Q From Peter McMenamin: What was the dash in dashboard? A A
simple one for a change, with a straightforward answer. This key
component of vehicles, with its gauges and controls, has been
called a dashboard since early in the history of motoring.
Despite the obvious associations, however, it has nothing to do
with speed. An early railway carriage It’s an example of
technological and linguistic conservatism. When railways began,
passenger accommodation was built by artisans who were skilled
in constructing their road equivalents. They used the same
techniques and employed the same vocabulary. They put stage
coach bodies on wagon frames and, in Britain and some other
countries, continued to call them carriages. The builders of the
early motor vehicles likewise borrowed their methods and their
language from the horse-drawn vehicles they had long been
familiar with. More than a century ago, the unknown writer of a
syndicated column in a US newspaper discussed this conservatism
under the headline Evolution in Carri