Parlor car

“ If the motor-car in the guise of a private carriage has developed at an astonishing rate, its adaptation to the needs of the community, as a public service vehicle, has been even more rapid. The first cabs placed on the streets of London in 1903 were by no means a success, but the cabs constructed by the French house of Renault and first introduced in London in 1906 rapidly effected a revolutionary change in the means of individual transport. ”

“ As a matter of law, the automobile is a vehicle, and has precisely the same rights on the highway that a bicycle or a carriage has. The horse has no monopoly of the highway, it enjoys no especial privileges, but must share the road with all other vehicles. Furthermore, the law makes it the business of the horse to get accustomed to strange sights and behave itself This duty has been onerous the last few years; the bicycle, the traction engine, and the trolley have come along in quick succession; the automobile is about the last straw. ”

“ AUTOMOBILES. A Few Rules of the Road Which, It Is Hoped, Will Speedily Be Adopted By All Automobile Societies.
The automobile is the rich man's liquor and the poor man's chaser.
It keeps our streets full of red, white and blue streaks all the livelong day, and if the weary pedestrian is not supplied with a ball-bearing neck his chance of getting home is null and void.
Probably the safest part about the machinery of an automobile is the Chauffeur, because he knows which way to jump out.
Chauffeur is the name of the man who points the machine at you and dares you to get out of the way. ”

“ In Paris, London, Berlin, the motor mail van is a common sight. It has even penetrated the interior of India, [147] where the Maharajah of Gwalior uses a specially fitted steam car for the delivery of his private mails. And, as though to show that man alone shall not profit by the new mode of locomotion, Paris owns a motor-car which conveys lost dogs from the different police-stations to the Dogs' Home! In fact, there seems to be no purpose to which a horse-drawn vehicle can be put, which either has not been, or shortly will be, invaded by the motor. ”

“ The uses to which the motor vehicle has been put are legion. On railways the motor carriage is catering for local traffic. On the roads the motor omnibus is steadily increasing its numbers. Tradesmen of all sorts, and persons concerned with the distribution of commodities, find that the petrol- or steam-moved car or lorry has very decided advantages over horse traction. Our postal authorities have adopted the motor mail van. The War Office looks to the motor to solve some of its transportation difficulties. ”

“ Concurrently with its development into a reliable, silent, odourless and smokeless power-propelled vehicle, the motor-car gradually came into more general use. It no longer appealed only to a few but gained converts daily, and its final triumph came when it began seriously to displace the horsed vehicle. becoming the private carriage of the wealthier classes to be used on all occasions. ”

“ The people who use cars ought, I think, to remember that it is not sufficient merely to obey the letter of the law, but that they ought to use their motor-cars as they would use any other portion of their property, no doubt for their own advantage and enjoyment, but also with due regard to the comfort and convenience of the rest of the community. ”

“ Before the advent of the motor-car, Society, though tired of “biking” and craving for a novelty, could not tolerate the notion of being seen in any other than a well-horsed vehicle. Society now thinks differently, as evidenced by a stroll in the Park during the season. There, in the midst of graceful landaus and other equipages drawn by the most splendid horses in the world, may be seen endless electric and steam barouches, broughams, victorias, and cars, all perfectly noiseless, and magnificent petrol motor-cars (not noiseless!) ”

“ The car, with its exhaust wide open, for your Italian driver delights in noise, roared down the grade at express-train speed, took the hairpin curve at the bottom on two wheels, to be brought to an abrupt halt with an agonized squealing of brakes, our further progress being barred by a six-inch tree-trunk which had been lowered across the road like a barrier at an old-time country toll-gate. ”

“ It is a noisy, dirty, mechanical contrivance, capable of great speed; it is the only vehicle in which one could approach that distant smudge on the landscape with any sense of the eternal fitness of things. A coach and four would be as far behind the times on this highway as a birch-bark canoe on yonder lake. In America an automobile is beautiful because it is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age and country; it is twin brother to the trolley; train, trolley, and automobile may travel side by side as members of one family, late offsprings of man's ingenuity. ”

“ The car, he saw with the experienced eye of a connoisseur, was a recent model of one of the most expensive and popular foreign makes: built on lines that promised a deal in the way of speed, and furnished with engines that were pregnant with multiplied horse-power: all in all not the style of car one would expect to find controlled by a solitary woman, especially after ten of a summer's night. ”

“ John Winston, whose mother-Lady Brighthelmston-I met in Paris, and promised to meet again in Cannes. Fancy Aunt Mary and me lolling luxuriously (I love that word "lolling") in a snow-white car with scarlet cushions, all the brass-work gleaming like a fireman's helmet-the rakiest, smartest car imaginable! There are two seats in front and a roomy tonneau behind. The steering and other arrangements are quite different from those in the poor dead Dragon-rest its wicked soul! There's a steering-wheel, and below it two ducky little handles that do everything. ”

“ Yet that is what many people are expecting, forgetful of the fact that a motor-car is a horse and carriage in one, that its stable bill is of the smallest, that it ceases to consume oil or spirit immediately it is at rest, and that although its tyre bill, and accounts for occasional repairs, may be high, it is not subject to half the troubles that worry the owner of even the best-conducted horse stables. ”

