There’s a lot of talk about “dashboards” in the business world today. Everybody wants a “dashboard” presenting a summary of relevant information. Some software products are, to users, dashboards. The ready analogy, of course, is to the dashboard in an automobile, although it should also be noted that as manufacturers switched from analog gauges to electrical indicators starting around the 1960s, the term “idiot lights” also arose, at least in the US.
But “dashboard” predates the automobile. There haven’t been any kind of “boards” used in cars for many decades, and what the word “dash” is doing there doesn’t relate to anything in a car. Really the word “dashboard” is from about the 1840s, and was at first a real board. It was the piece of wood attached to your wagon or carriage just in front of your feet to block the dirt and mud from the hooves of your horses and keep your trousers clean. “Dash” here refers to spattering, as in “they dashed water in his face to bring him around after the knockout punch.”
The earliest automobiles were simply copies of horse-drawn carriages with an engine instead of a horse, and so the “dashboard” (the real one) was still there. It became increasingly vestigial as designs evolved, but the term stuck anyway. It took a while for any sort of instrumentation to be attached to cars, and many decades for all the instruments to migrate to the panel in front of the driver — even into the 1930s some cars displayed engine temperature in a “motometer,” which was simply a thermometer built into the radiator cap at the front of the car. As late as the 1970s some American “muscle cars” had tachometers mounted outside the passenger compartment. That hood-mounted tach was just a styling gimmick; it was supposed to copy drag racing cars and, I suppose, make you think your car was really fast. Or at least really loud, which in come circles is even better.
“Dash” itself, by the way, may have originated in Old Norse; there is still a similar word in some Scandinavian languages (“daske” in Danish, “daska” in Swedish) meaning flap or slap. We’re definitely stuck with the term “dashboard” by now, but when you see marketing copy touting “a single pane of glass dashboard,” just remember: the original purpose was to keep the mud and manure out of your face.
