Would You Steal A Car?

Of course not, that would be the moral equivalent of illegally downloading something from the internet.

OK, you've seen the ad with its blatantly ridiculous comparison. Obviously stealing someone's car is not the same as downloading an illegal copy of it.

The latter doesn't stop the owner from getting to work, for a start.

That's not to say that downloading isn't a serious problem, or that we shouldn't have some sympathy for record companies and film studios. With the whole world now able to steal from artists, they have lost their monopoly on doing just that.

But back to car theft: who invented it and when did it first happen? It's a billion-dollar industry and affects us all (in increased insurance rates, at the very least), so it seems likely someone would have produced a social history of the phenomenon.

But there's none I can find, despite there being histories of the car crash, even one on the automobile-as-explosive device (Mike Davis's Buda's Wagon: a Brief History of the Car Bomb).

There are, of course, books and learned papers on the legal side of car theft and strategies for preventing it happening to you. There are publications, too, about computer games that glamorise it.

These include the delightfully named GTA-ology: What I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Playing Grand Theft Auto. Yes, honestly. Author Ty Liquido promises that you'll "explore ways to turn your life into a GTA-styled, MISSION GALORE adventure". Strangely, some of us have other plans.

So when did car stealing begin? A typically US-centric web reference suggests the Des Moines Tribune reported the first case of auto theft in the US. It happened in 1905, "nine years after the first automobile theft in the world, in France".

More rifling around produced equally unsourced, and possibly just as dodgy, information on that 1896 French theft. It happened in Paris when a mechanic nicked a Peugeot that Baron de Zuylen de Nyevelt had put in the workshop for repairs.

Baron who? Turns out the Dutch-born car enthusiast was the first president of the FIA, the international motoring body set up to ensure that, some time in the distant future, Ferrari would be allowed to use a different rule book to everyone else in formula one.

Details on the second-ever car theft are harder to find, though further trawling turned up some more easily cross-referenced material about carjacking. It seems it was also pioneered in France as early as 1912.

Anarchists stopped a De Dion south of Paris and shot the driver. They used the purloined car to rob a bank and escaped successfully despite having two policemen hot on their exhaust pipes. It may have been significant that one was on a horse, the other madly pedalling a bicycle.

The New York Times archives turn up an interesting piece from 1922, headlined "First Stolen Rolls-Royce". It explains how the said Roller, worth $16,000 and the property of one Howard Friend (his full address is given), was reported missing shortly after "2 o'clock yesterday morning".

The owner had parked it near 89th Street "while he visited friends". A tabloid publication would have asked the important questions, such as exactly which "friends" Howard was visiting at that hour. It would have also added some unattributed quotes from a "close family friend" explaining that Howie's marriage was in the toilet because of his penchant for mysterious late-night trysts.

The paper, however, was content merely to say the car was "recovered by Detectives Styme, Kane and Reilley of the automobile squad some twelve hours later ... abandoned on Amsterdam Avenue near 81st Street".

What an innocent age, when you could go out late at night in your Rolls-Royce to engage in moral turpitude without the media giving you a hard time. And you could confidently assume that the automobile squad was on your side.

How things change.


DIPOSTKAN OLEH SHOWROOM CAHAYA INTAN MOTOR


cahayaintan1@yahoo.com