Bus

Bus (pronounced buhs)

(1) A large motor vehicle, having a long body, equipped with seats or benches for passengers, usually operating as part of a scheduled service; sometimes called omnibus, motorbus or trolleybus

(2) A similar horse-drawn vehicle.

(3) A passenger automobile (or airplane in casual use) used in a manner resembling that of a bus.

(4) In electrical transmission, short for of busbar.

(5) In ballistics, the part of a MIRV (multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicle (an exoatmospheric ballistic missile)) payload containing the re-entry vehicles, guidance and thrust devices.

(6) In astronautics, a platform in a space vehicle used for various experiments and processes.

(7) In computer architecture, a communication system that transfers data between components inside or between computers. This expression covers all related hardware components (wire, optical fibre, etc) and software, including communication protocols.

1832: A clipping of the French omnibus.  Omnibus dates from 1829 and was used to describe a "long-bodied, horse-drawn, four-wheeled public vehicle with seats for passengers", from the French voiture omnibus (carriage for all, common (conveyance)), from the Latin omnibus (for all), dative plural of omnis (all), ablative of omnia, from the primitive Indo-European hep-ni- (working), from hep- (to work; to possess) or hop- (to work; to take).  Bus was thus a convenient shortening to describe the (then horse drawn) forms of public transport and subsequent uses by analogy with transporting (even weightless) stuff is derived from this.  The present participle is omnibusing or omnibussing and the past participle omnibused or omnibussed; the noun plural is either omnibuses or (for the public transportation) omnibusses; the attractive omnibi unfortunately wholly non-standard.  The sense "to travel by omnibus" dates from 1838; the transitive meaning "transport students to integrate schools" is American English from 1961.  The meaning "clear tables in a restaurant" is first attested 1913, probably from the four-wheeled cart used to carry dishes. The electrical sense is derived from a figurative application of the automotive sense; the use in computer architecture followed this model.  “To miss the bus” in the figurative sense of a lost opportunity is from 1901 and credited as an Australian invention (although the OED lists a figurative “miss the omnibus” from 1886).  It was most famously used by Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940; UK prime-minister 1937-1940) during the "Phoney War".  On 5 April 1940, confident the previous eight months spent building up armaments meant the west was now invulnerable to invasion, Chamberlain felt sufficiently confident to declare to the House of Commons "Hitler has missed the bus".  The Wehrmacht invaded four days later.

The bus wars

For IBM, the decision in 1980 to adopt an open bus architecture for the original PC was a good idea at the time.  Anticipating the PC being a niche-market product, the open bus was seen as a way to encourage sales by encouraging smaller manufacturers to produce expansion boards (cards) but not involving IBM in what would be an activity of marginal profitability. However, the PC soon became a huge sales success and the open bus meant manufacturers were soon producing their own PCs, not just the expansion cards and by the mid-1980s, IBM weren’t best pleased to find of all the PCs being sold, relatively few were genuine IBMs.  Their response in 1987 was to develop a proprietary bus for the new range (the PS/2 PCs & the OS/2 operating system) which, unlike open architecture, would attract royalties from the cloners, the new bus called Micro Channel Architecture (MCA).  Technically MCA offered many advantages, most obviously an early implementation of the soon-familiar plug’n’play which (usually) worked surprisingly well as well as a twenty percent increase in bus speed.  Apart from the cost, the main drawback was the lack of backward compatibility; not only did third-party manufacturers have to re-tool to design and produce new motherboards & cards, consumers could not re-use their existing cards, something important at the time.

8-bit ISA (XT)

16-bit ISA (AT)

32-bit EISA

32-bit VESA

16-bit MCA

32-bit MCA

A pack of the biggest cloners didn’t like this and responded with their own design, an enhancement of the original AT (which they re-named Industry Standard Architecture (ISA)) called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) which either matched on felt only slightly short of the technical improvements provided by MCA.  EISA advantages were (1) cost breakdown, (2) it was free for anyone to use and (3) backward compatibility.  IBM wasn’t impressed, stressing the technical superiority of 16 & 32-bit MCA, noting a mixing of 8, 16 and 32-bit cards in the one bus would inevitability result in one device getting very hot, leading to what they called “…a silicon barbeque”.  For a while, the bus wars raged and while it’s true MCA was better, it wasn’t that much better so for many the additional costs were hard to justify.  Had the bus wars continued, it could have gone either way because while EISA was free, it was a cul-de-sac, it’s development potential limited whereas IBM could have both improved MCA and lowered its licensing fees.  However, the development of the the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus rendered both MCA and EISA (and the short-lived VESA) obsolete.  When USB (Universal Serial Bus) devices became ubiquitous, the whole system board became unknown to all but the nerds.

Bus scene in Mean Girls (2004). 

