CHAPTER 21
The increase in auto sales after the Panic of 1907, when just about every other consumer item was losing ground, occurred in good part due to a constant stream of news spotlighting the glamour and desirability of an exotic technical marvel that, thanks to Henry Ford and friends, had become possible for many average people to own. Much of that news was generated within the nation’s borders, where racers such as Barney Oldfield had become idols. But the most arresting and compelling headlines were generated from the other side of the globe, where an American driver in an American automobile seemed poised to perform a feat that many had considered impossible.
In the spring of 1907, when George Selden was preparing at last to demonstrate the automobile he claimed to be the first of its kind, the French newspaper Le Matin announced sponsorship of a race to Paris from Peking, China, a distance of more than 6,000 miles. The course would take the participants through territory that was as exotic to Westerners as the surface of the moon: through the Gobi Desert; around Lake Baikal (so deep that no one had ever reached the bottom); through Kansk, Omsk, and Tomsk; to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin; and finally, down the Champs-Élysées. The course was so alien that estimates of the race’s duration varied by months. One of the entrants, Prince Scipio Borghese, journeyed to China in advance of the event and walked with a pole the precise width of his automobile, a 40-horsepower Itala, to ensure that it would fit through a series of narrow rocky passes.
Le Matin received inquiries from forty potential competitors, but that number was winnowed to a mere five when the race began on June 10. The spirit of pioneering adventure was established almost immediately. On the third day, Prince Borghese’s car
was buried over the axles in a morass, and held up by immense roots of trees, which had to be cut away with axes, whilst two days after, it had to be drawn through about 18 miles of deep sand by coolies and mules. Near Urga the car stuck in a morass and fell on to its side. With the aid of Mongolians using beams as levers, and oxen, the car was pulled backwards out of the swamp. On the next day the vehicle again sank in thick mud to the axles, and gradually sank lower until rescued by Mongolian shepherds.1
Another of the competitors, a swashbuckling Frenchman named Charles Godard, driving a 15-horsepower Dutch Spyker, “drove through the Gobi Desert without a sufficient supply of gasoline. For two days he had to lie beneath his car while the sun was burning fiercely.” Finally, “camel riders brought him the gasoline.” Godard, who was riding with a Le Matin correspondent, sold all his spare parts for cash to finance the journey, then, when that ran out, borrowed money from virtually everyone he encountered, assuring them that the newspaper had agreed to pay all his expenses. Unfortunately for the luckless Godard, that turned out not to be the case, and he was eventually sentenced to eighteen months in prison for swindling the Dutch consulate in Peking. (The charges were later dropped.)2
Progress of the race was front-page news in Europe and was regularly featured in trade magazines. Even though there was no American presence in the race, neither car nor driver, it also turned out to be extremely popular in American newspapers. In an article titled “Daredevil Motorists Defy Death in Mad Dash from Peking to Paris,” syndicated across the United States, a “special correspondent” reported, “Grave dangers confront the intrepid motorists, who are wildly speeding from Peking to Paris in the most notable automobile race ever undertaken. The course covers 6,200 miles and traverses the pathless wastes of northern Asia.”3
The article was a mixture of high adventure and exotic travelogue.
Of the five entries who left Peking, only one has dropped out, [Auguste] Pons, who became lost in the Gobi desert and had to hire camels to get his car back to Nankin, himself almost dead with fatigue. In the Gobi desert the Italian car’s petrol tank began to leak and by the time the fault was discovered, the motorists found themselves stranded, with no motive power left. They were not provisioned for a long isolated stay, and they could not get forward. The sun beat on them throughout a long day. Their water gave out. A caravan of camels suddenly made its appearance. The automobilists tried to secure relief from the nomads, but the latter refused to halt and callously passed by.
The party searched for four hours before stumbling on a Mongol village where aid was given.
Everywhere they went the motorists had to overcome fear on the part of the natives before they could be induced to render any help. In the woods near Krasnolarak, a company of bandits, heavily armed, appeared, and the tourists began feeling for their guns, expecting a fight, but needlessly. The bandits caught one good look at the vehicle, moving by itself, and became panic stricken. They hurled themselves into the shrub, threw down their arms, and made signs that they surrendered to the mysterious spirit that propelled the horseless cart.
Tales of colorful foreign dignitaries were popular as well.
