Name that tool

[Rupert]

What was the third?

[93JC]

I think you mean what were the second and third, because there was no clutch pedal either.

The pedal on the left was forward. You pushed it to the floor to go into low gear. Neutral was at an intermediary point in the pedal's travel. To shift to high gear you put the car in neutral by keeping the left pedal at the right point and pushed a shift lever forward.

The middle pedal was reverse. The right pedal was the service brake, a band brake that stopped the transmission instead of the wheels.

Here's a video from YouTube to give you an idea of what it was like to drive the complicated contraption that was a Ford Model T. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWBEM4yjI1Y

[ifcar]

I see things like that all the time in old documents. It makes me believe that the modern vocabulary is about a third the size it was in the early twentieth century.

To be fair, outright illiteracy was higher then. If you were reading at all, you were automatically a cut above many, and could be held to a higher standard.

[Rupert]

I think you mean what were the second and third, because there was no clutch pedal either.

The pedal on the left was forward. You pushed it to the floor to go into low gear. Neutral was at an intermediary point in the pedal's travel. To shift to high gear you put the car in neutral by keeping the left pedal at the right point and pushed a shift lever forward.

The middle pedal was reverse. The right pedal was the service brake, a band brake that stopped the transmission instead of the wheels.

Here's a video from YouTube to give you an idea of what it was like to drive the complicated contraption that was a Ford Model T. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWBEM4yjI1Y

So what is the other shifter-lookin' lever for?

[93JC]

That particular T is a truck, so I presume it has a two-speed differential as many of the trucks did.

EDIT: Reading the comments in the video, the owner says he installed an overdrive unit for a higher top speed. The smaller lever is the overdrive. The longer one is the differential. The lever on the left is the parking brake/high gear lever. If you pushed the lever forward it engaged high gear, if you pulled it back it engaged the parking brake, and if you had it in the middle it went into neutral.

[Rupert]

Jesus... Who could remember that?

[93JC]

Presumably 15,007,034 people at the very least.

Other cars were similar to today's manual transmissions, in that they had a dedicated shift lever with a quadrant of available gears, but they also had no synchronizers and straight-cut spur gears. The transmissions themselves were very noisy, and particularly difficult to drive. Double clutching was an absolute necessity, and even then it was difficult to make a clean shift.

Here's another YouTube video to give you an idea about driving a more conventional car, a 1931 Ford Model A (same guy who drove the Model T in the other video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m_8jnteZkE

[Rupert]

I did some YouTube-ing last night about old cars. It looks pretty cool, actually.

[Laconian]

I wish there was more about the Owen Magnetic on the Youtubes (magnetic coupling between the transmission input and output shafts.) It seems like it might have worked better with today's magnetic technology, coupled with automatic lockup and perhaps used as a supplement to traditional friction-based clutches.