Omnibus

Omnibus (pronounced om-nuh-buhs)

(1) A now less commonly used term for a bus (a public mass-transit vehicle).

(2) A volume of reprinted works of a single author or of works related in interest or theme, by extension later applied to a television or radio programme consisting of two or more programmes earlier broadcast.

(3) Something pertaining to, including, or dealing with numerous objects or items at once, the best known example being the omnibus bills submitted to a legislature (a number of bills combined as one).

(4) As a pre-nominal, of, dealing with, or providing for many different things or cases. 

(5) In philately, a stamp issue, usually commemorative, that appears simultaneously in several countries as a common issue.

(6) In public transportation, a service which stops at every station, as opposed to a point-to-point express.

(7) In literary use as a humorous device, a jack of all trades (a person with knowledge in multiple fields, usually with some hint of lacking competence in at least some).

(8) In restaurants, both (1) a waiter’s assistant (obsolete, replaced by busboy or (now more commonly) busser or commis waiter) & (2) later the small, wheeled cart used by a waiter's assistant.

1829: A adoption in English to describe a "long-bodied, horse-drawn, four-wheeled public vehicle with seats for passengers", from the French voiture omnibus (carriage for all, common (conveyance)), from the Latin omnibus (for all), dative plural of omnis (all), ablative of omnia, from the primitive Indo-European hep-ni- (working), from hep- (to work; to possess) or hop- (to work; to take).  Bus was thus a convenient shortening to describe the (then horse drawn) forms of public transport and subsequent uses by analogy with transporting (even weightless) stuff is derived from this.  The present participle is omnibusing or omnibussing and the past participle omnibused or omnibussed; the noun plural is either omnibuses or (for the public transportation) omnibusses; the attractive omnibi unfortunately wholly non-standard.

Omnibus entered English to describe a “horse-drawn, long-bodied, four-wheeled public vehicle with seats for passengers” in 1829 as a borrowing from the French where it had been in use for a decade, introduced in Paris in the winter of 1819-1820 by a Monsieur Jacques Lafitte (1761-1833) who used the term voiture omnibus”, combining the French word for "carriage" with the Latin phrase meaning "for all".  An Englishman named George Shillibeer (1797-1866) was the coach-builder to whom Lafitte awarded the contract to build his omnibuses and after returning to London, he built similar models, introducing them in 1929 to immediate success.  In the manner of the Brougham and Hansom cabs, they were known first as Shillibeers (and use of his name to describe the vehicles did persist until late in the nineteenth century) but omnibus was soon preferred and that for more than a century remained the official designation (and indeed still appears in some legislation and ordinances) but predictably, the public preferred the more phonetically economical "bus" and that endures to this day.  Encouraged by his success, Mr Shillibeer remained entrepreneurial, introducing in 1858 the “funeral omnibus” which combined in the one vehicle (in separate compartments), accommodation for both coffin (casket) and mourners.  Thus a combination of bus and hearse, the advertising suggested that for smaller funeral parties it would be cheaper than hiring multiple vehicles (with their attendant staff and horses).  Perhaps for cultural reasons it seems not to have been a success, but hearses with similar configuration are used in some countries and, in the West, some are built with seating for up to four passengers, apparently intended for the undertaker’s staff.

Lindsay Lohan display advertising on Italian omnibus, Milan.

The use of omnibus to describe a junior staff member in a restaurant who was assigned essentially “all the tasks the waiters preferred not to do” dates from 1880 and came soon to be applied to the wheeled carts such helpers used to more around crockery, cutlery, flatware and such.  This simultaneous use may have proved confusing or else three syllables was just too much because by 1913 the carts were being called busses and their operators busboys (although that seems not to have survived our more gender-sensitive age and “commis waiter” seems now preferred (usually as “commis”).  Omnibus was the name of a long-running live TV series (1952-1961) hosted on US television by expatriate English journalist Alistair Cooke (1908-2004).  The use of omnibus to describe a legislative bill which addresses a number of vaguely related (or even wholly dissimilar) matters in the one document technically dates from 1842 although, as an adjective referring to legislation "designed to cover many different cases, embracing numerous distinct objects", it was in use in the US as early as 1835 and is most famously associated with the act (made of five separate bills) passed in 1850 to secure the Compromise of 1850 which (temporarily) defused a political confrontation between slave and free states over the status of territories acquired in the Mexican–American War.

The Man on the Clapham Omnibus

1932 Lancia Autoalveare, a triple-decker omnibus which served the Rome-Tvoli route.  The upper deck was apparently, at least on some occasions, designated as "non-smoking" but history doesn't record whether the bus company enjoyed any more success than the government of Italy in enforcing such edicts.

