The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

C.F. CARTER

When the marine architects and engineers catch up with the automobile makers they can build a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic in twenty-three hours; or, if we forget to make allowance for the difference in longitude, capable of making the run from Liverpool to New York in the same apparent time in which the Twentieth Century Limited makes the run from New York to Chicago. That is, the vessel leaving Liverpool at three o'clock in the afternoon would arrive at New York at nine o'clock the following morning, which, allowing for the five hours' difference in time, would make twenty-three hours.

When the railroad engineers provide improved tracks and motive power that will enable them to parallel the feats of the automobile men, if they ever do, the running time for the fastest trains between New York and Chicago will be reduced to seven hours, while San Francisco will be but a day's run from the metropolis.

And when the airship enthusiasts are able to dart through the air at the speed attained by the automobile, it will be time enough to think of taking seriously the extravagant claims made in behalf of aviation.

For the automobile is the swiftest machine ever built by human hands. It is so much swifter than its nearest competitor that those who read these lines to-day are likely to be some years older before its speed is even equaled, to say nothing of being surpassed, by any other kind of vehicle.

So far as is known, but one human being ever traveled faster than Robert Burman did in his racing auto on the beach at Daytona, Florida, on April 23, 1911. This solitary exception was a Hindu carrier who chanced to tumble off the brink of a chasm in the Himalayas. His name has not been preserved, he never made any claim to the record, he was not officially timed, and altogether the event has no official standing. Still, as he is the only man who is ever alleged to have covered so great a distance as six thousand feet in an obstructed fall, the matter is not without interest; for, according to the accepted rule for finding the velocity of a body falling freely from rest, he must have been going at the rate of seven miles a second when he reached the bottom.

About Burman's record there can be no doubt, for it was made in the presence of many witnesses, and it was duly timed with stop-watches by men skilled in the art. The straightaway mile over the smooth, hard beach was covered from a running start in the almost incredibly short time of 25.40 seconds.

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.