In 1895 in New York, journalist Edward Platt Ingersoll founded a magazine whose name heralded a remarkable future: The Horseless Age. A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Interests of the Motor Vehicle Industry”. The epoch that is just beginning is not defined here by the introduction of something unknown, but by the absence of something known: the horses are disappearing. At the same time, cars were neither built in a standardized way nor distributed on a large scale. Although the internal combustion engine had long existed, vehicle manufacturers continued to prefer steam and electricity.
Today, the future of transport is once again the subject of debate, with the difference, of course, that it can hardly be separated from the future in general. And so it is not without amazement that one reads in Moritz Neuffer’s essay on the “Epochal Turnaround in Automobile Magazines around 1900” that Ingersoll repeatedly referred to the latest state of the art in electric vehicle construction, albeit with disapproval. He could only imagine rich women in urban areas buying an e-car. At the beginning of the last century, battery-powered vehicles were so popular that they accounted for more than a third of all vehicles registered in the USA. That was done with the electric starter, which replaced the crank, which was difficult to operate.
Wasn’t it enough for the Audi, Mercedes or Porsche?
Neuffer’s text can be found in an anthology on “cultural imaginations of the car”. Its table of contents gives the impression of being a systematic treatise; In fact, the contributions, as is quite usual with this book format, are so inconsistent that they result in a colorful, sometimes academic, but overall stimulating hodgepodge. So it is advisable to read it carefully, sniff it, and compare it here and there. Because some contributions vibrate with each other, which by no means only means that they would necessarily complement each other and arrive at similar findings. Rather, the reader encounters both consensus and differing assessments.
Steffen Martus, for example, points out in his essay on the “class boundaries of the Golf generation” that “sociological zeitgeist literature” has observed since the 1960s how “a number of criteria have lost their certainty of meaning”. These included occupation, income and possessions. Compared to other countries, “basically too many people could financially afford too many lifestyles” here. This also applies to car brands, which in the post-war period were still quite reliable indicators of one’s social position. Today, on the other hand, you discover people at the wheel of a Porsche who, at least at first glance, seem out of place there.
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