When steering wheel work was still strenuous
05/09/2014
If you look at car drivers today, you will notice that many of them sitting in their modern cars steer the car with one hand or even two fingers, while the other hand holds the gearshift, operates the navigation system or even writes a text message.
Such activities would have been unthinkable 50 or more years ago, as hardly any cars were equipped with power steering back then and the roads were often in a much worse condition.
You usually needed both hands to keep the car on course and if one hand was needed for a gearshift maneuver, the other had to grip all the harder. No wonder, then, that truck drivers often had thick upper arms, because the more weight on the axle, the harder the steering work.
The first power steering system was built by Francis W. Davis for Pierce Arrow as early as 1926, but it would be 1951 before this driver assistance system was used in series production cars.
The Americans were pioneers in its introduction, but even in the 1970s it was by no means commonplace for power steering to be installed in Europe. For a long time, power steering was frowned upon by sports car drivers because it was detrimental to the driving experience and contact with the road.
Today, there are hardly any vehicles that can do without power steering and most manufacturers have switched from hydraulic to electric power steering.
So we are all the more astonished when we get into an eighty-year-old vehicle that has to be moved around corners using real muscle power.