The phrase “man on the Clapham omnibus” was one adopted (apparently from early in the twentieth century) by judges of English courts to illustrate the “reasonable person”.  The word “reasonable” had been in English since circa 1300 as a borrowing from the Old French raisonable and the Latin rationabilis (from ratio) and in this context was an attempt by example encapsulate “the average man” or “the man in the street”, judges varying in their descriptions of this construct but meaning usually something like “a reasonably intelligent and impartial person unversed in legal esoteric” (Jones v US, DC Court of Appeals).  When the phrase was in 1903 used by Lord Justice Sir Richard Collins MR, the Clapham omnibus would have been horse drawn and he credited the expression to one he’d heard mentioned by a previous Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, Lord Bowen (1835-1894).

The judicial choice of a bus passenger was based on the idea that such a person could be thought to be representative of an upstanding, respectable and thoroughly ordinary member of society, one for whom views of things were not infected by legal technicalities.  The choice of Clapham was significant only that it was an unexceptional London suburb something like many of dozens that might be said to have been “typical” of the city.  The man on the Clapham omnibus was thus in the tradition of legal fictions, a hypothetical person used for illustrative purposes, the first known instance of which in Western legal tradition was the creation by Roman jurists of the figure of bonus pater familias (good family father) a chap said to be not only respectable but unrelentingly and reliably average in every aspect of life.  In the Canadian province of Quebec, the very similar standard of the bon père de famille is derived from the Roman bonus pater familias.  The reasonable man (now of course a reasonable person) is a necessity in many aspects of law because so many standards upon which cases are decided depend on the word reasonable.  Were the consequences of an action reasonably foreseeable?  Would a reasonable person believe a certain thing told to them?  Was a claim by advertisement reasonable?  Was the violence used reasonable given the manner in which the defendant was assaulted.

Crooked Hillary dumping on deplorables, Georgia, 2016.

Omnibuses have long been used by politicians for their campaign tours.  They offer lots of advantages, being offices and communications centres with at least some of their running costs offset by a reduction in staff travel expenses.  Additionally, with five large, flat surfaces, they are a rolling billboard although that can be good or bad.  In 2016, one of crooked Hillary Clinton’s campaign buses was photographed in Lawrenceville, Georgia dumping a tank full of human waste onto the street and into a storm drain.  The local news service reported that when police attended the street was “…was covered in toilet paper and the odor was noxious”.  Hazmat crews were called to clean up the scene and the matter was referred to the environmental protection division of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) later issued an apology, claiming the incident was “an honest mistake.”  Using the word “honest” in any statement related to crooked Hillary Clinton is always a bit of a gamble and there was no word on whether the dumping of human excrement had been delayed until the bus was somewhere it was thought many deplorables may be living.  If so, that may have been another “honest mistake” because Gwinett County (in which lies Lawrenceville) voted 51.02% Clinton/Kaine & 45.14% Trump/Pence although the symbolism may not have been lost on much of the rest of Georgia; state wide the Republican ticket prevailed 50.38% to 45.29%.

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s campaign buses also attracted memes referencing a crash and a breakdown.  Both were fake news but surprisingly prescient, the Clinton/Kaine ticket securing an absolute majority of votes cast but failing to gain the requisite numbers in the Electoral College because the campaign neglected adequately to target areas in states the DNC regarded either (1) solidly in the possession of their machine or (2) populated by folk from the "basket of deplorables" and thus worthy only of a dumping of shit, figurative and literal.  Like the candidate, the 2016 campaign was something like what was planned for 2008, taken from the cold-room, rechauffed and served with the claim it was fresh.  It wasn't quite that the staff had "learned nothing and forgotten everything" but it does seem the operation was top-heavy with political operatives and lacking in those with a mastery of the techniques of data analysis.  All the evidence suggests there was no lack of data, just an inability to extract from it useful information. 

Before Photoshop imbued all with cynical disbelief, the triple decked omnibus was a popular vehicle for April fool's day pranks, the photograph on the left published in Lisbon on the day in 1951.  The one on the right is from 1926 and was in the German magazine Echo Continental (trade publication of the auto and truck parts manufacturer Continental AG) which "reported" the development of Berlin's new triple-decker city omnibus.  So lovely are the art deco lines, it's a shame it wasn't real.

Decker

Decker (pronounced dek-er)

(1) Something (typically a bus, ship, aircraft, bed, sandwich et al), having a specified number of decks, floors, levels, layers and such (used usually in combination with a numerical or other expression indicating the number in the construction (double decker, triple decker, upper decker, five decker etc (sometimes hyphenated).

(2) As “table decker” an employee who “decks” (ie sets or adorns) a table used for entertaining (used also as a “coverer”) (archaic).  The idea lives on in the verb “bedeck” (to adorn).

(3) In boxing slang, a fighter with a famously powerful punch, able to “deck” an opponent (ie knock them to the canvas with a single punch).

