History of garages

It is challenging today to visualize a world without garages or a language deprived of the term garage. However, the word probably did not come into existence before the 19th century and undoubtedly not before the 18th; perhaps the item itself did not exist before the end of the 19th century. Our word is a direct deriving of the French verb ‘garer’, which originally meant "to put a vehicle into a place for safekeeping," i.e., a garage, a sense first recorded in French in 1901. English almost instantaneously borrowed this French word, the first occasion being found in 1902.



The origin of the garage arose when Henry Ford invented the ‘Quadra-cycle’ in 1896 in his coal shed. Doors in the shed weren't big enough to permit Ford to remove his new development and have a test drive. So he struck an opening in the brick wall large enough to escape the boundaries of the dusty shed and rode down the lane. Little had he known that he was unintentionally discovering the garage.

As the car toiled its way into society, so did the necessity for somewhere to keep it. And the outcome of that requirement, as labeled by an architect in 1912, was the formation of "a new type of outbuilding". People in those days thought of an outhouse as a carriage house – the place where you keep your horse and buggy. Since a carriage house was a building that accommodated everything to do with your means of transportation, at first, cars were kept next to the domestic animals, in the same erection. But there arose, shall we say, a stench about this whole scenario. People who had cars in those days were usually extremely rich and status conscious than most, and to have their extravagant new cars smell of horse dung just wouldn’t do. So a substitute way was sought.



The initial garages were actually a lot like our modern-day parking lots, but with a single level. People reckoned that if they could keep more than one horse in a shed, then feasibly they could park more than one vehicle in a similar structure. So they constructed huge garages, some publicly-owned and some privately-owned. It became quite a business – they’d charge $15-$20 per month for a parking slot. This scheme went well until about 1910, when there became too many cars for the garages to lodge.



After the parking garage idea, people started searching for a more expedient place for their vehicles that was closer to home. The carriage house had functioned fine previously, if only they could get liberated of those smelly horses. And that directed to the origination of the garage as we know it today.

So the carriage house model was utilized to build similar buildings that could line people’s cars. They were humble structures and, of course, had a door, because one of the purposes was to protect the car. And there we go with our vital need; modern day garages!



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