Automania [antikvár]

A Most Exciting Toy'Glorious, stirring sight!' murmured Toad, never offering to move.'The poetry of motion, the real way to travel I The only way totravel! Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped,towns and cities jumped - always somebody else's horizon! O bliss!O poop poop! O my! O my!'(Toad of Toad Hall on first seeing and falling in lovewith the motor car -Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willotps, 1908)From the very beginning man's relationship with the motor car was a manic affair. No other inanimate object has in our century inspired such a close and involved relationship with its creator or triggered such an outpouring of love, hate and obsession.In its first one hundred years of active life it has been described as a menace and a blessing, a blight and a godsend, as a saviour of our countryside and cities and as their curse, as socially divisive and as the greatest social leveller. It has been worshipped and reviled, celebrated and scorned. On the subject of the car no one is neutral because it is arguably the most powerful instrument of social change mankind has ever encountered. In barely a century the motor car has reshaped society in its image and in the process has become both part of man's personality and an expression of it. But what has been the basis of the passionate relationship between mankind and the motor car - that we here call 'automania' ?The car began life as a rich man's toy rather than as a means of transport or as an instrument of social change, although those possibilities were quickly realized. At the root of 'automania' has always been man's incredible enthusiasm for the machine itself, the constant factor which was established in the 1890s and has shown little sign of diminishing.It is not hard to see why. The coming of the motor car was the fulfilment of one of man's most ancient dreams of the 'horseless carriage', self-pro-pelled and capable of extraordinary speeds. For centuries man had fantasized about the glories of such independent travel. Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century scientist and philosopher, had written of the day when 'we shall endow chariots with incredible speed, without the aid of any animal'. By the 1890s, the bicycle had given the average man a foretaste of the possibilities of individualized long-distance road transportation, creating a demand that neither the horse nor the railway could satisfy. Thousands of riders had acquired a passion for speedy mechanical road transport, entirely under their own control, which could at least take them a little way towards the horizon. The cycle craze of the 1890s put 10 million Americans on their personal pair of wheels. For the wealthy and intrepid the emergence of the motor car was a great step forward in the furtherance of that ultimate dream. Drivers found they experienced an innate sensory pleasure derived from speed, motion and power under control. 'There are few people who want a slow automobile after having ridden in a moderately fast one', commented an early 'scorcher' in The Horseless Age, in March 1902. And if the first vehicles of the 1890s were stuttering, asthmatic runabouts of extreme unreliability that could barely outpace a horse, the larger models that appeared after 1900 gave drivers the opportunity of unprecedented speed and manoeuvrability. Speeding cyclists, known as 'cads on castors', were swiftly replaced by a new highway menace, the 'road hog'. There was anm.