AUTOMOBILE MUSEUM TM

For the third year, our magazine has been publishing materials on the history of technology.

In 1885, a loving husband gave Mrs. Daimler a brand-new, straight-from-the-store, phaeton.

No capitalist has achieved such fame as Henry Ford.

Having emerged into the world in the form of a truck (think of Cugnot’s or Selden’s machines), the automobile earned recognition as a “mechanical toy for adults” — a passenger car. In this form, it evolved from an exotic “self-propelled carriage” into a reliable autonomous means of transportation. In the 1890s, the truck experienced a second birth.

Machines, like people, inherit the traits of their closest ancestors. The automobile is no exception; its genealogy begins with the horse-drawn carriage.

Every automobile is a sports machine, and every motorist is an athlete. That was the belief at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries.

"I owe you many new impressions, a wealth of information that cannot be found in books; the fact that I could enjoy complete freedom, forgetting about heavy concerns, new countries and places little known to me, people whom I understood better because I saw them up close..."

The Latin word “omnibus” translated means: for all, universal. It became a transport term about two hundred years ago, when carriages for public use appeared.

Polemizing with critics of industrial art of the 1920s, V. Mayakovsky wrote:
Comrades,
have you seen a Royce?
A Royce,
merged with the wind?
And when it stands still —
a whale...

Let us devote a dozen lines to sonorous names: American — “Hudson,” “Graham,” “Jordan,” “Duesenberg,” “Kaiser,” “Cunningham,” “Cord,” “Locomobile,” “Marmon,” “Packard,” “Pathfinder,” “Pierce-Arrow,” “Premier,” “Studebaker,” and “Stutz”; French — “Amilcar,” “Bugatti,” “Voisin,” “Hispano-Suiza,” “Lorraine-Dietrich,” “Salmson,” “Talbot,” “Tracta,” and “Farman”; British — “Armstrong-Siddeley,” “Bristol,” and “Napier”; German — “Brennabor,” “Hansa–Lloyd,” “Maybach,” “Protos,” and “Simson–Supra”; Belgian — “Minerva” and “Excelsior”; Italian — “Ansaldo,” “Isotta–Fraschini,” “Itala”...