PastImperfect: The Cow's Tail:It has always surprised me that it took so long in the early days of motoring for the steering wheel to be adopted; it is hard to imagine why the various motor manufacturers persevered for so long with the steering used in early cars, namely tiller steering.
Perhaps the answer lies in the term horseless carriages used to refer to the earliest of motor vehicles. As a result, steering tended to follow the practice of the horse-drawn carriages from which they had originated. This led to the queue de vache, or cow's tail - the tiller, usually a bar of metal or wood and often curved in two directions, which through a simple linkage, varied the angle of the front axle to the centre line of the chassis.
The great disadvantage of the system, apart from its relative imprecision, was that it was unsuitable as cars became faster. As a result, the tiller of early vehicles gave way to a mechanically much more complicated mechanism known as the two-handle system. It consisted of a vertical steering column which was connected at its base to steering linkages with the result that instead of the whole axle turning, only the wheels turned on kingpins.
At its upper end the steering column was rigidly attached to a horizontal bar between 25 and 40cm long with a vertical steering handle. The two-handle system had its disadvantages - mainly that it could not cope with sharp angles of turn.
The steering wheel first appeared as an improvement to the two-handle system when the vertical handle was replaced by a small wheel. Although initially vertical the advantages of a steering wheel were apparent to anyone who used it and it was soon universally adopted.
The steering wheel quickly grew to an enormous size, far bigger than anything we use today. The reason was because the poor road surfaces of the time transmitted heavy shocks through the steering linkages to the steering wheel. The answer was to increase the diameter of the steering wheel. In time, as manufacturing techniques improved, the rim diameter also decreased in size.
For the first 40 or so years after the introduction of steering wheels a familiar fitting on them was the manual ignition advance/retard lever, usually mounted on the wheel centre. This lever was used every time the load on the engine varied - something which happens automatically on a modern car.
The final item to be added to the steering wheel was the horn button on the centre hub. Although sound warning devices had been used almost from the dawn of motoring, they did not arrive on the steering wheel until quite late in the development of the steering wheel.