Between 1900 and 1909, nobody agreed on what should power a car. Steamers, electrics and gasoline machines shared rutted roads with horses, while lawmakers made up speed limits and license plates as they went. These stories follow the makes, the inventions, the people and the moments of motoring's brass era, when a drive across the country was an expedition and a speed record was news.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1900s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1A car named for a girl, and a father renamed for her
On the tile: Mercedes1900
Emil Jellinek, who sold Daimler cars from Nice, raced under the pseudonym Monsieur Mercedes, borrowing the first name of his daughter, born in 1889. On December 22, 1900, Daimler delivered him a new 35-horsepower racing car, and her name went on the product. Mercedes cars were nearly unbeatable at Nice Week in March 1901, and the name became a trademark in 1902. In 1903 Jellinek changed his own name to Jellinek-Mercedes, remarking that it was probably the first time a father had borne his daughter's name.
The story goes that when the Olds Motor Works factory burned on March 9, 1901, only one car was saved: the little Curved Dash runabout. Ransom Olds credited that fire with his decision to build it. His biographer doubts the tale, because an advertising blitz had already brought in more than 300 Curved Dash orders before the fire. Legend or not, the $650 runabout was America's best-selling car in 1903 and 1904, and more than 19,000 were built.
In January 1907, Henry Ford ordered a secret experimental room built in a back corner of the third floor of his Piquette Avenue plant. One side was for drafting; the other held a few machine tools, a chalkboard and his mother's old rocking chair. Apart from Ford, who turned 44 that year, the regulars were all in their twenties. The first Model T built for sale was finished on September 27, 1908. Just 11 were built that October; by December, 200 a month.
From 1908 to 1912, Sears, Roebuck sold automobiles by mail order. The Sears Motor Buggy had a two-cylinder, air-cooled engine of about 14 horsepower, tiller steering and a top speed around 25 miles per hour. It arrived partly disassembled in a wooden crate, a 1,400-pound package that buyers picked up at the railroad freight depot. Models ran from $370 to $525. About 3,500 were sold before Ford's Model T won over most of the entry-level customers.
George N. Pierce started out making household goods, including iceboxes, birdcages and bathtubs. Experience making wire products such as birdcages carried over easily to bicycles, and bicycles led to automobiles. The first production Pierce, in 1901, used a small single-cylinder de Dion engine. By 1904 the company had moved upmarket with the four-cylinder Great Arrow, priced at $4,000, and the Great Arrow built its reputation by winning the first five Glidden Tours.
In January 1906, on the sand at Ormond Beach, Florida, Stanley mechanic Fred Marriott drove a steam-powered racer called the Rocket through a mile in 28.2 seconds, about 127.6 miles per hour. The 16-foot car looked like an upside-down canoe. In 1907 Marriott tried to go even faster in an improved Rocket, hit a rut and was thrown into the air; the car broke apart and his racing career ended. His record for steam cars stood until 2009.
Early in 1907, the Paris newspaper Le Matin challenged motorists to drive from Peking to Paris, and five teams set off from Peking on June 10. The winning Itala carried Prince Scipione Borghese, his mechanic Ettore Guizzardi, and Luigi Barzini, a correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. It had an enormous fuel tank on each side and an engine of more than 7 liters. It reached Paris on August 10, a full 20 days ahead of the next car, and now belongs to the automobile museum in Turin.
On February 12, 1908, in the middle of winter, six cars left Times Square in New York for Paris, by way of North America, Japan and Siberia. The only American entry was a 1907 Thomas Flyer, with George Schuster at the wheel. The German Protos reached Paris first, but it was penalized 30 days for skipping Japan and for riding part of the route on a railcar. That handed victory to the Thomas, which arrived on July 30, 169 days after the start.
By 1906 Rolls-Royce was selling two-, three-, four- and six-cylinder cars, and Henry Royce had built something stranger still: a V8 called the Legalimit. The name was the point. Its 3.5-liter engine was governed to keep the car below the 20 mph speed limit then in force in Britain. Only three were ever made, and Rolls-Royce says it remains the only model in the company's history of which no example survives.
