"Machine" as a 1920s American term for "car"

Question

I've recently been reading some of the short stories of Dashiell Hammett featuring the Continental Op. These stories were written in the 1920s and are about a detective investigating crime in and around contemporary San Francisco.

I noticed that the characters frequently use the word machine to mean an automobile, and I wondered whether this was common usage for the time and place. I had not heard it before. To a modern reader, it has an archaic sound, as if the car were such a new development that there was not yet a specific word for it. But of course by the 1920s cars were very common, so this does not make sense. It may also be slang; given their criminal associations, Hammett's characters tend to speak mostly in slang.

Does anyone have more information about this usage and its history?

Answer 1

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition 5h of machine is ‘originally and chiefly U.S. A motor vehicle, especially a car.’ The first recorded use with this meaning is from 1901: ‘His assistant crouching at his feet out of range of the swift-flying currents of air produced by the mad flight of the machine.’ There is also a Hammett citation from 1929. The word seems to have been used in this sense throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Machine is a versatile word. Remember the film 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines'? And when Windows is doing some housekeeping on my computer, I am told ‘Please do not power off or unplug your machine.’

Answer 2

My parents born in 1902 and I in 1940 Baltimore Maryland. As a child they would say, "Should we walk or take the machine" meaning the car.

For context, there were probably other regional differences of usage, that may not have made it to dictionaries:

1. My mother also told me to put on a "blouse" and I am male, and it sounded strange because it's what my sister wore. So, I looked it up and the word originally meant from the french, a loose garment worn by workers or peasants. So, while that word had changed it probably was commonly for both genders in her youth.
2. In the era before mass media, even movies were silent in my folks youth,

Answer 3

My grandfather, born around 1910, used "machine" to mean automobile. I asked him why. He explained that in his day, "car" referred to a streetcar, and "machine" meant automobile.

Answer 4

The OED traces to use of “Machine” (as a means of transport) thus

5. a. A ship or other vessel. Now colloquial: a boat.

1637 T. Heywood True Descr. Royall Ship 27 Shee [sc. Pallas] hath (no doubt) raptured our Undertaker This Machine to devise first, and then make her.

1807 R. Southey Lett. from Eng. II. 155 We..embarked upon the canal in a stage boat bound for Chester... The shape of the machine resembles the common representations of Noah's ark.

1985 Sydney Morning Herald 27 July 67/6 He..had no second thoughts about helping to sail it—and it is a flighty, high-performance machine—in the Round Britain race.

No distinction seems to have been made between “wheels and no wheels"@ the essence was "transport", but obviously, to the average citizen, a machine was more common as a wheeled vehicle:

b. A (usually wheeled) vehicle or conveyance, esp. one drawn by a horse or horses, or other draught animal or animals. Formerly esp.: a stagecoach or mail coach; (also) a brake, trap, or small carriage (chiefly Scottish). Now historical.

1687 A. Lovell tr. J. de Thévenot Trav. into Levant iii. 54 They make use of an Engine which they call Palanquin... This Machine hangs by a long Pole [etc.].

1759 J. Newton Diary 21 Mar. in Deserted Village (1992) 17 Went to London in the Oxford Machine.

1832 Mass. Stat. c. 75 §4 Every cart, wagon, or other machine, drawn by two or four oxen.

1911 G.N.S.R. Tourist Guide 305 Close and Open Machines suitable for Marriage and Picnic sent anywhere with good horses and careful drivers.

1986 P. O'Brian Reverse of Medal (1987) viii. 218 The chaise lost not a moment:..the elegant black and yellow machine ran steadily north..never lacking for horses at any stage on the road.

There seems little doubt that “machine” was merely an extension of the idea of a cart, trap, or stagecoach, etc:

h. Originally and chiefly U.S. A motor vehicle, esp. a car.

1901 McClure's Mag. 18 i. 21/2 His assistant crouching at his feet out of range of the swift-flying currents of air produced by the mad flight of the machine.

1915 Sat. Evening Post 3 Apr. 62/2 The reliability of the machine was so amazing that, in seven years of business, not a single breakdown had been reported.

1929 D. Hammett Red Harvest xv. 154 The machine that had been trailing us came into sight around a bend in the road..and unloaded its cargo of men and weapons.