8 ms·

America’s skepticism toward the first automobiles (1930)

77 points by dclowd9901 3y ago

dragontamer 3y ago
I think this is important to read but for the opposite reasons. The first cars were looked upon with skepticism in 1893 to 1895. But the article makes it clear that the American public was accepting of the idea by the 1900s. We're looking at a period of 5 to 8 years to go from skeptical of an idea to accepting. This lines up with my experience with smartphones, internet, and other inventions of my lifetime. There are other... inventions... which have had more than 10+ years to prove themselves. Maybe they'll prove themselves soon, but I have my doubts.
- thazework 3y ago
  I get what you're implying, and while you may not be wrong, this also depends on when you start the clock on the invention...the 'whitepaper' for the car first came out in 1495. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_self-propelled_cart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_self-propelled_ca...
  - toolz 3y ago
    I'm wondering if I'm in the minority as crypto rightfully draws a lot of skepticism (presuming OP is implying crypto) but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how anyone can call financial instruments with more volume than the NSYE and a higher market cap than any company in the world anything but "successful" already. Yeah, plenty of scammers and people with good intentions make a lot of claims that haven't come to fruition and most of them probably won't, but the same can be said of all the failed vehicle manufacturers as well. Yet, I don't think anyone was calling vehicles a failure at even orders of magnitude less valuation. I personally don't make great use of crypto other than some speculations (disclosue, I have made a non-life-altering amount in crypto speculation) but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting, valuable things being done with the technology. I see things like https://atalaprism.io/ https://atalaprism.io/ that seem really interesting as well as more institutional things like bonds being issued on the blockchain (happening in the EU) as things that have potential to continue adding value.
    - julianz 3y ago
      Given that nearly all that volume is made up of artificial wash trading to manipulate the price, I'm not buying it. If crypto had any real world use I would see it when I stepped outside into the world, and I don't.
      - toolz 3y ago
        Either you're saying that something has to benefit you personally for it to have "real world use" (which is a misuse of the phrase) or you're saying you haven't done any research, including the two real world uses I posted in my previous comment. I'm guessing I'm interpreting what you're saying wrong, but I'm failing to come up with any other way to read your comment. Also the highest trading volume of NYSE is close to 300 billion in a day. The highest trading volume of crypto is something like 500 billion with some estimates saying 51% of all crypto volume is artificial. That still puts crypto's trading volume peak only ~40 billion off from NYSE trading volume peak. So by that metric alone crypto as a financial instrument is successful.
    - dclowd9901 3y ago
      I posted this because I started thinking about what it must’ve been like living in a world where we only had horses and trains and what the absolute freedom that cars brought must have felt like. It must have felt miraculous. There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods. I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        Do you know what 100,000 horses did to the streets of New York in the 1890s? Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop. Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on. I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.
roschdal 3y ago
Cars have been a blessing and disaster for humanity and the planet.
npunt 3y ago
It's fun to see the patterns of history repeat themselves. Two things stood out: 1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll. > I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that. 2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products. > When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed. AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force. Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!
- eesmith 3y ago
  > we pioneers always worked together That is an overly broad characterization. We can look to the Wright brothers as pioneers who vigorously enforced patent. As the Wikipedia entry puts is: "The Wright brothers did not have the luxury of being able to give away their invention: It had to be their livelihood. Thus, their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney, Henry Toulmin, not to reveal details of their machine." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers http://wintonhistory.com/ http://wintonhistory.com/ adds "[Winton] was also generous in passing the technology along to competitors when safety was an issue." The steering wheel described fits that characterization. https://archive.org/details/1001inventionsth0000unse/page/498/mode/2up?q=%22Alexander+Winton%22 https://archive.org/details/1001inventionsth0000unse/page/49... goes on to describe how other companies of the time were no so eager to share in the "over 1 00,000 patents [that] went into the creation of the first practical automobile." ] Unfortunately, Winton's local competitors were simultaneously working on a very similar system and beat him to the patent. The Ohio Automobile Company, later renamed the Packard Motor Car Company, added their version of the steering wheel, based on Winton's early developments, to the second car they launched in 1899. It was immediately successful, and Winton, whose company custom-made every vehicle, found the competition difficult and was forced to stop production in 1924.
npunt 3y ago
dang - should be (1930) not (2017)
matsemann 3y ago
