9781422277072

In the early years of car making, there were few rules. Anyone who could build or buy a car could drive it as long as there was a road it could drive on. Where there are few rules, there is a lot of experimentation. Early cars ran on steam and electricity. It wasn’t until around 1920 that gasoline-powered cars dominated the market. Around the same time, the first big auto show took place in New York City. Although it wasn’t the first gathering of cars in an auditorium, the 1900 Horseless Carriage Show, sponsored by the Automobile Club of America, has been long considered the first modern auto show. It was a weeklong event held in early November of 1900 at Madison Square Garden. Just about anything that could have wheels was represented at the show. The New York Times reported the day after the opening, “There were heavy delivery trucks, delivery wagons, large and small, such as are becoming familiar sights in the streets, cabs, carriages, broughams, and the dozen and one styles of fashionable Victorias, traps, surreys, phaetons, runabouts, and carts.”

Phaeton is the name of a style of horse carriage. Many early vehicle models adopted this name.

Here’s where concepts come in. Whenever a new technology becomes popular, companies struggle to understand what makes their product sell better or worse than competitor’s similar products. Entrepreneurs try anything they can think of. After a while, the successful companies figure out what people want. In the early days of the Internet, startups threw up anything and everything for sale. Some things sold well on the Internet, others didn’t. Companies that figured out what sold and what didn’t still are in business today, like Amazon and eBay. Others like eToys and CDNow either folded or were purchased by bigger companies. Car companies evolved the same way. The concept in the early days was, more or less, to put motors on horse carriages—hence the term horseless carriage. Cars didn’t get their own design standard until around 1910 when Ford and Oldsmobile had assembly line production churning out cars with sunken seats, roofs, and the engine in the front.

Ford did not participate in the 1900 auto show at Madison Square Garden. Of all the carmakers that did participate, none remain in operation today. Oldsmobile was the last Horseless Carriage Show carmaker to shutter its doors. The last Olds came off the assembly line April 29, 2004.

What’s a brougham, or a Victoria, or a phaeton, or those other weird nouns? These were different types of carriage shapes that were typical of horse-drawn carriages.

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