At Urga, the Chinese governor asked permission to ride in the automobile. Dressed in the greatest pomp, the celestial got into the car, somewhat nervously, but, gaining courage, he asked that the car be speeded up. The chauffeur moved the levers to five miles an hour, and the party flew along, leaving far in the rear, in wild disorder, a great cavalcade that had hoped to keep up with the pace of the automobile. The governor returned to his palace shaken and pale, but conscious that he had enormously increased his importance in the eyes of his subordinates.
Daredevil motorists meet the living God
The adventure continued for weeks until the race ended on August 10, two months to the day from when it began, when Prince Borghese drove into Paris, “escorted by a squadron of cavalry, and followed by hundreds of automobiles,” and cheered by hundreds of thousands from every economic and social stratum.4 He had completed the journey in one day less than Horatio Jackson’s trip across the United States only four years earlier. The prince was given a celebratory banquet attended by thirty thousand guests. It was ten days before the next finisher, a De Dion–Bouton, appeared in Paris.
At the victory banquet in Paris, Prince Borghese expressed the desire to motor across America, a sentiment that was duly reported in the press. The editors at The New York Times decided to take the prince up on his idea. In late November 1907, they announced sponsorship, with Le Matin, of a race from New York to Paris—going west. The plan was to make almost the entire course land-bound. The cars would be shipped from Seattle to Valdez, Alaska, would traverse the (hopefully) frozen Bering Strait, and would then head across Siberia to Moscow. (Boats would, of course, be available if ice on the Bering Strait was not.) And, the Times was pleased to note, interest was “immeasurably increased when it became known that an American car had entered the race.”5 The Times also observed that “a year or two ago [this undertaking] would have been termed the wildest dream of the automobile imagination.”
The course was a daunting 20,000 miles, which, in addition to long stretches in the desert, would require the entrants to climb mountains, several over 10,000 feet, and “drop down the sides of mountain ranges on passes and roads that are well-nigh impassable. The drivers will have to go through rivers which in many cases will completely cover the wheels and the flooring of the car, and the motor will have to do its work at a temperature of 100 degrees as well as 50 below zero.”6
The New York Times was the most widely read newspaper in the United States, and it threw its full editorial might into publicizing the event. Just four days after the article announcing the race, the newspaper ran a full-page feature filled with harrowing tales of automobilists who had braved just some of the terrain the race would cover. European newspapers, fresh off the Peking-Paris bonanza, needed little incentive to hail this new test of human and mechanical endurance.
At 11:00 A.M. on February 12, 1908, Mayor George Brinton McClellan Jr. fired a gun, and six automobiles departed Times Square, heading north on Broadway for Albany. Three of the cars had been shipped from France: a De Dion–Bouton; a Sizaire-Naudin, one of whose drivers was Auguste Pons, who had almost died in the Gobi Desert; and a Motobloc, whose team included the intrepid Charles Godard. A German Protos and an Italian Züst were also entered, although Prince Borghese had decided against participating. Representing the United States was an automobile built by the E. R. Thomas Motor Company, an ALAM member. The car, a standard 1907 model that had already proved itself in endurance contests, was known as the Flyer.
For the journey, the Thomas machine, more than 4,000 pounds of it, had mounted “skid planks” atop its mud guards—boards 20 feet long that ran the full length of the car. A winch had been installed at the front. Supplies included two shovels, two picks, two axes, two lanterns, three searchlights, two extra gas tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons, a 10-gallon reservoir of oil, extra springs, and myriad other spare parts. The Flyer was also equipped “with a top similar to those used on the old prairie schooner,” complete with ribs over the chassis, so that the automobile could double as a tent at night. “As an extra precaution” the drivers carried 500 feet of rope, a rifle, and revolvers.7 Lacking in this array were a windshield and a heater. The other automobiles were of similar size and similarly equipped, although the proportions varied depending on whether the drivers thought the desert, the Arctic, or the American West would present the greatest challenge. The Protos, for example, custom-made by a team of six hundred workers on the direct orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was made extra wide to allow the driver—a military officer—to sleep bundled up on the floor.
Each car had a crew of two or three, one or two drivers and a mechanician. The Flyer carried one driver, the dashing Montagu Roberts, and George Schuster, a mechanic at the Thomas factory in Buffalo who had been summoned only three days before to, he thought, perform a final tune-up. He brought only a few changes of clothing since he believed he would be returning to Buffalo in a day or two.
With Mayor McClellan’s starting gun, bands played, the flags of the four entering nations flew, and fifty thousand cheering people crowded into the square to see the racers off. The racers would pass a quarter million spectators lined up for miles as they left the city.