I recently read a book about the history of cars in my country [0], and how they came to dominate. It's quite astonishing how quickly we went from the streets belonging to the people, to the few privileged owning a car taking all that space. In 1920, 15 pedestrians were killed with only 2000 cars in the country. Instead of that being a killing blow to the cars, the rich people owning cars organized. They had power and stood together, and managed to make it so that it was "uncultured people walking in the road getting run over". Some of these organizations still exist today, like Trygg Trafikk ("Safe Traffic"), and they're true to their roots: they're not really advocating for less traffic deaths, they're advocating for making it easier to drive everywhere in the guise of promoting "safety". [0]: Et land på fire hjul, by Ulrik Eriksen
- seper8 3y ago
  Dont think you understand the extent to which you and we owe our wealth to the invention of the combustion engine...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheGigaChad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - matsemann 3y ago
    What in my comment makes you think I don't know the impact of cars? I just wrote a relevant comment to the article, of how cars won over my country.
  - wyre 3y ago
    Yes, yes, all hail the combustion engine…
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  The concept of jay walking was invented to permit victim blaming of people who once freely roamed among the carriages.
arcticbull 3y ago
Seems like the doubters were quite right - our ability to go anywhere is now dependent on forking out $25-50K for a car, hundreds of dollars in insurance payments, hundreds of dollars in gas payments, hundreds of dollars in parking, tickets/fines, tolls, registration, licensing. Not to mention all the taxes paid for the road, interstates, etc. And the fact you now have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the US. Getting into a car is among the riskiest things you do on a daily basis. Then, the way interstates tore apart communities and parking continues to ruin downtowns. That's before we get to the impact on the planet. At the time they had a wonderful network of intercity trains across the country (430,000mi by 1910), street cars and metros. A lot of which was torn up thanks to the car lobby.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Paywall for life.
- hifromLA 3y ago
  Not to mention how car dependence makes it hard to densify our cities enough to build our way out of the housing crisis we have.
  - hotstickyballs 3y ago
    The housing crisis is exactly how densification starts. It will happen when market forces are allowed to work despite the god awful amount of regulations.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    It’s always the same objection to every new apartment “but what about the traffic? the roads can’t support this.” If we built this we wouldn’t need traffic…
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  It's not even about the car lobby. It's about individual vs. collective choice. For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but for society, it is worse that more public spending, resources and city design is geared towards accommodating more cars than public transit. However no one is going to sacrifice their personal well being via giving up their car. The solution is to pay people not to buy cars.
CalRobert 3y ago
Considering they were the leading cause of dead kids until recently (guns have overtaken them, both are worsening at present) I'm skeptical of present day ones too.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  One of the leading causes of death in the US, period. 1 in 93, just about the same as guns. Half way to the opioid crisis. [1] [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
  - refurb 3y ago
    Sure, but death rates in the US are super low overall, so #1 is irrelevant when there is always a #1. And you can’t ignore benefits with any cost. Giving someone cancer drugs has a chance of killing them but we don’t stop using them because a chance at a cure outweighs the costs.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      They kill thousands of kids despite the fact the we stole the streetscape from those kids and with it their independence. How many kids walk or bike to school compared to 1940? If we put sharks in all the pools it would reduce drownings too ..
      - refurb 3y ago
        Look at the death rate in the 1940's and compare it to today.
        CalRobert 3y ago
        Yes, and consider the "kids having a semblance of independence" rate in the 40's too.
dvh 3y ago
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
prmoustache 3y ago
I barely understand how cars culture work in the USA. Infrastructure costs are huge, yet people in this country do not want to pay taxes and will build schemes to avoid them at all costs. And they don't want to have shops and restaurants at a walking distance from their house. It can only lead to bankrupting country or cities, drive on barely maintained roads and suffer traffic and lose precious time every day.
- pxeboot 3y ago
  >And they don't want to have shops and restaurants at a walking distance from their house. If prices are any indicator, people highly value walkable neighborhoods, which is why they tend to be much more expensive than less walkable suburbs.
  - b1ue64 3y ago
    > which is why they tend to be much more expensive than less walkable suburbs. Also there are barely any walkable neighborhoods in America
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Australia has quite a few, especially around Melbourne. And they are all the most expensive places to buy or rent. Made up for the fact you save a fortune not needing a car.
    - newZWhoDis 3y ago
      Every major metro area in the US has walkable prisons. This myth that they don’t exist needs to fall off already.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        > “Walkable prisons” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength”
      - nayuki 3y ago
synergyS 3y ago
Fascinating story - many truths and behaviors' still sticks
repler 3y ago
Alexander Winton sounds like a fascinating person! It’s a shame he doesn’t seem to have written an autobiography. Aside from this Saturday Evening Post contribution, and the biography “Famous but forgotten: The story of Alexander Winton, automotive pioneer and industrialist”, there doesn’t seem to be much else to read about the man. Anybody find anything else?
mistrial9 3y ago
"What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today." A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies
jp57 3y ago
If AI is the car, the human mind is the horse.

