Boite de Vitesse

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Mazlumian writes "I would like to know where John gets the notion that
the italian 'cambio di velocita' *follows* 'the French box of speeds.' - -
Did the french use the term first in the latin world?"

I was making a leap there - call it an 'informed guess', if you want to be
kind. (Or an uninformed guess.) The prehistory of the automobile was largely
French (look up the two volumes of Jacques Ickx' "Ainsi Naquit l'Automobile"
if you want a good weekend read), followed by some inspired German work
(mainly by Daimler and Benz) after which the French picked up the ball and ran
with it. Roughly a decade later Agnelli found the remains of a Daimler engine
(or was it Benz? One or the other-) on the scrapheap at his University,
started tinkering, and the Italian automobile industry was, if not born, at
least pregnant. By 1910 it was a burgeoning export market - selling more cars
abroad than Germany and England combined- but France was exporting more than
Italy, Germany, England and the rest of Europe combined. The reasons for the
relatively slow starts in England, the birthplace of the Industrial
Revolution, and in Italy, which had a very limited industrial and technical
base at the time, are too intricate for digest discussion, but both the
British and Italian automobiles at the turn of the century were largely
derivative of the French industry which had picked up a substantial dollop of
German engine development. The English and American vocabularies - automobile,
garage, chauffeur - are largely French, and I doubt that in these matters
(unlike cooking) the French owed much to Italy.

Jorge is certainly correct that the proper terms are 'boite de changement de
vitesse' and 'scatola del cambio di velocita' but both Fusi and d'Amico &
Tabucchi use 'cambio di velocita' while I am fairly sure that I have normally
seen 'boite de vitesse' in French. I would guess that in the original full
form the Italian did follow the French, and the short forms evolved in the
vernaculars. But I am no polyglot, and certainly no authority.

Cordially,

John H.
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