The feeling of the endurance test to come was captured on that very first day. The New York Times had assigned a young reporter, T. Walter Williams, to ride along with the Flyer, and his page-one lead on February 13 was “Autos Fight Snow Drifts.” North of the city, it seemed, much of the snow that had descended on the East Coast from a series of blizzards in the previous weeks had yet to be cleared from the roads, and the shovels that the participants carried had to be put to good use. In addition, many of the local children decided to amuse themselves by pelting the shovelers with snowballs. By day’s end, only three, the Flyer, the Züst, and the De Dion, escorted by a man holding a lantern, had reached Hudson, New York, 116 miles north, and the other three had made substantially less progress. Two days later, one of the drivers of the German vehicle declared on finally reaching Albany, “Siberia will be a picnic after this.” He would find that he had underestimated Siberia.
The Times ran page-one updates nearly every day, but it would be another forty days before the newspaper could announce that the Thomas Flyer, still in the lead, had reached San Francisco. By then, only four cars remained, as the Sizaire-Naudin and the luckless Auguste Pons were forced to drop out only nine days after the start, still short of Albany, when a broken casting was found to be unrepairable without a part shipped from France. By that time the Flyer, still in the lead, had already passed Buffalo. At Omaha two weeks later, the Motobloc was also forced to give up the chase due to numerous breakdowns, although Godard did escape in this instance without any criminal charges lodged against him. The Times had a casualty as well. At Chicago, Walter Williams had debarked and refused to continue even if it cost him his job. “Insanity” was the term he used to describe the proceedings.
For a good part of the journey, especially in the West, there were still no roads on which an automobile could travel. Like Jackson in 1903, the automobiles bumped along railroad tracks, sometimes for hundreds of miles. Even then, not all the contestants ran under equal conditions. The Thomas was sometimes granted right-of-way on a stretch of track while the foreign contestants were denied the same privilege. In Indiana, large volunteer crews showed up to help dig the Flyer out of deeper snowdrifts than were encountered in New York, while the foreign crews were forced to get by with limited hospitality from the locals. On still another occasion, the Flyer was allowed to use a tunnel cut through a mountain, while the Italians were required to navigate a much longer route around.8
For each of the four survivors, the trip across the United States, the first ever in winter, was dismal. Cars broke down regularly or were disabled in unforgiving terrain. Drivers were frequently injured in crashes or making repairs. The entire trip in the West was a series of ruts, chuckholes, knee-deep mud, and shoulder-high snow. In Wyoming, temperatures rarely rose above zero. More than once, drivers discovered that thieves had relieved them of personal possessions or spare parts. Even celebrations were not always to be savored, such as when arriving automobiles were pelted with oranges in Los Angeles. And except for the final jaunt across Europe, the United States leg was considered the least challenging on the course.
That became clear as the Alaska run commenced. On March 28, the Flyer left by steamer for Seattle, where another vessel would transport the car to Valdez, a deepwater port on the southern coast, for what George MacAdam, the reporter that the Times had sent to replace Williams, termed “the most hazardous part of the whole 20,000 mile journey.” Insanity or no, MacAdam would ride in the Thomas for the remainder of the race. And MacAdam was not the only replacement on the Flyer. Roberts quit in frigid Wyoming, and neither of the two replacement drivers E. R. Thomas engaged would go farther than San Francisco. So George Schuster doubled up, becoming both driver and mechanic for what promised to be the most grueling automobile ride ever attempted. Eventually he would be joined by another mechanic, George Miller, so that the Flyer would cross Asia with a crew of three Georges.
Tens of thousands of cheering San Franciscans had lined the streets when the American automobile arrived and tens of thousands saluted them as they left. But Alaska was an unexplored wasteland. The attempt to cross the vast expanse “is regarded as foredoomed to failure, but Schuster said the same predictions were made…after Indiana blizzards, Iowa mud, and trackless Wyoming, so he was not prepared to accept what anyone said of an automobile’s possibilities until he had tested them himself.”9 So remote was much of the route mapped out by the organizers that sending dispatches by telegraph would be impossible and the only means of communication would be by carrier pigeon.
On April 6, Schuster, MacAdam, and the Flyer arrived in Valdez. They had traveled 4,836 miles, less than one-quarter of the planned total, in fifty-four days. The Züst had arrived in San Francisco, traveling 4,090 miles, but was forced to wait for a vessel to carry it north. The De Dion had just entered southern California, 3,586 miles, where it stopped for repairs. The Protos, also stopped for repairs, had not made it across Utah, a mere 2,616 miles from the start.