77 points by dclowd9901 3y ago

I think this is important to read but for the opposite reasons. The first cars were looked upon with skepticism in 1893 to 1895. But the article makes it clear that the American public was accepting of the idea by the 1900s. We're looking at a period of 5 to 8 years to go from skeptical of an idea to accepting. This lines up with my experience with smartphones, internet, and other inventions of my lifetime. There are other... inventions... which have had more than 10+ years to prove themselves. Maybe they'll prove themselves soon, but I have my doubts.

thazework 3y ago
I get what you're implying, and while you may not be wrong, this also depends on when you start the clock on the invention...the 'whitepaper' for the car first came out in 1495. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_self-propelled_cart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_self-propelled_ca...
- toolz 3y ago
  I'm wondering if I'm in the minority as crypto rightfully draws a lot of skepticism (presuming OP is implying crypto) but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how anyone can call financial instruments with more volume than the NSYE and a higher market cap than any company in the world anything but "successful" already. Yeah, plenty of scammers and people with good intentions make a lot of claims that haven't come to fruition and most of them probably won't, but the same can be said of all the failed vehicle manufacturers as well. Yet, I don't think anyone was calling vehicles a failure at even orders of magnitude less valuation. I personally don't make great use of crypto other than some speculations (disclosue, I have made a non-life-altering amount in crypto speculation) but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting, valuable things being done with the technology. I see things like https://atalaprism.io/ https://atalaprism.io/ that seem really interesting as well as more institutional things like bonds being issued on the blockchain (happening in the EU) as things that have potential to continue adding value.
  - julianz 3y ago
    Given that nearly all that volume is made up of artificial wash trading to manipulate the price, I'm not buying it. If crypto had any real world use I would see it when I stepped outside into the world, and I don't.
    - toolz 3y ago
      Either you're saying that something has to benefit you personally for it to have "real world use" (which is a misuse of the phrase) or you're saying you haven't done any research, including the two real world uses I posted in my previous comment. I'm guessing I'm interpreting what you're saying wrong, but I'm failing to come up with any other way to read your comment. Also the highest trading volume of NYSE is close to 300 billion in a day. The highest trading volume of crypto is something like 500 billion with some estimates saying 51% of all crypto volume is artificial. That still puts crypto's trading volume peak only ~40 billion off from NYSE trading volume peak. So by that metric alone crypto as a financial instrument is successful.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    I posted this because I started thinking about what it must’ve been like living in a world where we only had horses and trains and what the absolute freedom that cars brought must have felt like. It must have felt miraculous. There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods. I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      Do you know what 100,000 horses did to the streets of New York in the 1890s? Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop. Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on. I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.

roschdal 3y ago

Cars have been a blessing and disaster for humanity and the planet.

npunt 3y ago

It's fun to see the patterns of history repeat themselves. Two things stood out: 1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll. > I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that. 2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products. > When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed. AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force. Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!

eesmith 3y ago
> we pioneers always worked together That is an overly broad characterization. We can look to the Wright brothers as pioneers who vigorously enforced patent. As the Wikipedia entry puts is: "The Wright brothers did not have the luxury of being able to give away their invention: It had to be their livelihood. Thus, their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney, Henry Toulmin, not to reveal details of their machine." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers http://wintonhistory.com/ http://wintonhistory.com/ adds "[Winton] was also generous in passing the technology along to competitors when safety was an issue." The steering wheel described fits that characterization. https://archive.org/details/1001inventionsth0000unse/page/498/mode/2up?q=%22Alexander+Winton%22 https://archive.org/details/1001inventionsth0000unse/page/49... goes on to describe how other companies of the time were no so eager to share in the "over 1 00,000 patents [that] went into the creation of the first practical automobile." ] Unfortunately, Winton's local competitors were simultaneously working on a very similar system and beat him to the patent. The Ohio Automobile Company, later renamed the Packard Motor Car Company, added their version of the steering wheel, based on Winton's early developments, to the second car they launched in 1899. It was immediately successful, and Winton, whose company custom-made every vehicle, found the competition difficult and was forced to stop production in 1924.

