Car Fact: “Glove Compartments” get their name from a practice during the early days of the automobile in which human drivers used them to store items called “gloves”, which the historical record indicates were cloth garments, worn for aesthetic reasons over grasping appendages called “hands”, which had to be removed during the act of driving in order to maximize surface area contact during driver-vehicle interface via a circular helm-wheel
just realized my syntax was a little ambiguous here, sorry. To clarify, the hands had to be removed during operator-interface, not the gloves.
Because people keep asking: The glove compartment might have been used to store hands too, but it’s equally likely they had their own compartment or were simply placed on the dashboard while the act was committed. There’s no definite evidence either way. We do know that early automobiles had a special piece of machinery to hasten the process of hand detachment though, fittingly called a “handbreak”. These became less common over time but some cars actually retained vestigial handbreaks well into the 3100s. Saint Lightning had one, for example, and you can actually see it yourself if you visit the McQueen Drive-Thru Mausoleum at the Vatican Autonecropolis where his body is displayed.
