History of the Glove Box
- Robert Roy Foresman
- Nov 27, 2018
- 7 min read
"Regarding gloves--never wear woollen gloves, but gloves made of good soft kid. You will find room for these gloves in the little drawer under the seat of the car."
-- Dorothy Levitt, 1909
Simply defined, a glove compartment, glovebox, glovie or jockey box is a compartment built into the dashboard of an automobile, located over the front-seat passenger's foot-well, and often used for miscellaneous storage. While this might be an oversimplification of what purpose the glove box serves today, the name derives from the original intended use of the compartment, a mobile-junk-drawer-of-sorts, not just a place to store driving gloves. Original glove boxes on vehicles were sometimes in a box on the floorboard near the driver where they would store miscellaneous equipment including gloves for changing tires and the like, hence the words "glove box." But the history behind the naming of the glove box is both complicated and interesting. Regionally speaking, the history reveals a difference of opinion in what to call this mobile junk drawer. In Barbados, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, as well as parts of southern Minnesota and northwest Wyoming, the glove compartment has been commonly referred to as a 'cubby-hole.' In other locales, such as in northern Europe or the upper Rocky Mountain areas of the United States, the glove box is commonly referred to as a 'jockey box'--which is probably the more traditional historical reason for how the glove box got its' name.
Driving gloves were considered necessary equipment in early cars, many of which lacked a hard top, to prevent the cooling effect of fast-moving air from numbing drivers' hands. Some of the earliest history that is available on the development of the glove box in transportation indicates that the concept of a glove or compartment box came from cattle-drive chuck wagons, freighters, or Cownestoga wagons and their riders who contracted out their services to varying commercial and private interests in nineteenth-century America. As former Assistant Director of the United States Railroad Administration C.A. Morse pointed out in 1915, "I always associated a master carpenter with the old time freighter, who had on the back of his wagon a 'Jockey Box.'
In this jockey box could be found anything from baling wire to a wagon-hammer. If anything happened on the road he could always find something in his jockey box with which to repair it. A master carpenter's headquarters shop together with outlying buildings is usually a great big 'jockey box' from which he can dig up something with which to do any ordinary job, without waiting for the material ordered on his requisition to show up." So in this way, we see how it was easy for emergent automobile transportation companies in the early twentieth century to apply the name or concept of a jockey box as a necessary component of motorized transportation as it had been popularly known in wagon or freighter transport.
At the turn of the 20th century, early automobile manufacureres like the Packard Motor Company of Warren, Ohio (also known as the Ohio Automobile Company)--headed by founders James and William Packard and George Lewis Weiss--were struggling to shed the public image of their brand new transportation product as "horseless carriages." Packard's approach to differentiate the automobile was to get rid of the dashboard--which originated as a wooden or canvas panel to keep horses from splashing the driver with mud or other unpleasantries if they were dashing. Makes sense, right? Packard ingeniously replaced the dashboard with a storage box, suitable for "parcels, waterproofs, etc." Thus, the designers at Packard were the commercial originators of the glove compartment. Automobile enthusiasts of the early twentieth century, who were considering a 1900 Packard were promised soft and stylish storage. "The body of the carriage shows the best possible coachwork and upholstering," boasted the original sales literature from the Packard dealership in Warren. "Instead of a leather dash, there is a boot or box forming part of the body. In this is ample space for parcels, waterproofs, etc."
The National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nev., said the 1900 Packard-style glove compartment was quickly adopted by other early automakers in the United States and abroad. "The 1902 Oldsmobile Curved Dash Roundabout had a leather satchel nestled into its dash that was held closed with four buckles. The 1903 Duryea had a box built into the dash, opening on top instead of in front with a decorative iron rail on the lid. Other automakers included baskets, hampers, and trunks for storage, and by the 1930's, glove boxes had become standard equipment. But by that time, the boxes were already being used to store a plethora of other objects."
