Automobile, when you caught us...
Nicola Carboni
The rise of the machine
At the beginning of the century, images of cars were omnipresent in the press. They announced a new invention, a new symbol of progress capable of seducing intellectuals and bureaucrats alike. The car is then the future, the speed, the novelty; a call to leave behind the rest of the world.
Like many technological innovations, the automobile received as much praise as criticism.
The history of its beginnings is rich in conflicts, particularly frequent in Europe and the United States. If the bicycle had received a similar welcome a few years earlier, blowing hot and cold, the points of view on the automobile quickly evolve towards more burning controversies. The car leaves no one indifferent. Articles, letters to the editor, photographs, caricatures express the phobia or the desire of this fascinating and controversial object.
The conflict and controversy about the automobile lasted until the 1940s and 1950s, when cars were finally accepted.
"It began as a scientific experiment, then became the instrument of adventurers, then the toy of the rich, then the ambition of the poor, finally the slave of all... After having been the plaything of society, it has come to dominate it. She is now our tyrant, so that at last we have revolted against her, and begun to protest against her arrogant ways."
"The Hooting Nuisance," The Living Age, #3502 (August 19, 1911), pp. 508-509.
But why was the automobile so controversial in the early 20th century?
And how did it cease to be so?
![Vue de la rue de Paris au Havre en 1910. Photographie anonyme noir et blanc coloriée](/visualcontagions/application/files/6416/5658/5952/Rue_de_Paris_Le_Havre_1910.jpg)
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View of the rue de Paris in Le Havre in 1910. Anonymous black-and-white colorized Source: Wikimedia Commons
The figure above provides a simple answer to both questions: the road.
Today, we think of roads as THE place for cars, while pedestrians are confined to the sidewalk. The use of streets for children's play is considered inappropriate, dangerous, - irresponsible.
Yet the idea that roads are not for pedestrians was born in the early years of the car, at a time when it is important to remember that the car was the intruder. Until the introduction of the automobile, roads had remained a mixed environment shared by streetcars, pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages and the latest invention, the bicycle. There were no specific rules about how to cross a road (regulations were introduced later, because of the cars). There was not even a clear distinction between the sidewalk and the street. Convoys could pass, but always anticipated by a human being. The environment allowed for a pedestrian-friendly lifestyle. Children played and people walked nearby without disturbing each other too much, except when the usual streetcar passed by - but on predefined tracks, in a non-random logic.
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and recklessness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature having so far magnified the pensive immobility, the ecstasy and the sleep, we want to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, the gymnastic step, the perilous jump, the slap and the punch.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with its trunk adorned with large pipes, like snakes with explosive breath... a roaring car, which looks as if it is running on machine gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man who holds the steering wheel, whose ideal stem crosses the earth, launched itself on the circuit of its orbit.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figaro, February 9, 1909.
The introduction of the car in the city and in the country is almost a revolution. A revolution that began with the invention of the automobile in the 1880s. At first, only the richest part of the population could own a small, fast vehicle that could be used to move around the city and the countryside: the automobile was driven by a chauffeur.
![Pluck, New York City, United States : 1907. The Moths and the Flame, Frank Arthur Nankivell. Source: Commons](https://www.unige.ch/visualcontagions/application/files/cache/thumbnails/04c5ae34dbcb9c70f34210a648f56815.jpg)
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Pluck, New York City, 1907. The Moths and the Flame, Frank Arthur Nankivell.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A new mobility
Mobility soon became an important factor in the growing success of the automobile. Many people used their vehicles not only to travel through the city, but also to try to escape from the city. In search of fresh air, nature and a healthier environment, many people continued to seek refuge in the countryside. The big difference is that they start to move with their cars, and in this idyllic setting, the roar of the cars becomes a constant, scaring the residents and the animals. The satirical press of the time had a field day with this: the rich were invading the land of the poor.
High off speed
Speed was the main attraction for these new drivers: the promise of thrills was exhilarating, and the numerous spectators were enough to convince many to buy and use an uncomfortable vehicle for the time, very prone to accidents.
Automobile manufacturers and sellers had long recognized the appeal of the subversive thrill of speed. In addition to sponsoring car races, they began to encourage fast and aggressive driving.
In this context, many referred to driving as a disease, a demon taking over the driver by losing control and aiming for nothing more than speed. The anarchist writer Octave Mirbeau bears witness to this in his writings on the automobile:
"When I am in a car, possessed by speed, humanitarian feelings vanish. I begin to feel obscure stirrings of hatred and a silly sense of pride. I am no longer a miserable specimen of humanity, but a prodigious being in whom is embodied - no, don't laugh - elemental Splendor and Power. And since I am the Wind, the Storm, the Thunder, imagine with what contempt I regard the rest of humanity from the vantage point of my car."
Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, Paris, Fasquelle, 1907.
![Le rire : journal humoristique : Paris, France – 1910](/visualcontagions/application/files/2916/5658/7365/default.jpg)
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Der Wahre Jakob : illustrierte Zeitschrift für Satire, Humor und Unterhaltung, Berlin, 1920.
Source: Heidelberger historische Bestände – Digitale Sammlung
Enraged crowds, frightened drivers
City pedestrians and country people alike sometimes react violently against motorists. The diary of a German motorist in 1905 reports that stones were thrown at cars:
"a journey by automobile through Holland is dangerous, because most of the rural population fanatically hates motorists. We even met old men, their faces distorted with anger, who, without any provocation, threw fist-sized stones at us." [2]
American millionaire and car enthusiast William K. Vanderbilt II testifies that he was attacked and pelted with stones by crowds during his European tour, following the death of two dogs in the French countryside. Attacks by crowds were so frequent that in 1909 a German law allowed drivers who had run over someone to flee the scene of the incident, provided that they reported to the police the next day [2]. There are numerous historical sources on the problem of early motorists: letters of protest, accounts of demonstrations, and the founding of motorist or pedestrian protection associations. The illustrations in the press of the time also tell the story in their own way.
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/8516/5660/6441/0f6040b0-9763-3713-b483-3ff7efeea897-4773.jpg)
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Le rire : humorous newspaper : Paris, France - 1910 : the fight for the rights on the roads of the city. The illustration depicts and mocks the desire to free the roads from all the people walking on them, only to concede them to automobiles.
This quest for freedom and speed was not without sacrifice. The city streets, populated by children and adults alike, soon saw drivers as assassins. Incidents became so frequent in the 1910s that drivers in the United States were nicknamed "joy riders", "road hogs" or "speed demons". Their machines were also given revealing nicknames: "juggernauts", "death cars" or "modern Moloch" [1] .
A few years later, first in the United States in the 1920s, then in Europe in the following decade, a safety movement led by the automobile industry, the Boy Scout movement, concerned parents and insurance companies eventually called for the banishment of people from the roads and the invention of traffic rules, the establishment of pedestrian crossings. This trend gradually imposed the feeling that the roads belonged to the cars. The role of automobile clubs and the automobile industry in this development was decisive, mercilessly belittling and blaming pedestrians and cyclists.
Soon the political establishment took up the issue.
"More than six thousand people commit suicide every year, and no one cares," said Colonel J. T. C. Brabazon, a Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom in 1934 and later Minister for Transport[3]. A general opinion was beginning to emerge: cars represented progress, novelty, and anyone who disagreed with these new conditions should stay in the past and not complain about them.
What role did images play in these changes?
In our corpus of 3 million images recovered from illustrated prints from around the world, more than 5,000 depict automobiles. These images come from Europe, the United States and, in one case, China.
Projected in time and space, the circulation of the motif is mostly between Europe and the East Coast of the United States, particularly the Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York areas.
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/5416/5658/8748/corpus-2-4563.png)
New-York-Chicago, Munich-Berlin
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/2516/5658/8878/bokeh_plot-2-5444.png)
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/3016/5658/8872/bokeh_plot-5440.png)
As the figure shows, the corpus describes circulations between Europe and the United States, particularly between Germany and the United States, with strong exchanges between the Munich-Berlin and New York-Chicago axes.
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/9016/5658/9030/all-5336.png)
Our 5000 and some images come from 42 different categories of newspapers, including daily newspapers, art, history, politics, entertainment, economics, children's literature and many others. The automobile is everywhere.
Where do they publish images of cars?
The interactive application below, enabled by a visualization application called Vikus Viewer, allows us to explore certain types of images over time, to understand their representativeness within the corpus as a whole, as well as the time of their appearance or disappearance and their quantity. Vikus Viewer also allows us to visualize them to better understand what these images denote or connote.
The study shows that the number of images representing an event is very low. All the images representing an incident or having any relation with road safety have been compiled in a simple gallery. If we look at the year of publication, we can see that the images were published between 1900 and 1922. The peak of published images of road accidents occurs for the years 1905-1907, mainly in humorous newspapers, car magazines and cultural and children's magazines. No daily newspaper reports an automobile accident in pictures.