New York's 1901 registration law required the owner's initials on the back of each car, in letters at least three inches high. Owners supplied their own: some painted initials on the car, others hung wood or leather tags. Massachusetts led the way in issuing plates in 1903, made of iron coated in dark blue porcelain enamel with white numbers. Plate number 1 went to Frederick Tudor, and a member of his family still holds it as an active registration.
2Three Cadillacs taken apart and mixed up on purpose
On the tile: Dewar Trophy1908
In 1908 Cadillac's British agent, Frederick Bennett, staged a test at the Brooklands track in England. Three single-cylinder Cadillacs were driven around the track, then dismantled, their parts piled together. Eighty-nine randomly chosen parts were swapped for new ones from Cadillac's London storeroom, and mechanics rebuilt the cars using only screwdrivers and wrenches. All three then ran 500 miles. The Royal Automobile Club awarded Cadillac its Dewar Trophy for a convincing demonstration of interchangeable parts.
Around 1900, a car buyer had three kinds of power to choose from, and two came with real drawbacks. Steam cars could take up to 45 minutes to start on a cold day and had to be refilled with water. Gasoline cars meant hard gear changes and a hand crank to get going. Electric cars suited short trips around town and were popular with city residents, especially women. By 1900, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, they made up around a third of all vehicles on the road.
In 1909 Wayne County, Michigan, paved a mile of Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads with concrete, and it is often called the country's first mile of concrete highway. The Federal Highway Administration puts it more carefully: Wayne County was first to surface a rural public road with Portland cement concrete. A street in Bellefontaine, Ohio, had concrete in 1891, and the private Long Island Motor Parkway came in 1908. The county's commissioners had first gone to Windsor, Ontario, to study its concrete streets.
5Tarmac began with a spilled barrel, the story goes
On the tile: Tarmac1902Legend
The story goes that in 1901 Edgar Purnell Hooley, a Nottinghamshire county surveyor, noticed an oddly smooth stretch of road near an ironworks in Denby, Derbyshire. Locals said a barrel of tar had fallen from a dray and burst, and someone had covered the mess with waste slag from the furnaces. The patch had no ruts and no dust. What is on record: Hooley patented a tar and slag road surface in 1902 and registered Tarmac as a trademark in 1903, but he struggled to sell it.
Gasoline engines need a dependable spark, and Robert Bosch's company had been fitting magneto ignitions to cars since 1897. In 1902 its chief engineer, Gottlob Honold, who had started at Bosch as an apprentice, unveiled a better system: high-voltage magneto ignition with a spark plug, filed for a patent that year. Bosch credits it with launching the company as a major automotive supplier. Robert Bosch paid tribute: "When Honold finished a new item and passed it to manufacturing, the Bosch world started clamoring for the finished product."
At the 1900 Paris Exposition, an electric car drew attention for what it did not have: a transmission between motor and wheels. Its designer, 24-year-old Ferdinand Porsche, had built an electric motor into the hub of each front wheel, 2.5 metric horsepower apiece, for a top speed of 32 kilometers per hour. He developed the system in ten weeks for the Vienna firm Jacob Lohner & Co. He then paired a gasoline engine with a generator in the Semper Vivus, which Porsche calls the first functional hybrid car.
In 1900 a car trip was a real adventure, and tire makers André and Édouard Michelin wanted to help their customers get where they were going. André created a red booklet, the Guide Michelin. It offered technical advice on tire maintenance and repair, plus practical listings of garages, gas stations, tire shops and hotels. The restaurant stars that made the guide a reference for food lovers came much later.
In French, a chauffeur is a stoker, the person who tends the fire of a steam engine, from chauffer, to heat. English borrowed the word by 1896 as a name for any motorist, a joke that fit because the first motor cars were steam-driven. By 1902 it had narrowed to mean a professional driver of someone else's private car, and a verb, to chauffeur, followed that same year.
