horseless carriage

English
London Steam Carriage (1803)

Etymology

Early term for an automobile, at the time it was common that carriages were pulled by animals, typically horses, but the automobiles were not.

Noun

horseless carriage (plural horseless carriages)

  1. (historical) An early automobile, of the types designed before World War I.
    Synonym: Brass Era car
    • 1896 August, Popular Science Monthly‎, volume 49:
      The movement for the introduction of horseless carriages is represented by two periodicals, the Horseless Age and the Motocycle, in the United States; the Autocar, in London; and La Locomotion Automobile and La France Automobile, in France.
    • 1918, Booth Tarkington, chapter VIII, in The Magnificent Ambersons, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC:
      Fanny Minafer had begun to talk to Lucy. "Your father wanted to prove that his horseless carriage would run, even in the snow," she said. "It really does, too."
  2. (figurative) Something new and unprecedented interpreted in older and familiar terms.
    horseless carriage thinking
    • 2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
      The basic operational mechanisms and business practices were so new and strange, so utterly sui generis, that all we could see was a gaggle of “innovative” horseless carriages.

Further reading
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