Few magazines printed pictures with road accidents, and the tendency not to show them increases with time...
Sometimes we doubt its results. Is it only a European phenomenon? To see a little more clearly, we can look at the corpus of the Library of Congress, in the United States, whose "Chronicling America" project makes available the digitization of a large number of American newspapers for the period 1777-1963. This corpus, which includes (like ours) more than 3 million images, is not yet included in Visual Contagions, but it can be queried both textually (by retrieving information from articles), and visually (by visual similarities). Through this search, we were able to find a few examples of car accidents, murders and collisions, again not very many. The following gallery shows the totality - very small! - of the results.
In contrast, the literature on the subject indicates a large amount of material in the form of images and text, which reveals significant changes in habits. The lack of visual material is all the more striking.
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/4216/5659/9814/dlc_1oldenburg_ver01_data_sn83045462_00280602103_1939102701_0525.jp2-5588.jpg)
![](https://www.unige.ch/visualcontagions/application/files/cache/thumbnails/fafb689237ef133003f752d644af4b8a.jpg)
![](https://www.unige.ch/visualcontagions/application/files/cache/thumbnails/2637fe03849ba48b0f32699d09a0a3a9.jpg)
From the mockery of the 1900s to the aestheticizing advertising of the 1920s
Let's refine the analysis by evaluating the distribution of car photos in the magazines in the Visual Contagions corpus during the first 50 years of the 20th century.
In the early days of automobiles, humorous magazines published many articles on the subject. Around 1900, cars spread to a more diverse and larger number of publications. From culture and news magazines to sports and children's fashion magazines, no type of magazine was impervious to the subject.
Shortly before 1920, certain types of art and culture magazines became a prime venue for car advertising.
This is clearly where manufacturers find new customers. The trend continued into the 1930s, until the image of cars was used mainly in regional news, a change that signified the integration of cars into the social habits of Europe and the United States.
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/3816/5660/0237/digitalhistory.063.jpeg)
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/2216/5660/0592/digitalhistory.065.jpeg)
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/7616/5663/0708/2022-07-01_01-11_140.jpg)
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Privileged sport - Puck, v. 65, no. 1684 (June 9, 1909). The illustration shows a car driven by a driver speeding down a road. Around him are newspaper clippings of numerous road accidents: pedestrians run over; the death of a 13 year old boy, etc. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Seeing the spread and displacement of automobile advertisements in such a wide spectrum of newspapers, and the parallel decrease in accident imagery, it is natural to ask the question: would the imagery of car accidents have been blocked for fear of losing the advertising stake of the car companies?
Perhaps we are too quick to consider, mindful of the dependence of contemporary magazines on advertising revenue, that advertising agencies could have effortlessly influenced the presence (or not) of articles and images in a newspaper. Perhaps advertising played no role... Or maybe the opposite.
One thing is certain: the presence of cars in the illustrated press has not diminished since then.
Accidents or not, traffic or not, the car has become a sacred art, shaping the environment around us.
It has shaped our environments in the physical sense - with the construction of roads and the exploitation of natural resources for the use of cars; but it has also shaped them in the symbolic sense. Cars have become the protagonists of our feature films, symbols of freedom, representations of the star system, of wealth and success. Cars have become objects of admiration, synonymous with a new way of life, a life in which cinemas, stores or restaurants are only a stage on a car journey. A life made of famous roads, like Route 66, a life that builds statues dedicated to cars, like the American Graffiti statue in Modesto, a life where cars are our daily companions - and where so many people are convinced that we can't live without them.
This life began gradually in the early 20th century. It became established at the end of the first half of the century, when cars began to be universally recognized and accepted - so much so that, as the mayor of Munich, Hans-Jochen Vogel, was later quoted as saying [2] :
"it was almost suicidal for a politician in the 1950s to take a stand against the automobile."
![](/visualcontagions/application/files/4516/5663/4984/Anterior_view_of_Cadillac_ranch.jpg)
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Ant Farm Collective, Cadillac Ranch, 1974, Amarillo, Texas. Source: Wikimedia Commons
References
[1] Norton, Peter D. Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city. Mit Press, 2011.
[2] Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: love and hate in the automotive age. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
[3] Plowden, William. The motor car and politics, 1896-1970. Bodley Head, 1971.
[4] O'connell, Sean. The Car and British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939. Manchester University Press, 1998.
[5] Mom, Gijs. Atlantic automobilism: emergence and persistence of the car, 1895-1940. Vol. 1. Berghahn Books, 2014.