When the first horseless carriages appeared in the nineteenth century, an inordinate amount of thought was given to the most trivial details about how the car would become integrated into society. A Michigan preacher named Uriah Smith, anxious that horses would be frightened by carriages that seemed to move on their own power, patented the daft ‘Horsey Horseless’ (look it up) in which a carriage was preceded by a looming wooden horse head that concealed a fuel tank. Smith was apparently confident that horses would be comforted by the sight of legless, disembodied horse heads drifting fixedly and unblinklingly through town.

Though horses and carriages had traditionally been controlled by reins, eighteenth century engineers replaced this control first with a tiller, and later with the modern steering wheel. Even Cugnot’s steam-powered ‘fire engine’ of 1769 was steered by a till, making it surprising that it was more than a century later that a Mr. C. E. W. Abernathy of Lansing, Michigan undertook the design of a ‘carriage bridle’ for attaching leather reins to a motorcar. An early motoring enthusiast who hoped to make his fortune in the fledgling automobile business, Abernathy seized upon the idea that what stood between the car and its driver was a lack of familiarity. He felt that what united the farmer driving a buckboard wagon, the British gentleman with his four-in-hand, the coachman ferrying aristocrats in a Brougham carriage, and the cowboy on his cayuse, was the comforting control of leather reins held softly in the left hand. In response, Abernathy outfitted each of his vehicles with an elaborate carriage bridle, to which leather reins could be attached, and through which the driver could feel the tug of the engine. The popularity of steering by wheel, the demands of the clutch transmission, and the temperamental nature of early cars in general made this additional affordance a distraction, so Abernathy’s carriage bridle was short lived, though these beautiful devices remain a skeuomorphic embodiment of a more dignified age.

Published December 27, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.