The Flyer’s lead over the Züst might have been only 800 miles, but because of sailing time, that translated into an advantage of almost two weeks, an enormous edge in the Alaskan spring. “If the freezing weather continues on the trail, it might be possible for the Thomas car to go where the others could not follow a fortnight later.” But if the thaw had already set in, “it might necessitate stopping in the interior, out of reach of assistance that could readily reach the other cars coming later.”10
Theories of the relative advantage or disadvantage of the Alaska trails turned out to be moot. Four days later, with the De Dion by then in San Francisco with the Züst, and the Protos still mired in Utah, Schuster concluded an inspection of the first leg of the mail trail to Fairbanks and declared it impassable. Not only was the trail too narrow for an automobile, something no one had thought to measure, but the “unprecedented” early spring thaw meant that the “crust of snow” that was supposed to support two- and three-ton automobiles had melted into a sea of mud.
The Thomas had no choice but to return to Seattle and from there sail to Vladivostok. When the Flyer arrived in Washington State on April 17, Schuster discovered that the De Dion and the Züst had departed three days earlier, not for Alaska but for Yokohama, whence they would motor across Honshu and then sail to Vladivostok for the beginning of the run across Asia and Europe. E. R. Thomas telegraphed to formally ask for a time allowance, since his car, which could not depart until April 21 because of visa complications with Russia, had wasted more than three weeks in a fruitless journey north. The Protos had yet to leave Utah, but the head of the German team decided that his automobile should leave with the Flyer, which meant driving to Idaho and then packing the automobile on a railroad flatbed. As it turned out, the Protos did not depart until the following day, but it procured direct passage to Vladivostok—the Germans were the only crew able to locate the Russian legate before entering their territory—meaning that the car that was last and had driven only 2,966 miles would arrive five days before the lead car, which had driven 6,036 miles.
During the passage across the Pacific, the committee refereeing the contest, made up entirely of Frenchmen, assessed a fifteen-day penalty to the De Dion, the Protos, and the Züst to account for the extra time the Thomas had taken on the detour to Alaska, and the Germans an additional fifteen days for shipping their car by rail from Pocatello, Idaho, to Seattle. They also required the other three entrants to await the Flyer’s arrival, so that they would all leave Vladivostok on the 10,000-mile race to Paris together.
This was too much for the ever-excitable Albert de Dion, who was convinced he had been betrayed by his own countrymen. He promptly withdrew on the grounds that the remainder of the race was so similar to the Peking-Paris run—which he had lost—that it “has no longer any attractions for his firm.” The Züst was also said to be withdrawn at Vladivostok, a rumor that was quickly scotched from Milan by R. M. Vollmoeller, chairman of the Italian firm. What was more, a Züst would be entered in another cross–United States race, this one from New York to San Francisco and back, planned for the following summer. (Such was the passion the New York–to–Paris race had incited that no fewer than twenty automakers from the United States and Europe—though not Ford—immediately announced their intention to enter.)
The racers left Vladivostok on May 24, and it became immediately apparent that whatever hardships had been encountered in the race across America would be dwarfed in Siberia. Spring thaw was in full flower, and only two days out the Times correspondent, traveling in the Thomas, wrote, “We have traversed an endless stretch of mud, save where the pools were so liquid that they no longer may bear the name of mud. The trans-Siberian post road, of which we talked so glibly while on route across the Pacific, has been untouched since the Trans-Siberian Railroad line has been opened, and its condition is simply execrable.” In order to allow horses to pass, “huge boulders and great logs” were thrown in the road and submerged just below the effluent surface. “Each time the wheels strike one of these sunken obstructions, it is hurled in the air, and we have all we can do to prevent ourselves from being thrown into the ditch. The fearful racking the machine gets is worse than anything that America affords by a thousandfold.” Bridges were rotted or washed away and the auto had to ford “stream after stream,” on each occasion requiring the crew to either lead the car across the mud bottom, often over their boot tops, or push from the rear. The crew ate hard-boiled eggs and canned meat for days on end, and the mud was so deep and persistent that for some stretches, progress for a day was measured in feet rather than miles. “We will push on with all dispatch to reach Irkutsk,” the correspondent wrote glumly, “but Irkutsk is still 1,884 miles away. It is more than 5,000 miles to Moscow.”11
Over the next weeks, among other mishaps, the Thomas crew broke through a rotted bridge, stopped inches short of the edge of a 200-foot precipice, encountered wolves and bandits, scaled mountains, pushed the Flyer through mud and water, ate terrible food, baked and froze, and spent day after day being tossed about on bone-jarring stretches of nonexistent road. But every hardship in the automobile made for more compelling headlines at home. Americans awaited news of the Flyer’s progress with the same breathless anticipation devoted to cliffhanger serials.
