The Great Events by Famous Historians

The next fastest mile ever traveled by human beings who lived to tell about it was made in an electric-car on the experimental track between Berlin and Zossen, in 1902. As the engineers who achieved this record for the advancement of scientific knowledge of the railroad considered such speed dangerous, it is not at all likely to become standard practise. The fastest time ever made by a steam locomotive of which there is any record, was the run of five miles from Fleming to Jacksonville, Florida, in two and a half minutes by a Plant system locomotive in March, 1901. This was at the rate of 120 miles an hour. As for steamships, the record of 30.53 miles per hour is held by the

Mauretania

.

These things, if borne in mind, will serve to throw into stronger relief the things that an automobile can do, and to supply a substantial basis for the premise that, at least in some respects, the automobile is the most marvelous machine the world has yet seen. It can go anywhere at any time, floundering through two feet of snow, ford any stream that isn't deep enough to drown out the magneto, triumph over mud axle deep, jump fences, and cavort over plowed ground at fifteen miles an hour. It has been used with brilliant success in various kinds of hunting, including coyote coursing on the prairies of Colorado, where it can run all around the bronco, formerly in favor, since it never runs any risk of breaking a leg in a prairie-dog hole. Educated automobiles have been trained to shell corn, saw wood, pump water, churn, plow, and, in short, do anything required of them except figure out where the consumer gets off under the new tariff law.

But to get back to the subject of speed, as automobile talk always does, the supremacy of the motor-car has been established by so many official records that any attempt to select the most striking only results in bewilderment. The best that can be done is to recite a few representative ones.

That was a most interesting illustration, for instance, of the capacity for sustained high speed made by a Stearns car on the mile track at Brighton Beach in 1910. In twenty-four hours the car covered the amazing distance of 1,253 miles, which was at the average speed of 52-1/5 miles per hour. This record is all the more remarkable from the fact the car was not a racer, but a stock car which had been driven for some months by its owner before it was borrowed for the race, and did not have any special preparation. The men who drove it were not notified that their services were wanted until the morning of the race.

While this is about the average rate per hour of the fastest train between New York and Chicago, it should be remembered that the trains run on steel rails, that curves are comparatively few, and they are not sharp, while the automobile was spinning around a mile track made of plain dirt, and was obliged to negotiate 2,506 sharp curves. Besides, the locomotives on the fast trains are changed every 120 to 150 miles, while the entire run of 1,253 miles was made by one auto which had already run 7,500 miles in ordinary service before it was entered in the race.

Unfortunately for the automobile, it has achieved so many remarkable speed records that its name is suggestive of swiftness. If the English language were not the stereotyped, inelastic vehicle for the communication of thought that it is we should now be speaking of "automobiling" a shady bill through the city council instead of "railroading" it. There are few places where it is permissible to attain record speed, and fewer men who, with safety to others, may be entrusted with the attempt. The true value of the automobile to the average man lies in its ability to keep right on going indefinitely at moderate speed under any and all conditions.

One of the innumerable tests in which the staying qualities of the automobile were brought out was the trip from Pittsburg to Philadelphia by way of Gettysburg by S.D. Waldon and four passengers in a Packard car, September 20, 1910. This run of 303 miles over three mountain ranges, with the usual accompaniments of steep grades, rocks, ruts, and thank-you-ma'ms to rack the machinery and bruise the feelings of the riders, was made in 12 hours and 51 minutes.