1Across America with toothbrush holders full of water
On the tile: Alice Ramsey1909
On June 9, 1909, 22-year-old Alice Ramsey drove a Maxwell out of rainy New York City, headed for San Francisco with her two sisters-in-law and a 16-year-old friend. When the car needed water in the Midwest, her sisters-in-law carried it from roadside ditches in their cut-glass and silver toothbrush holders. The guidebooks stopped at the Mississippi, so she sometimes followed the telegraph poles with the most wires. They arrived on August 7, after 59 days and 3,800 miles.
On a snowy day in 1902, Mary Anderson rode a New York City streetcar and watched the driver struggle to clear his windshield, sometimes stopping altogether. Her answer, patent 743,801 of November 10, 1903, was a lever inside the vehicle that swung a spring-loaded arm with a rubber blade. But cars were still uncommon, and one firm, Dinning and Eckenstein, replied that it did not consider the device of enough commercial value to sell. Anderson gave up. By the time her patent expired in 1920, cars had become far more popular, and other companies profited from the idea.
3The father of traffic rules never learned to drive
On the tile: William Eno1900
As a boy, William Phelps Eno watched about a dozen horses and carriages tangle in a jam that neither the drivers nor the police knew how to clear. In 1900 he sent an article to The Rider and Driver that led to New York's first written traffic regulations. Eno proposed signals for turning, slowing and stopping, and keeping vehicles to one side of the street. Yet the man known as the Father of Traffic Regulation was a devoted horseman who never learned to drive, despite holding an honorary driver's license.
Dorothy Levitt was billed as the first Englishwoman to drive in a public competition, and she set a women's speed record at the Brighton Speed Trials. In 1909 she published The Woman and the Car, subtitled A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor. Among its tips, decades before rearview mirrors became standard equipment, she advised women to carry a small hand mirror and hold it up now and then to see what was behind them.
5Goggles at midnight for the first Grand Prix winner
On the tile: Ferenc Szisz1906
Hungarian-born Ferenc Szisz trained as a machinist and rode as a Renault mechanic before he drove. The first Grand Prix, near Le Mans on June 26 and 27, 1906, sent cars six laps a day around a triangle of roads more than 60 miles long. By five on the first evening, tar thrown up by other cars had inflamed his eyes so badly he could not see. As Szisz told it, at midnight Monsieur Renault was racing around Le Mans for safety goggles, and at one in the morning cut him a face mask to fit them. Szisz won, averaging 62.9 mph.
Charles Stewart Rolls won the Automobile Club's Thousand Mile Trial in 1900, driving a Paris-made Panhard. He went on to sell cars through his own firm, C.S. Rolls & Co., but he was desperate to find a British-made car as good as the Continental models he sold. In 1904 he found it: a new 10 H.P. car built by Henry Royce. After their first meeting in Manchester on May 4, Rolls agreed to sell every car Royce could make, under a new name, Rolls-Royce.
7A 26-year-old heir brought road racing to Long Island
On the tile: Vanderbilt Jr.1904
William K. Vanderbilt Jr. was 26, heir to a transportation fortune and already a racing veteran when he staged the first Vanderbilt Cup race on Long Island on October 8, 1904. It was the first major international road race in the United States. A French Panhard driven by George Heath won, averaging 52.2 miles per hour over nearly seven hours. American drivers kept chasing the cup until 1908, when George Robertson won in a Locomobile nicknamed Old 16, the first American victory in the series.
By 17, Carl Fisher ran a flourishing bicycle sales and repair business in downtown Indianapolis, and he was very likely the city's first automobile dealer. In 1904, when driving at night with enough light was a real problem, Fisher and a friend were impressed by inventor P. C. Avery's lighting system fired by compressed carbide gas. Fisher's Prest-O-Lite headlamps went on to light most cars of the period. In 1909 he joined three partners to build the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
9The red-bearded racer who became an advertisement
On the tile: Jenatzy1903
Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy had already driven his electric car La Jamais Contente, which Michelin says was the first vehicle in the world to break 100 kilometers per hour. In 1903 he won the Gordon Bennett Cup in Ireland in a Mercedes fitted with a Bosch ignition system. With his red beard and hair and a flowing red dust coat, Jenatzy made a natural advertising icon, and he promoted Bosch ignition as the Red Devil for years afterward.