Packard is credited for the very first storage box, but the popular idea to use the box for gloves and storing miscellaneous items might be credited to Dorothy Elizabeth Levi Levitt. Levitt may have been the first person to popularize the phrase 'glove compartment' or 'glove box,' as she advised motorists to carry a number of pairs of gloves to deal with many eventualities of automobile travel. In her short but brilliant life, Levitt was a major contributor to the earliest days of Motorsport in Europe. She was Britain's first female race car driver, an expert mechanic, flew planes, and held both the ladies land speed record and the overall water speed record. She was a pioneer of female independence and female motoring, and taught Queen Alexandra and the Royal Princesses Louise, Victoria and Maud how to drive. In 1905 she established the record for the longest drive achieved by a lady driver by driving a De Dion-Bouton from London to Liverpool and back over two days, receiving the honorary titles in the press of the Fastest Girl on Earth, and the Champion Lady Motorist of the World.
Levitt's book, The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women who Motor or Who Want to Motor (1909), recommended that women should "carry a little hand-mirror in a convenient place when driving" in their glove box, so they may "hold the mirror aloft from time to time in order to see behind while driving in traffic", thereby also inadvertently inventing the rear view mirror before it was introduced by automobile manufacturers in 1914. Levitt also wrote in The Woman and the Car about the necessity and practical usage of the formerly-named-jockey-box. While commercial automobile manufacturers like Packard were implementing the storage box or compartment into their new vehicles, Levitt definitively offered up early popular advice that the American and European public took hold of, that was to store one's gloves and other necessities for road travel in the formerly-named-jockey-box:
"While there are several little repairs that it would be impossible to remedy if wearing gloves, the majority of work on a car (filling tanks, etc.) can be done just as well if one's hands are protected by a pair of wash-leather gloves. You will find room for these gloves in the little drawer under the seat of the car. This little drawer is the secret of the dainty motoriste. What you put in it depends upon your tastes, but the following articles are what I advise you to have in its recesses. A pair of clean gloves, an extra handkerchief, clean veil, powder-puff (unless you despise them), hair-pins and ordinary pins, a hand mirror--and some chocolates are very soothing sometimes!"
One might argue that not much has changed, and you might be well to find most if not all of these items (including chocolate in varying states) in at least a small percentage of today's glove boxes. Practical advice and ideas introduced to automobile history by Levitt that well outlasted her short but brilliant lifetime.
Eventually the need to wear driving gloves dissipated, and the glove compartment evolved to what we know today. It still is a mobile junk drawer of sorts. Perhaps the most awesomely unusable idea ever to find its way into a production car, Cadillac included a glove box-sized cocktail set with its 1957 Eldorado Brougham. However, in most modern vehicles, the glove compartment closes with a latch, with the option of being locked with a key (often desirable when using valet service, or when parking with the convertible top down, or when the compartment contains a mechanism to open the trunk). In some vehicles, the inside of the compartment's door may have an indented area for holding cups when open, and a section for holding a pen or pencil. In some newer cars, the glove compartment is temperature controlled, so that it can be used as a cooler. In others, multiple glove compartments are provided. One of the most distinct historical changes that glove compartments have seen is that older glove compartments typically contained an internal light, which automatically turned on when the box was opened, helping to search its contents or provide light on a warm summer night under the stars. From the early 2000's however, many manufacturers have not provided this light, to cut costs and streamline power regulation. However, the glove box continues to evolve and develop over time, continuing to provide motorists with storage and information needed for travel and convenience, and reveals a history that is both complicated and interesting.
Sources
Internet
http://www.earlyamericanautomobiles.com/americanautomobiles4.htm Retrieved 11/26/2018.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22313202/ns/business-autos/t/unrecognized-much-used-glovebox/ Retrieved 11/25/2018.
https://vintagedancer.com/vintage/vintage-mens-gloves-1900-1960/ Retrieved 11/25/2018.
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