built two miles of underground tunnels through Central Park to try to keep things moving, and dubbed them
sub-ways.
The British still use
subway
in the sense of a subterranean passageway (or, a cynic might add, public housing for vagrants) but in America that sense lasted just twenty-nine years before being usurped by the new urban underground railways in 1893.
²⁰
The automobile may have its drawbacks, but at least it doesn’t normally attract flies or drop things you need to step around. The filth of horses was a constant problem for cities well into this century, one that we can barely imagine now. In 1900 some dedicated official in Rochester, New York, calculated that the manure produced by the city’s 15,000 horses would in a year cover a one-acre square to a depth of 175 feet. Often kept in insanitary conditions and worked hard through all weathers, horses not only drew flies but dropped like them. At the turn of the century, 15,000 horses a year died on the streets of New York, 12,000 on the streets of Chicago.
²¹
Sometimes they were left for days. Between the flies, the manure and the steaming corpses, there was no mistaking that you were in a city.

Thus the advent of the cable-car and trolley-car was not just a boon but a kind of miracle. The cable-car was perfected by a Scottish immigrant named Andrew Smith Hallidie, who had something of a vested interested in its success: he ran a company that made cables. Cable-cars moved by gripping underground cables that were in constant motion. When a driver wished to stop he pulled a lever that disengaged the grippers. If for some reason the grippers would not disengage – and this appears to have happened quite a lot – the result was a runaway car, which would trundle along inexorably,
mowing down anything too slow or insensible to get out of the way, until the power station could be alerted to shut down the entire system.
²²
It was not, as you can imagine, altogether ideal. Even so, cable-cars were briefly very popular, though today San Francisco is the only American city where they still exist, and even there the system is a shadow of its former self. In 1900 the city had 110 miles of line and 600 cars; by 1980 it had a little over 10 miles of line and just 40 cars.

What rendered the cable-car obsolete was the trolley-car, or
trawley car
as it was sometimes spelled in the early days. The trolley-car was so called because the mechanism that connected the cars to the overhead wires was a troller, which in turn was ultimately from a British dialect word
troll,
meaning to move about. Trolley systems were easier to install and cheaper to run than any competing systems and in consequence they thrived. It is generally overlooked that the United States once had the finest system of public transportation in the world. At the turn of the century, Berlin had the most extensive streetcar network in Europe; but in America it would have come only twenty-second.
²³
By 1922, the peak year, America had over 14,000 miles of streetcar track. The biggest system in the country was, you may be surprised to hear, that of Los Angeles.

Streetcars changed the way people lived. They opened up suburban life. The population of the Bronx went from under 90,000 to 200,000 in the years immediately after the introduction of the streetcar.
²⁴
By 1902 New York streetcars alone were carrying almost one billion passengers annually. Cities became bigger, busier, more confusing and in consequence in the 1890s two new words entered the language:
rush hour
and
traffic jam.

But streetcars also offered opportunities for pleasure. People were for the first time able to explore districts of their cities that they had only heard about. Realizing the
possibilities, streetcar companies began building amusement parks at the end of the lines as a way of boosting revenue – places like Willow Grove Park, twelve miles from downtown Philadelphia and now, inevitably, the site of a shopping mall. Despite their popularity, streetcars were seldom profitable. In 1921 America’s 300 largest streetcar systems made a collective profit of $2.5 million – roughly $8,000 each – on an investment of $1.5 billion. With the rise of private car ownership and other forms of transport such as buses – or ‘trackless trolleys’, as they were sometimes called at first – their fate was sealed. Between 1922 and 1932 the number of streetcar miles in America almost halved. In that same decade, a company called National City Lines – a cartel made up of General Motors and a collection of oil and rubber interests – began buying up trolley lines and converting them to bus routes. By 1950 it had closed down the streetcar systems of more than a hundred cities, including those of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and St Louis. Its actions were unquestionably illegal and the company was eventually taken to court and convicted of engaging in a criminal conspiracy. The fine: just $5,000, less than the cost of a new bus.

Tempting as it is to blame a monolithic corporation for the downfall of public transportation in America, the real culprit was the car, or more specifically the nation’s abiding addiction to it. No innovation in history has more swiftly captured 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 Duryea, had built America’s first gasoline-powered car, and the country never looked back.

No technology in history has taken off more swiftly, more breathtakingly, than the car. And nowhere did it take off faster than in America. In 1898, there were not thirty working cars in the whole of the United States. Within a little over a
decade there were not just 700 cars in America, but 700 car factories. In just the first four months of 1899 – just the first four months – American investors provided no less than $388 million of start-up capital for new automobile companies.
²⁷

They came from every walk of life. John F. and Horace E. Dodge had run a Detroit machine shop. David D. Buick made plumbing supplies. Studebaker was the world’s largest producer of horsedrawn carriages. Pope, Winton and Rambler all started out as makers of bicycles. A striking number of the first manufacturers were from the Midwest and particularly from Michigan – Ransom Olds, creator of the Oldsmobile, from Lansing; David D. Buick and Henry Ford from Detroit; William C. Durant, founder of General Motors, from Flint – which helps to explain why Detroit became the Motor City. As well as the celebrated names of the early years like Packard, Duesenberg and Cord, there were scores of companies now almost entirely forgotten – Pathfinder, Marmon, Haynes, Premier, McFarland, Ricker (which held the world speed record of 26 m.p.h. in the late 1890s
^*23
), Maxwell, Briscoe, Lexington. Many of the early cars were named for explorers, reflecting the sense of adventure they imparted: De Soto, Hudson, La Salle and Cadillac (named for a French nobleman, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who would almost certainly have been long forgotten except that he had the good fortune to found Detroit). But buyers could choose among a positive galaxy of names now sadly forgotten: the Black Crow, the Bugmobile, the Averageman’s Car, the Dan Patch, the Royal Mail, the Lone Star, the Premier, the Baby Grand, the Hupmobile, the Locomobile.