“ The carriage work is hopelessly bad. The building of carriages is a long-established industry, employing hundreds of thousands of hands and millions of capital, and yet in the entire United States there are scarcely a dozen builders of really fine, substantial, and durable vehicles. Yet every cross-road maker of automobiles thinks that if he can only get his motor to go, the carpenter next door can do his woodwork. The result is cheap stock springs, clips, irons, bodies, cushions, tops, etc., are bought and put over the motor. ”

“ Motor-cars were rushing about as numerous as flies in August. Trolley-cars followed one another up and down Seventh Avenue in endless processions. Wagons and trucks stretched along the highway in slow-moving lines as far as the eye could see. Bells were ringing, whistles tooting, horns blowing, motor-cars honking, newsies shouting. The grinding of car-wheels, the rattle of carts, the clatter of hoofs on the asphalt, the shuffling of feet on the sidewalk, and a thousand other noises combined to make an indescribable and confusing roar. ”

“ This last was just as soon as personal examination had reassured him with respect to his automobile—superficially an ordinary motor-cab of the better grade, but with an exceptionally powerful engine hidden beneath its hood. A car of such character, passing readily as the town-car of any family in modest circumstances, or else as what Paris calls a voiture de remise (a hackney car without taximeter) was a tremendous convenience, enabling its owner to scurry at will about cab-ridden Paris free of comment. ”

“ That it will be awakened I cannot doubt, when motor-cars become cheaper, when the prejudice against them has died out completely, and when men find, as they soon will, that it is more economical to keep a motor-car, not only than a carriage and pair, but than a horse and trap. ”

“ But now, 60 years later, we find that auto-makers have wiped out all differences and are making all cars alike. No matter which company made the car you are driving today, you have nothing to brag about. Today's cars all have at least four things in common- -they are too big, too powerful, too costly and burn too much gasoline.
But it hasn't always been that way. About the same year we bought our Reo, a neighbor family of ours had a flat tire. They set the emergency brake while they jacked up the car to put the spare on. ”

“ Few undertakings require more care and caution than the choice of a motor-car. Of the three or four hundred types and varieties now in existence, many are of no practical use, some are extremely complicated, not a few dangerous, and many more or less faulty in construction. The difficulty of the choice is increased by the fact that almost every enthusiast recommends the particular kind of carriage he himself possesses, and in addition every manufacturer claims, and possibly believes, that his is the only possible automobile. ”

“ The car is so singularly intelligent that you feel it is a friend, too kind-hearted and chivalrous a creature to let anything bad happen. Of course, about every ten minutes something almost happens, but that is invariably the fault of other people's cars. You dash up to the mouth of a cross-road which you couldn't possibly have seen, because it is subtly disguised as a clump of trees or a flowery knoll; and you discover its true identity only because another motor—a blundering brute of a motor—bursts out at fifty miles an hour in front of your nose. ”

“ The event aroused the greatest interest, and the failure of the vehicle to realise the expectations formed of it by no means disheartened the horseless carriage enthusiasts. They declared that before long a reliable horseless carriage would certainly be invented. In 1790 there was a belief that their prophecy had been fulfilled, for invitations were sent out to members of the Society of Arts, engineers, and all interested in mechanics and vehicular tratlie to attend a certain place on a stated day to inspect a horseless carriage, which possessed the additional novelty of having one wheel only. ”

“ Until the horse is accustomed to the machine, it is the duty—by law and common sense—of the automobile driver to take great care in passing; the care being measured by the possibility and probability of at accident.
The sympathy of every chauffeur must be entirely with the driver of the horse. Automobiles are not so numerous in this country that they may be looked for at every turn, and one cannot but feel for the man or woman who, while driving, sees one coming down the road. The best of drivers feel panicky, while women and children are terror-stricken. ”

“ For ordinary partridge- and pheasant-shooting in England motors have already taken their place as practical vehicles; and I may here remark that it is all-important that we should not lead motor manufacturers to imagine their cars are only to be used in the summer-time, when the roads are good and when you can arrive at the end of your journey with your paint showing in all its glory. ”

“ But the life of the mechanism of a car, in one form or another, is of considerable length (there were, for instance, in use in 1910, as commercial vehicles, motor chassis that were put on the road in 1896) , and it is considered that many registered but unlicensed cars remain for years capable of rendering useful service in emergencies or on special occasions, such as at election periods. ”

“ The automobile is no respecter of persons or places; it pants with impatience if brought to a stand for so much as a moment before a house or monument of interest, and somehow the throbbing, puffing, impatient machine gets the upper hand of those who are supposed to control it; we are hastened onward in spite of our better inclinations.
The trolley line from Lexington to Concord is by way of Bedford, but the direct road over the hill is the one the British followed. ”

“ Altogether the motorcar must revolutionise our social life in the country, and let us hope before long will lead to the bettering of our cross-country roads. The horse, poor beast, has never been able to tell us what he endures from bad roads, and the pace of a horsedrawn vehicle has been too slow for even the springs to suffer much; but if you get into a motor-car going five-and-twenty miles an hour over a road which you have hitherto deemed good, the engine and car will very soon tell you the difference between what the road surveyor's work has been and what it ought to be. ”