1The first drive across America, and cries of cheating
On the tile: Nelson Jackson1903
On a fifty-dollar bet, Vermont doctor H. Nelson Jackson left San Francisco on May 23, 1903, in a 20-horsepower Winton with mechanic Sewall Crocker, and in Idaho they added a young bulldog named Bud. They reached New York City on July 26, after about 50 days of driving that cost Jackson $8,000. Skeptics claimed the pair had switched cars or put the car on a train. The Winton company offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove it, Jackson added $15,000, and the charges were never proved.
On January 12, 1904, Henry Ford drove his big racer across the frozen surface of Lake St. Clair, northeast of Detroit, with mechanic Ed "Spider" Huff at the throttle. They covered a mile in 39.4 seconds, a world speed record of 91.37 miles per hour, in a car with a wooden chassis and no body or hood. Ford Motor Company was not yet a year old. The racer was technically named the Arrow, but Ford's advertisements made it famous as the Ford 999.
3The motor racetrack that borrowed from horse racing
On the tile: Brooklands1907
Hugh and Ethel Locke King built Brooklands on their estate in Surrey, England, and on June 17, 1907, Ethel led the procession of cars onto what the museum there calls the world's first purpose-built motor racing circuit. Its organizers borrowed freely from the racecourse: a paddock, a finishing straight, a Clerk of the Course, handicapping, and personal colors for drivers that imitated jockeys' silks. The press greeted the first official race meeting, on July 6, as a Motor Ascot.
Four Indianapolis auto businessmen bought 320 acres in December 1908 for a high-speed racing course. Their first track, laid early in 1909, was 2.5 miles of crushed stone and tar. That summer it hosted motorcycle races and was the starting point for a balloon race, and the first auto race ran on August 19. The surface quickly went to pieces, and after three fatal accidents the owners rebuilt it with 3.2 million 10-pound paving bricks, finished by December 17, 1909.
To honor incoming president William Howard Taft, an automobile enthusiast, Congress set aside $12,000 in 1909 for the first two White House motor cars, despite heated protests. Representative Thetus Sims of Tennessee declared, "The automobile is a genuine, all around nuisance." Taft's car was a seven-passenger steam touring car from the White Motor Company, a branch of the White Sewing Machine Company of Cleveland. First Lady Helen Herron Taft got a six-cylinder Pierce Arrow built in Buffalo.
In December 1902, AAA conceived a tour that would meet a variety of road conditions on the way to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Routes left from New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Officially 77 cars took part and 66 made it; the 1,350-mile run from New York took 18 days and ended August 12 with a parade. AAA handed out maps and local driving laws, and pilot cars marked confusing turns with confetti. Charles J. Glidden sponsored the next year's tour, and the tours took his name.
In My Merry Oldsmobile, with music by Gus Edwards and words by Vincent Bryan, was popular enough that Billy Murray recorded it for Columbia on January 31, 1907. That same year Tom M. Phillips copyrighted a set of amusing lantern slides to accompany the song, and the Library of Congress keeps 13 photographic proofs of them. They show "auto-mobubbling" along a shaded dirt road and "Johnnie" explaining the "sparker" to "Lucille."
On June 28, 1907, eleven days after Brooklands opened, Selwyn Edge led three specially converted Napier cars around the track in a 24-hour run. The other two cars used shifts of drivers, but Edge drove his for the whole day and night, with mechanic J. Blackburn beside him. More than 300 red railway lamps lit the track after dark, with flares marking its upper edge. Edge covered more than 1,581 miles, averaging nearly 66 miles per hour.
On October 10, 1901, Henry Ford ran his first automobile race, a 10-mile contest on a horse racing track at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. His opponent was Alexander Winton, the country's best-known racer, whose car was faster and whose experience was greater. Then Winton's engine gave trouble, and Ford's Sweepstakes racer, with Ed "Spider" Huff riding along as mechanic, took the win. The victory gave Ford the reputation and financial backing to start his second car company.