Automobile

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AUTOMOBILE

gendering the automobile
social distinctions
limits of nineteenth-century automobilism
bibliography

Germans Carl Friedrich Benz (1844–1929) and Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler (1834–1900), working separately in the 1880s, both invented small and sufficiently efficient internal combustion engines for a variety of uses. Showing potential applications, each mounted his engine on a chassis. Soon French metalworking firms, most notably Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot, but including a host of other companies, began using the new technology to produce small, gasoline-powered cars. When Édouard Michelin (1856–1940) placed the new contraption on pneumatic tires, the automobile became more efficient, more comfortable, and more marketable. The internal combustion engine riding on pneumatic tires became the dominant way to power an automobile.

Until the first decade of the twentieth century, automobiles were the domain of inventors and very wealthy sportsmen. Although the French were widely reputed to have the best roads in Europe—a fact attributed to the elite Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, Napoleonic road building, and better maintenance—even there conditions were hazardous. Across Europe, driving was an adventure, requiring neither drivers' licenses nor car inspections. Early road races, in which circuits were established on preexisting country roads, were feats of survival given uneven surfaces, curves, hills, lack of safety features on cars, mechanical breakdowns, and frequent tire blowouts.

At the turn of the century, wealthy Europeans began to buy automobiles for touring and not just sport, pressuring governments for better roads and creating a veritable tourist infrastructure. Automobile and touring clubs began to publish road maps and directories of mechanics, hotels at which to stay, and businesses selling tires and gasoline. Tire companies followed suit, as they wanted to encourage tourists to travel more, using more tires: Michelin set the pace with the first Red Guide to France in 1900, then Continental and Dunlop copied the effort. Touring clubs and manufacturers both placed road signs designed for automobiles and lobbied governments to take on the responsibility and substantial cost.

gendering the automobile

In the late nineteenth century, automobiles were often compared with women, suggesting that both automobiles and women were male possessions. In advertisements, half-naked women were draped over automobiles, implying that the male buyer of the auto mobile either got the woman as part of the package, or that he would become so irresistible in his new car that any woman would happily undress for him.

The Michelin tire company similarly made the comparison between women and automobiles. But unlike most advertisers, which used mere images and little text, Michelin published weekly newspaper articles, designed to be humorous. In 1914, in the mass-circulation Le Journal, the "Michelin Man" declared the ways that an automobile resembled a woman:

Woman, says the Arab proverb, shares our pains, doubles our joys, and triples our expenses. One can say the same thing about the automobile…. The automobile, like woman, makes us see the country…. To steer her one needs softness, a certain touch, and one recognizes this experience among those who have gotten around. You will tell me that the automobile has the superiority of silence. Would you be quiet! A pretty woman and a car, what could be better for expanding one's circle of acquaintances? The owner of a pretty car and the husband of a pretty woman never risk having too few friends… and which costs the most, whether you are talking about a woman or a car? Maintenance… I can't pursue this comparison. It could go on into infinity. ("Le Lundi de Michelin," Le Journal, 6 April 1914, p. 5)

Automobiles were clearly gendered, and they were gendered in a way that tended to reinforce existing stereotypes, not to mention male dominance.

With engines invented in Germany, cycling technology perfected in Britain, and a series of French innovations, the automobile was at root European. Within Europe and the world, France quickly became the center of the prewar automobile industry. Until 1904–1905, when cheap Oldsmobiles and Fords emerged in the United States, France produced more automobiles than any country in the world. In 1914, France still exported more automobiles than any other country, including the United States. Within Europe, there were more cars produced in France, and more driven in France, than in any other country. Within France and in Europe generally, the automobile was an article de luxe, a luxury item much like the fine silks

and wines that French manufacturers sold to the European bourgeoisie.

social distinctions

Without much practical use in Europeans' daily lives before 1914, automobiles offered the kind of social distinction money could buy. Neither the working class nor the lower middle class could afford automobiles, let alone the very steep maintenance costs: in 1901, a single tire, unlikely to last more than a couple of thousand kilometers, cost the equivalent of thirty-three days of work by an adult male laborer in the French provinces. The well-heeled upper middle class constituted the primary market before World War I, and advertisements implied that they could be aristocratic if they bought automobiles and their accessories. Advertisements reminded potential buyers that King Edward VII (r. 1901–1910) of the United Kingdom was an auto enthusiast. Automobile and tire makers named which heads of state and which famed aristocrats drove their products or rode on their tires. The message was clear: by buying a certain kind of automobile, a bourgeois man could have the next best thing to royal or aristocratic lineage.

Early distribution reinforced the image of automobiles as a luxury good. In the annual automobile salons, manufacturers set up exhibits, showing off their products. Potential buyers walked through the salon and ordered a chassis, a motor, any accessories, and then waited for their automobile to be built. The assembly line was not introduced until the eve of World War I and was not widespread in Europe until the interwar years; automobiles before 1914 were essentially custom-made, much as a bourgeois man would go to a tailor, choose a fabric, be measured, and have his suit made. Advertising posters also focused on automobiles as a luxury, a means of setting oneself off from others.

limits of nineteenth-century automobilism

The environmental challenges posed by the automobile were not obvious in 1914, as most people still traveled by foot, horse, and train, when they traveled at all. And despite the dreams of automobile manufacturers, it was not obvious that the automobile would eventually become a practical conveyance for many, let alone most, Europeans. It was, after all, World War I that first illustrated just how practical automobiles might be: in September 1914, prewar Renault taxis from Paris helped to halt the German advance at the battle of the Marne; in 1917, truck traffic on the voie sacrée to Verdun moved men and supplies to the fortress. Only in the interwar years did the lower middle class begin to buy automobiles, and the mass market for automobiles in Europe developed only after World War II.