(4) In historic naval slang, as “quarter-decker”, a label applied to officers known more for their attention to matters of etiquette or trivial regulations than competent seamanship or ability in battle.  It was an allusion to a warship’s “quarter deck” (the part of the spar-deck of a man-of-war (warship) between the poop deck and main-mast (and originally (dating from the 1620s), a smaller deck above the half-deck, covering about a quarter of the vessel’s LOA (length overall)).  In many navies, the quarter-deck was reserved as “a promenade for officers only”.

1785–1795: The construct was deck + -er.  Deck in this context was from the Middle English dekke (covering extending from side to side over part of a ship), from a nautical use of the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering), from the Middle Dutch decken, from the Proto-Germanic thakam (source also of the noun “thatch” and from the primitive Indo-European root steg & teg- (to cover) and the Old Dutch thecken, from the Proto-West Germanic þakkjan, from the Proto-Germanic þakjaną and related to the German Decke (covering, blanket).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals.  In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb.   The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun.  The noun double-decker was first used in 1835 of ships with two decks above the water line and this extended to land transport (trains) in 1867.  Decker is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is deckers.

Flight deck of the US Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70).

The reason ships, trains, buses, aircraft and such have "decks" while buildings have "floors” or “stories (or storeys)” is traceable to nautical history and the nomenclature used in shipbuilding.  English picked up “deck” from the Middle Dutch decke & dec (roof, covering) where the use had been influenced by the Old Norse þekja (to cover) and in early shipbuilding, a “deck” was the structure which covered the hull of the ship, providing both a horizontal “working surface” and enclosing the vessel, creating a space for stores, cargo or accommodation which was protected from the elements.  In that sense the first nautical decks acted as a “roof”.  As ships became larger, the nautical architects began to include multiple decks, analogous with the floors of buildings in that they fulfilled a similar function, providing segregated layers (ie the storeys in buildings) used for cannons, crew quarters, storage and such.  As the terminology of shipbuilding became standardized, each deck came to have a specific name depending on its purpose or position (main deck, flight deck, poop deck, gun deck etc).

Ford Mustang convertible (1965–1973) replacement floor pan (complete, part number 3648B) by Moonlight Drive Sheet Metal.

Until the nineteenth century, although the vehicles used on land became larger, they tended to get longer rather than higher but the advent of steam propulsion made possible trains which ran on railways and these could pull carriages carrying freight or passengers.  The first “double decker” versions appeared in France in 1867 and were described as voitures à imperial, (imperial cars) were used on the Chemin de Fer de l'Ouest (Western Railway), the upper deck roofless and thus an “open-air experience”,  Rapidly, the idea spread and double-deck carriages became common for both long-distance and commuter services.  An outlier in the terminology is car design; cars have a floor (sometimes called the “floor pan”) rather than a deck, presumably because there’s only ever one.  In the narrow technical sense there have been cars with “two floors” but they were better understood as a “double-skinned” single floor and they were used for armor or to provide a space for something specialized such as hydrogen fuel-cells, the technique often called “sandwich construction”.

Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat cutaway (left) and front schematics of Boeing 747-300 (right).  Re-using some of an earlier design for a bomber which failed to meet the military’s performance criteria, between 1938-1941, Boeing built twelve 314 Clippers, long-range flying boats with the range to cross both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  Although used by the military during World War II, most of their service was with the two commercial operators Pan Am (originally Pan American Airways) and BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation).  Very much a machine of the pre-war age, the last Clippers were retired from service between 1946-1948, the advances in aviation and ground infrastructure built during war-time rendering them obsolete and prohibitively expensive to maintain.

Because train designers adopted the nautical terminology, it naturally came to be used also in buses, and aircraft, the term “flight deck” (where the pilot(s) sat) common even before multiple decks appeared on flying boats and other long-distance airframes.  The famous “bubble” of the Boeing 747 (1968-2023) remains one of the best known decks and although most associated with the glamour of first-class international travel, was designed originally as a freight compartment.  The multi-deck evolution continued and the Airbus A380 (2005-2021) was the first “double decker” with two passenger decks extending the full length of the fuselage (with cargo & baggage) carried in the space beneath hence the frequent description of the thing as a “triple decker”.

Lindsay Lohan contemplating three decker sandwich, now usually called a “club sandwich”.  Many menus do specify the number of decks in the clubs.

