Vintage Wooden Homes on Wheels: Photos of Mobile Living from Early 20th Century | Hacker News Reader

Vintage Wooden Homes on Wheels: Photos of Mobile Living from Early 20th Century

rarehistoricalphotos.com

42 pointsbookofjoe22 comments

I think the one made out of bricks is just taking the piss! I also like the ones with porches ... such a homey little convenience!

has to be lino or something.

Shows tiny home/van life is certainly not a new concept.

You don't even have to go that far back, living in RVs is nothing new. "Tiny home" is just a rebranding that removes connotation of a "trailer", but it's essentially the same.

"Tiny home" probably also carries the implication of trendy design, more expensive materials, etc. You're not wrong but a lot of tiny home designs probably optimize space usage in ways that mobile home designs don't necessarily.

Humans have been nomadic longer than they've been static. You can take a nomad out of the wilderness, but you can't take the nomad out of the boy or whatever. Before these, we had covered wagons. Before that...

Before that, gypsy wagons.

I like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumance ; that way you only have to move the four- and two-legged members of the household, and the roof, walls, and stuff can remain in place in each seasonal-appropriate stop.

I love the absolute lack of concern for aerodynamics in these designs. They are straight up designed for function.

Most of these couldn't move fast enough for aerodynamics to matter much. A Ford Model TT truck had a top speed of 15mph without a house attached to it.

Aerodynamics is one thing, complete lack of crash safety is another. Aside from the RV's built on truck and van chassis, these things explode into a million bits in a head on collision. The vehicle's crumple zone is your face.

Most of those things probably had a top speed of around 10-15 MPH on level ground and unusually good roads for the time period. You don’t need much in the way of safety equipment at those speeds, though hills would be more risky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_TT

I was referring to NEW rv's.

What a 1930s Car Crash Looks Like (19s)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9fDmBTX7w

crash? that's just how they stopped.

Does the superb bus of Ray Conklin, president of the New York Motorbus Company in 1915 have plastic windows? I guess cellophane dates to 1912, but that's pretty wild to see in a photo from 1915.

Why do they all have big wheels?

Roads were much poorer, so clearance* was much more important.

One of my great grand fathers was a surveyor, and the neighbourhoods he worked on have become difficult for modern cars, because the curbs can be higher than low-slung doors, and driveway entrances are steep enough to bottom out.

* in my ski tourism area, even without reading the plates it's easy to tell local vehicles apart from the tourist ones, by clearance alone. Some of the farm equipment even has portal axles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_axle

(and even if they'd had good roads, I don't think they had the rubber technology: "radial" tyres weren't practical until after WWII)

Thanks for explaining. I had this silly idea that may be small wheels is a new tech and big wheels was something that just worked and everyone stuck with that back then.

What is it they have on these wheels if its not rubber and how does bigger wheel avoid the downside of not having rubber?

It was rubber, but natural, not synthetic.

(I think modern tyre shapes at 1920s rubber prices might have cost a significant fraction of the car? Back then, they were not only small and narrow compared with today, but they were also much thinner — which is probably why Bibendum, the Michelin Man, is made of tubes)

The Allies miscalculated with the Maginot Line, because they hadn't realised the Axis might invent and produce synfuels.

The Axis miscalculated with cutting the UK off from its rubber-producing colonies, because they hadn't realised the Allies might invent and produce synthetic rubber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_rubber#World_War_II

EDIT: more on rubber; those colonies had earlier yanked the market away from Brazil: https://www.k-online.com/en/Media_News/News/April_2014_From_...

During WW2, the US had plenty of gasoline, but they had to ration it because of the limited supply of rubber for new tires.

Some of these look like AI.

Had that thought too. Unfortunately, almost every history story lately has started to have that suspicion filter for something that was suddenly "discovered."

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