npunt 3y ago

dang - should be (1930) not (2017)

matsemann 3y ago

I recently read a book about the history of cars in my country [0], and how they came to dominate. It's quite astonishing how quickly we went from the streets belonging to the people, to the few privileged owning a car taking all that space. In 1920, 15 pedestrians were killed with only 2000 cars in the country. Instead of that being a killing blow to the cars, the rich people owning cars organized. They had power and stood together, and managed to make it so that it was "uncultured people walking in the road getting run over". Some of these organizations still exist today, like Trygg Trafikk ("Safe Traffic"), and they're true to their roots: they're not really advocating for less traffic deaths, they're advocating for making it easier to drive everywhere in the guise of promoting "safety". [0]: Et land på fire hjul, by Ulrik Eriksen

seper8 3y ago
Dont think you understand the extent to which you and we owe our wealth to the invention of the combustion engine...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TheGigaChad 3y ago
  [dead]
- matsemann 3y ago
  What in my comment makes you think I don't know the impact of cars? I just wrote a relevant comment to the article, of how cars won over my country.
- wyre 3y ago
  Yes, yes, all hail the combustion engine…
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
The concept of jay walking was invented to permit victim blaming of people who once freely roamed among the carriages.

arcticbull 3y ago

Seems like the doubters were quite right - our ability to go anywhere is now dependent on forking out $25-50K for a car, hundreds of dollars in insurance payments, hundreds of dollars in gas payments, hundreds of dollars in parking, tickets/fines, tolls, registration, licensing. Not to mention all the taxes paid for the road, interstates, etc. And the fact you now have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the US. Getting into a car is among the riskiest things you do on a daily basis. Then, the way interstates tore apart communities and parking continues to ruin downtowns. That's before we get to the impact on the planet. At the time they had a wonderful network of intercity trains across the country (430,000mi by 1910), street cars and metros. A lot of which was torn up thanks to the car lobby.

CalRobert 3y ago
Paywall for life.
hifromLA 3y ago
Not to mention how car dependence makes it hard to densify our cities enough to build our way out of the housing crisis we have.
- hotstickyballs 3y ago
  The housing crisis is exactly how densification starts. It will happen when market forces are allowed to work despite the god awful amount of regulations.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It’s always the same objection to every new apartment “but what about the traffic? the roads can’t support this.” If we built this we wouldn’t need traffic…
atleastoptimal 3y ago
It's not even about the car lobby. It's about individual vs. collective choice. For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but for society, it is worse that more public spending, resources and city design is geared towards accommodating more cars than public transit. However no one is going to sacrifice their personal well being via giving up their car. The solution is to pay people not to buy cars.

CalRobert 3y ago

Considering they were the leading cause of dead kids until recently (guns have overtaken them, both are worsening at present) I'm skeptical of present day ones too.

arcticbull 3y ago
One of the leading causes of death in the US, period. 1 in 93, just about the same as guns. Half way to the opioid crisis. [1] [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
- refurb 3y ago
  Sure, but death rates in the US are super low overall, so #1 is irrelevant when there is always a #1. And you can’t ignore benefits with any cost. Giving someone cancer drugs has a chance of killing them but we don’t stop using them because a chance at a cure outweighs the costs.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    They kill thousands of kids despite the fact the we stole the streetscape from those kids and with it their independence. How many kids walk or bike to school compared to 1940? If we put sharks in all the pools it would reduce drownings too ..
    - refurb 3y ago
      Look at the death rate in the 1940's and compare it to today.
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        Yes, and consider the "kids having a semblance of independence" rate in the 40's too.

dvh 3y ago

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

prmoustache 3y ago

I barely understand how cars culture work in the USA. Infrastructure costs are huge, yet people in this country do not want to pay taxes and will build schemes to avoid them at all costs. And they don't want to have shops and restaurants at a walking distance from their house. It can only lead to bankrupting country or cities, drive on barely maintained roads and suffer traffic and lose precious time every day.

pxeboot 3y ago
>And they don't want to have shops and restaurants at a walking distance from their house. If prices are any indicator, people highly value walkable neighborhoods, which is why they tend to be much more expensive than less walkable suburbs.
- b1ue64 3y ago
  > which is why they tend to be much more expensive than less walkable suburbs. Also there are barely any walkable neighborhoods in America
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Australia has quite a few, especially around Melbourne. And they are all the most expensive places to buy or rent. Made up for the fact you save a fortune not needing a car.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    Every major metro area in the US has walkable prisons. This myth that they don’t exist needs to fall off already.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      > “Walkable prisons” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength”
    - nayuki 3y ago

synergyS 3y ago

Fascinating story - many truths and behaviors' still sticks

repler 3y ago

Alexander Winton sounds like a fascinating person! It’s a shame he doesn’t seem to have written an autobiography. Aside from this Saturday Evening Post contribution, and the biography “Famous but forgotten: The story of Alexander Winton, automotive pioneer and industrialist”, there doesn’t seem to be much else to read about the man. Anybody find anything else?

mistrial9 3y ago

"What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today." A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies

jp57 3y ago

If AI is the car, the human mind is the horse.