Deck widely was used of many raised flat surface which people could walk or stand upon (balcony, porch, patio, flat rooftop etc) and came to be used of the floor-like covering of the horizontal sections or compartments, of a ship, a use later extended to land transport (trains, busses etc) and in the twentieth century, to aircraft.  A pack or set of playing cards can be called a deck as (less commonly), can the dealt cards which constitute the “hand” of each player and the notion was extended to sets of just about anything vaguely similar (such as a collection of photographic slides). , Because slides tended to be called a “deck” only when in their magazine, this influenced the later use in IT when certain objects digitally were assemble for storage or use and in audio and video use when cartridges or cassettes were loaded into “tape decks”.  In print journalism, a deck is a headline consisting of one or more full lines of text (applied especially to a sub-headline).  The slang use in the trade of illicit narcotics to describe the folded paper used for distributing drugs was a US regionalism.  There are dozens of idiomatic and other uses of deck, the best known including “all hands on deck”, “swab the decks”, “hit the deck” “clear the decks”, “deck-chair”, “deckhand”, “deck shoes”, “flight deck”, “gun deck”, “observation deck”, “play with a full deck”, “promenade deck”, “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”, “decked out”, “stack the deck”, “sun deck”, “top deck” & “to deck someone”.

Schematic of the Royal Navy’s HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765, most famous as the flagship of Admiral Lord Nelson’s (1758-1805) flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805; it was on her Nelson was killed in battle.  Uniquely, after 246 years on the active list, she is the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission.  Although the term wasn’t in use until the 1830s, Victory was a “five decker” configured thus:

Orlop Deck: The lowest deck, mainly used for storage and ship's equipment.
Lower Gun Deck: The deck housing the heaviest cannons.
Middle Gun Deck: This deck contained another set of guns, slightly lighter than those on the lower gun deck.
Upper Gun Deck: The third level of guns, with even lighter cannons.
Quarterdeck and Forecastle: The uppermost decks, where the captain and officers usually directed the ship during battle.

The early meanings in English evolved from “covering” to “platform of a ship” because of the visual similarity and it’s thought the idea of a deck being a “pack of cards” (noted in the 1590s) was based on them being stacked like the decks of a multi-deck man-of-war (warship).  The tape-deck was first so described in 1949 an was a reference to the flat surface of the old reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The first deck chairs were advertised in 1844, an allusion to the use of such thing on the decks of passenger ocean liners and deck shoes were those with sturdy rubber soles suitable for use on slippery surfaces; the modern “boat shoes” are a descendent.  The old admiralty phrase “clear the decks” dated from the days of the tall-masted warships (the best known of which was the big “ship-of-the-line”) and was a reference to the need to remove from the main deck the wreckage resulting from an attack (dislodged masts, sails, spas etc) to enable the battle to be rejoined without the obstructions.  Being made of wood, the ships were hard to sink but highly susceptible to damage, especially to the rigging which, upon fragmentation, tended to fall to the deck.  It may have been a adaptation of the French army slang débarasser le pont (clear the bridge).

Ford 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) Windsor V8 with the standard deck (left) and the raised deck 351 (5.8) (right).  In production in various displacements between 1961-2000, the 221 (3.6), 255 (4.2), 260 (4.3), 289 (4.7) & 302 (4.9) all used what came retrospectively to be called the “standard deck” while the 351 (5.8) was the sole “raised deck” version.

For decades, it was common for US manufacturers to increase the displacement of their V8 engines but means of creating a “raised deck” version, the process involving raising the height of the engine block's deck surface (the surface where the cylinder heads bolt on).  What this allowed was the use of longer connecting rods while using the original heads and pistons which in combination with a “longer stroke crankshaft” increases the displacement (the aggregate volume of all cylinders).  The industry slang for such things was “decker” and the technique was used with other block configurations but is best known from the use in the 1960s & 1970s for V8s because it’s those which tend to be fetishized.  The path to greater displacement lay either in lengthening the stroke or increasing the bore (or a combination of the two) and while there were general engineering principles (longer stroke=emphasis on more torque at the cost of reducing maximum engine speed and bigger bore=more power and higher engine speeds) but there were limitations in how much a bore could safely be increased including the available metal.  A bigger bore (ie increasing the internal diameter of the cylinder) reduces the thickness of the cylinder walls and if they become too thing, there can be problems with cooling, durability or even the structural integrity of the block.  The piston size also increases which means the weight increases and thus so too does the reciprocating mass, increasing friction, wear and has the potential to compromise reliability, especially at high engine speeds.

Increasing the stroke will usually enhance the torque output, something of greater benefit to most drivers, most of the time than the “top end power” most characteristic of the “big bore” approach.  In street use, most engines spend most time at low or mid-range speed and it’s here a longer stroke tends to produce more torque so it has been a popular approach and the advantage for manufacturers is that creating a “decker” almost always is easier, faster and cheaper than arranging one which will tolerate a bigger bore, something which can demand a new block casting and sometimes changes to the physical assembly line.  With a raised deck, there can be the need to use different intake and exhaust manifolds and some other peripheral components but it’s still usually a cheaper solution than a new block casting.  Ford’s “thinwall” Windsor V8 was one of the longest-serving deckers (although the raised-deck version didn’t see out the platform’s life, the 351 (introduced in 1969) retired in 1997).  Confusingly, during the Windsor era, Ford also produced other 351s which belonged to a different engine family.  Ford didn’t acknowledge the biggest Windsor's raised deck in its designation but when Chrysler released a decker version of the “B Series” big-block V8 (1958-1978), it was designated “RB” (Raised B) and produced between 1959-1979.

