Car dependency may now have become a serious problem, but in 1882, when the German car maker Karl Benz took out his rudimentary internal combustion engine for a test drive in the streets of Stuttgart, he was arrested. The French count Albert de Dion fared no better. When he tried to produce his steam automobile commercially, his father got a court to restrain him.

But by the beginning of the 20th century, de Dion and his partner George Bouton had become car barons. So had Benz. Newspaper reports in Europe and America glowed with enthusiasm about the car. The first issue of the American automobile magazine, Horseless Age, waxed eloquent: "The growing needs of civilization demand it. The public believe in it.'

Actually, not everybody started believing in the car even then. People of the Swiss canton Graub