Orchestrating Automobile Technology

摘要

On the first pages of her 1918 war novel The Marne, U.S. writer Edith Wharton characterizes one of her protagonists by repeatedly, and ironically, calling his car "a large noiseless motor." Whereas before the war, engine noise was viewed (and heard!) as a token of power and modernity, postwar mainstream motoring had discovered silence as a new proof of modernity. Low sound levels indicated the absence of waste and inefficiency, while protests against motor traffic had sensitized urban populations to the noise nuisance. About a decade earlier, Wharton's friend Henry James had marveled at her open car, specially refitted as a closed car with interior electric lights, in which he had "three weeks of really seeing" his beloved France.