1964 AEC Routemaster double decker Bus RM1941 (ALD941B) (left), two sightseeing AEC Routemasters in Christchurch, New Zealand (centre) and one of the "new" Routemasters, London 2023 (right).

London’s red, double-decker busses are one of the symbols most associated with the city and a fixture in literature, art and films needing something with which to capture the verisimilitude.  The classic example of the breed was the long-running AEC Routemaster, designed by the London Transport Board and built by the Associated Equipment Company (AEC) and Park Royal Vehicles.  The Routemaster entered service in 1956 and remained in production until 1968, changed over those years in many details but visually there was such continuity that it takes an expert (and buses are a thing so experts there are) to pick the model year.  They entered service in 1956 and remained in regular service until 2005 although some were retained as “nostalgia pieces” on designated “tourist” routes until COVID-19 finally saw their retirement; since then, many have been repurposed for service around the world on sightseeing duties and other tourist projects.

Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) will leave an extraordinary political legacy which in time may came to be remembered more fondly than it now may appear but one of his most enduring achievements is likely to be the “New Routemaster” which had the typically bureaucratic project name “New Bus for London” but came to be known generally as the “Boris Bus”, the honor accorded by virtue of him championing the idea while serving as Lord Mayor of London (2008-2016).  In truth, the original Routemaster, whatever its period charm, was antiquated years before it was withdrawn from service and although the doorless design made ingress and egress convenient, it was also dangerous and apparently a dozen passenger fatalities annually was not uncommon.  The Borisbus entered service in 2012 and by 2024 almost 1200 were in service.

1930 Lancia Omicron with 2½ deck coachwork and a clerestoried upper windscreen (left) and a “three decker” bus in Pakistan (right).

The Lancia Omicron was a bus chassis produced between 1927-1936; over 600 were built in different wheelbase lengths with both two and three-axle configurations.  Most used Lancia's long-serving, six-cylinder commercial engine but, as early as 1933, some had been equipped with diesel engines which were tested in North Africa where they proved durable and, in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Algeria, once petrol powered Omicron chassis were being re-powered with diesel power-plants from a variety of manufacturers as late as the 1960s.  Typically of bus use, coachbuilders fabricated many different styles of body but, in addition to the usual single and double deck arrangements, the Omicron is noted for a number of two and a half deck models, the third deck configured usually as a first-class compartment but in at least three which operated in Italy, they were advertised as “smoking rooms”, the implication presumably that the rest of the passenger compartment was smoke-free.  History doesn't record if the bus operators were any more enthusiastic about or successful in enforcing smoking bans than the usual Italian experience.  For a variety of reasons, busses with more than 2.something decks were rare and the Lancias and Alfa Romeos which first emerged in the 1920s were unusual.  However, the famously imaginative and inventive world of Pakistani commerce has produced a genuine “three decker” bus, marketed as the “limousine bus”.  What the designer did was take a long-distance, double decker coach and use the space allocated usually as a luggage compartment to configure as the interior of a long wheelbase (LWB) limousine, thereby creating a “first class” section, the four rows of seating accessible via six car-like (ie limousine) doors.

Clerestory

Clerestory (pronounced kleer-stawr-ee or kleer-stohr-ee)

(1) In architecture, a portion of an interior rising above adjacent rooftops, fitted with windows admitting daylight.

(2) In church architecture, a row of windows in the upper part of the wall, dividing the nave from the aisle and set above the aisle roof (associated particularly with the nave, transept and choir of a church or cathedral.

(3) In transportation vehicles (usually busses, railroad cars and occasionally cars & vans), a raised construction, typically appended to the roof structure and fitted with (1) windows to admit light or enhance vision or (2) slits for ventilation (or a combination of the two).

1375–1425: From the late Middle English, the construct being clere (clear (in the sense of “light” or “lighted”)) + story (from storey (a level of a building).  The word is obviously analyzed as “a story (upper level) with light from windows”.  Storey was from Middle English stori & storie, from the Anglo-Latin historia (picture), from the Latin, from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία (historía) (learning through research, narration of what is learned), from ἱστορέω (historéō) (to learn through research, to inquire), from ἵστωρ (hístōr) (the one who knows, the expert, the judge).  In the Anglo-Latin, historia was a term from architecture (in this case “interior decorating” in the modern sense) describing a picture decorating a building or that part of a building so decorated.  The less common alternative spellings are clearstory & clerstory.  Clerestory is a noun and clerestoried is an adjective; the noun plural is clerestories.