Finally, on July 29, the Flyer and its crew reached Paris, driving through a series of cheering crowds yelling “Vive la voiture américaine” that began 25 miles outside the city limits. American flags flew in the streets of the French capital, photographs of which would run prominently in American newspapers. The Protos had arrived four days earlier, but every one of the thousands who turned out to greet the Flyer—including the crew of the German machine—knew the Thomas was the winner. The journey had taken 169 days. The Züst would not pull into Paris until the end of September.
Motor Age captured the spirit of the race—and its legacy—in a long article written just as the Flyer was to make its grand entry down the Champs-Élysées:
From the sunlight and gayety [sic] of Times Square, through the arctic wilds of the Empire state, over the rutty roads of Ohio and into the unprecedented blizzard-ridden Indiana, thence on through the mud of Iowa, the alkali of Nebraska and Wyoming, the spring floods in the Wasatch range of the Rockies, the awful silence of the Utah deserts, the parched plateau of the Goldfield district, the menacing grandeur of the treacherous Death Valley and up through the dust of California, through San Luis Obispo and the triumphant entry into San Francisco, the passage to Seattle and the lonely but demonstrative trip of the Thomas car into the snow-bound and rocky trails of Alaska—a futile sticking to the original route that contemplated motoring north of the arctic circle where no wheeled vehicle ever had gone in the memory of white man, Indian or Eskimo—the runaway confederacy of the foreign cars across the Pacific Ocean to the Orient; the pluckiness of the Thomas crew in hastening to Japan, crossing the big island and arriving in Vladivostok in time to make it an even race with the Protos and Züst, and then the most marvelous narrative of motoring the world has ever known—the story of crossing Siberia, the Ural mountains, flying through Russia and the German empire and the grand climax of the run through France and into Paris…the New York-Paris racing machines have created a series of chapters in motoring that not only are novel, new and thrilling, but they have breathing through them all the slogan, “the world needs more good highways.”*1, 12
The New York Times was even more glowing, although, as a sponsor, it could be forgiven a bit of self-congratulatory hyperbole. “As a sporting event,” it declared, “the New York to Paris event takes precedence over any contest ever organized in the world. There is scarcely a part of this entire distance that lacks its dramatic interest, while reviewing the whole journey in its entirety, it seems incredible.”13
The victory was billed as a national triumph, and on their return George Schuster and mechanic George Miller were feted as American heroes, with newspapers across the nation reporting in detail on the incredible odds overcome to complete a journey of more than 15,000 miles in a machine that just a decade earlier could barely complete a run 1 percent of that. E. R. Thomas told reporters that “the victory of the American flag was more important to him than the victory of the Thomas car.”14
Schuster and the Flyer on page one
And the Flyer was certainly as much a celebrity as its drivers, described almost as a hero of battle. When it was unloaded in New York,
as the last cover dropped away and it stood revealed, it told its own story of the hardships it had withstood and overcome. It was battered and worn from front to rear, but its inner mechanism was uninjured, as it soon showed. The skids that it bore on either side when it started out from Times Square on Lincoln’s Birthday had disappeared. The treads of its tires were torn and snagged, and its hood was dented and bent….Parts of the body had been cut away as souvenirs, while the whole surface was covered by a countless number of autographs gathered in every part of the world which it circled. The blue body was so covered with mud that it looked gray from a distance, but the mud and grime exactly fitted it.15
With the victory of the Flyer, the automobile had passed its final test, dispelling any doubts of both its efficacy and its desirability. True, the price for a car such as the Flyer was prohibitive for the majority of Americans. But the automobile was no longer looked on as an affectation of the rich. The automobile was heroic, unconquerable, pioneering—so very American. There were few in the United States in that summer of 1908 who did not feel an urge, despite whatever economic hardships they might be enduring, to own an automobile of their own. For few objects in the history of this nation was there so much pent-up demand.*2
Five weeks later, on September 27, 1908, the first Model T rolled out of the Piquette Avenue factory.