From here was picked up the transferred sense of “floor; level”.  The later use in church architecture of “an upper story of a church, perforated by windows” is thought simply to be a reference to the light coming through the windows and there is nothing to support the speculation the origin was related to a narrative (story) told by a series of stained glass windows, illuminated by sunlight.  Historians have concluded the purpose of the design was entirely functional; a way of maximizing the light in the interior space.  The related architectural design is the triforium.  The noun triforium (triforia or triforiums in the plural) (from the Medieval Latin triforium, the construct being tria (three) + for (opening) + -ium) describes the gallery of arches above the side-aisle vaulting in a church’s nave.  The –ium suffix (used most often to form adjectives) was applied as (1) a nominal suffix (2) a substantivisation of its neuter forms and (3) as an adjectival suffix.  It was associated with the formation of abstract nouns, sometimes denoting offices and groups, a linguistic practice which has long fallen from fashion.  In the New Latin, it was the standard suffix appended when forming names for chemical elements.

Clerestories which once shone: Grand Central Terminal (the official abbreviation is GCT although the popular form is "Grand Central Station" (often clipped to "Grand Central")), Midtown Manhattan, New York City, 1929 (left) and the same (now dimmed) location in a scene from the Lindsay Lohan film Just my Luck (2006) (right).  Because of more recent development in the surrounding space, the sunlight no longer enters the void through the clerestoried windows is such an eye-catching way.  In modern skyscrapers, light-shafts or atriums can extend hundreds of feet.

Tourist boat on a canal cruise, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Boats with clerestory windows are commonly seen on waterways like the canals of Amsterdam and are valued by tour-guides because they make excursions possible in (almost) all-weathers.  Those designing passenger busses and train carriages were also early adopters of clerestory windows, initially because they were a source of “free” light but as packaged tourism developed into “sightseeing”, tour operators recognized the potential and commissioned versions optimized for outward visibility, essentially a form of “value-adding” which made even the dreary business of bus travel from one place to the next more of a “sightseeing” experience, something probably most valued by those afforded a greater vista to observe in mountainous regions.

Greyhound Scenicruiser in original livery.

A variation of the idea was used for long-distance busses in North America, the best known of which remains the Greyhound Scenicruiser (PD-4501), featuring a raised upper deck with a clerestory windscreen.  Although the view through that was enjoyed by many passengers, the design was less about giving folk a view and more a way to maximize revenue within the length restrictions imposed by many US states.  What the upper deck did was allow a increase in passenger numbers because the space their luggage would absorb in a conventional (single layer) design could be re-allocated to people, their suitcases (and in some cases also freight, another revenue stream) relegated to the chassis level which also improved weight distribution and thus stability.

A predecessor: 1930 Lancia Omicron.

Famous as it became, the Scenicruiser, 1001 of which were built by General Motors (GM) between 1954-1956, was to cause many problems for both manufacturer and operator, the first of which caused by the decision to use twin-diesel engines to provide the necessary power for the new, heavy platform.  The big gas (petrol) units available certainly would have provided that but their fuel consumption would not only have made their operation ruinously expensive (both the fuel burn and the time lost by needing frequently to re-fill) and the volume of gas which would have to be carried would have both added to weight and reduced freight capacity.  Bigger GM diesel units weren’t produced in the early 1950s so the twin engines were a rational choice and the advantages were real, tests confirming that even when fully loaded, the coupled power-train would be sufficient for hill climbing while on the plains, the Scenicruiser happily would cruise using just a single engine.  However, as many discovered (on land, sea and in the air), running two engines coupled together is fraught with difficulties and these never went away, the busses eventually adopting one of GM’s new generation of big-displacement diesels as part of the major re-building of the fleet in 1961, a programme which also (mostly) rectified some structural issues which had been recognized.  Despite all that, by 1975 when Greyhound retired the model, the company still had hundreds in daily service and many of those auctioned off were subsequently used by other operators and in private hands, some are still running, often as motor homes or (mostly) static commercial displays or museum exhibits.

1951 Pegaso Z-403 (left) and 1949 Brill Continental (right).

GM’s Scenicruiser was influential and clerestory windscreens soon proliferated on North American roads although the idea wasn’t new.  The Spanish manufacturer Pegaso (a creation of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s (1892-1975; Caudillo of Spain 1939-1975) industrial policy) between 1951-1957 produced the Z-403 (1951-1957) which used the same design and before even that a bus with an almost identical profile had been sold in the US by the JG Brill Company, albeit with a conspicuous lack of success.  As early as 1930 the Italian concern Lancia offered the Omicron bus with a 2½ half deck arrangement with a clerestoried upper windscreen.  The Omicron’s third deck was configured usually as a first-class compartment but at least three which operated in Italy were advertised as “smoking rooms”, the implication presumably that the rest of the passenger compartment was smoke-free.  History doesn't record if the bus operators were any more successful in enforcing smoking bans than the usual Italian experience.

1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.

One quirky offering which picked up the Scenicruiser’s clerestoried windscreen was the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser (1964-1977), a station wagon which, until the release of the third series in 1973 featured one at the leading edge of a raised roof section, the glass ending midway over the backseat, the shape meaning it functioned also as a “skylight”.  Above the rear side windows were matching clerestories which might sound a strange thing to add above a luggage compartment but during those years, a “third seat” was a popular option to install in the space, transforming the things into eight or nine seat vehicles; families were bigger then.  The Vista Cruiser sold well and Buick later adopted the idea for some of its range until the concept was abandoned in 1972 because of concerns about upcoming safety regulations.  Such rules were however never imposed and both manufacturers revived the idea in the 1990s for their (frankly ugly) station wagons and when the Buick was discontinued in 1996, it was the last full-sized station wagon to be made in the US, the once popular market segment cannibalized to the point of un-viability by the mini-van (people-mover) and the sports utility vehicle (SUV).

The arrangement of a series of windows in a high-mounted row, borrowed from architecture, became familiar on train carriages and buses, especially those which plied scenic routes.  Usually these were added to the coachwork of buses built on existing full-sized commercial chassis which could seat 40-60 passengers but in the 1950s, there emerged the niche of the smaller group tour, either curated to suit a narrower market or created ad-hoc by hotels or operators; smaller vehicles were required and these offered the additional advantage of being able sometimes to go where big buses could not.  In places like the Alps, where those on the trip liked to look up as well as out, rows of clerestoried windows were desirable.

1959 Volkswagen Microbus Deluxe (23 Window Samba). 

The best known of these vehicles was the Volkswagen “Samba”, a variation of the Microbus, one of the range of more than a dozen a models built on the platform of the Type 2, introduced in 1950 after a chance sighting by a European distributer of a VW Beetle (Type 1) chassis which had been converted by the factory into a general-purpose utility vehicle.  The company accepted the suggestion a market for such a thing existed and in its original, air-cooled, rear-engined configuration, it remained in production well into the twenty-first century.  Between 1951-1966, the Microbus was available in a “Deluxe” version which featured both a folding fabric sunroof and rows of rows of clerestoried windows which followed the curve of the sides of the roof.  Available in 21 & 23 window versions, these are now highly collectable and such is the attraction there’s something of a cottage industry in converting Microbuses to the clerestoried specification but it’s difficult exactly to emulate the originals, the best of which can command several times the price of a fake (a perfectly restored genuine Samba in 2017 selling at auction in the US for US$302,000).  Such was the susceptibility to rust, the survival rate wasn’t high and many led a hard life when new, popular with the tour guides who would conduct bus-loads of visitors on (slow) tours of the Alps, the sunroof & clerestory windows ideal for gazing at the peaks.  To add to the mood, a dashboard-mounted valve radio was available as an option, something still for many a novelty in the early 1950s.  The Microbus Deluxe is rarely referred to as such, being almost universally called the “Samba” and the origin of that in uncertain.  One theory is it’s a borrowing from the Brazilian dance and musical genre that is associated with things lively, colorful, and celebratory, the link being that as well as the sunroof and windows, the Deluxe had more luxurious interior appointments, came usually in bright two-tone paint (other Type 2s were usually more drably finished) and featured lashings of external chrome.  It’s an attractive story but some prefer something more Germanic: Samba as the acronym for the business-like phrase Sonnendach-Ausführung mit besonderem Armaturenbrett (sunroof version with special dashboard).  However it happened, Samba was in colloquial use by at least 1952 and became semi official in 1954 when the distributers in the Netherlands added the word to their brochures.  Production ended in July 1967 after almost 100,000 had been built.

1966 Volkswagen Samba (21 Window, Left) and 1962 Volkswagen Samba (23 Window, Right).  The 23 Window van is a conversion of a Microbus and experts (of which there seem to be many, such is the following these things have gained) say it's close to impossible exactly to replicate a factory original.  In theory, the approach would be to take the parts with serial numbers (tags, engine, gearbox etc) from a real Samba which has rusted into oblivion (something not uncommon) and interpolate these into the sound body of a Microbus with as close a build date as possible.  Even then, such are the detail differences that an exact replication would be a challenge.  Because the Sambas received the same running changes and updates as the rest of the Microbus range, there was much variation in the details of the specification over the years but the primary distinction is between the “21” & “23” window vans, the difference accounted for by the latter’s pair of side-corner windows to the left & right of the rear top gate opening.  In 1964, when the rear doors were widened, the curved windows in the roof were eliminated because there would no longer be sufficient metal in the coachwork to guarantee structural integrity.