Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age

by Lawrence Goldstone

  After sixty-three days on the road, which included nineteen lost to rest, breakdowns, waiting for parts to arrive, or hoisting the Vermont up and over rocks and mud holes, the expedition reached New York. It had cost Jackson $8,000, spent on hotel rooms, gasoline, tires, parts, supplies, food, and the Winton. Jackson told Horseless Age that he estimated that he had covered 5,600 miles and that the Vermont “traveled on its own wheels every foot of the way. The only times when it did not also run by its own power were a few occasions when horses or a block and tackle were used to draw it across streams or out of miry places. The total of the distances overcome by these methods was said not to have exceeded a quarter of a mile.”9

  The three sets of travelers were hailed as heroes and were credited with inspiring an entire generation of automobile enthusiasts. In particular, their journey made people think about long-distance auto travel as an alternative to railroads. When the Winton, the Packard, and then the Olds chugged into New York, the automobile had been transformed in the minds of many Americans. And what Henry Ford seemed to recognize more than anyone else in the business was the degree to which that transformation would translate into a desire for ownership.

  * * *

  *1 In later years, Joy would undertake the journey himself, in a Packard touring car.

  *2 The photographs turned out to be stunning, possibly the best ever taken depicting early automobiles crossing dreadful terrain.

  CHAPTER 14

  As impressive as was the trip across America, the other major cross-country adventure in 1903 promised to lend even greater worldwide acclaim to the burgeoning field of automobilism.

  The Paris-Madrid race had been the brainchild of Automobile Club de France. They sent emissaries to flatter Spain’s King Alfonso into supporting the endeavor, which then allowed them to enlist the Spanish automobile club as a co-sponsor.1 The race was sanctioned in February, with the start date eventually set for May 24—a Sunday, to ensure maximum public turnout—with the first race car leaving at 3:45 in the morning. The course would be 800 miles, divided into three stages: Versailles to Bordeaux; Bordeaux across the Pyrenees to Vitoria, Spain; and Vitoria to Madrid. Entrants would be divided into classes based on weight.*1 The ACF promoted the event as the largest, most prestigious, most challenging test of man and machine ever undertaken and predicted that hundreds of automobiles would participate and millions of spectators would line the roads to watch them pass.

  The notion of commandeering such an immense stretch of public thoroughfare did not appeal to everyone, nor did the prospect of the series of accidents that seemed inevitable on roads clogged with racing machines. When ACF officials first announced their plan, the French premier, Émile Combes, and most of his ministers were in opposition. But the French auto club was not without resources and impressed on skeptics that forgoing such an opportunity to trumpet the preeminence of the French automobile industry would be tragic, even criminal. As for safety, the race was quite manageable, they insisted, particularly if local and national officials would lend suitable numbers of army personnel and gendarmes to help along the roadsides. The left-wing Combes was dubious—particularly since the members of the French auto club, almost all conservative, were hardly his political allies—but, with national pride at stake, he ultimately agreed.

  Within weeks of the announcement, the genius of the idea seemed manifest. Entries poured in, particularly in the top class. The very best automakers in Europe—Mercedes, De Dion, De Dietrich, Panhard, Mors—would be sending, or in some cases building, their fastest, most durable, most aerodynamic, and most technologically advanced machines to compete in the most arduous road race ever undertaken.*2 Some of the racers were rumored to be capable of top speeds approaching 100 miles per hour, a mark that would have seemed preposterous just two years before. The Renault brothers—known for breakneck, accelerator-to-the-floor driving—had designed a lighter-weight car that would go almost as fast.

  Piloting those lightning machines would be the most celebrated drivers in Europe: Fernand Charron, now driving a car of his own manufacture; Henri Fournier; René de Knyff, winner of Paris-Bordeaux in 1898 and the Tour de France in 1899; Henri Farman, who later become one of France’s most celebrated aviation pioneers; Marcel and Louis Renault; Charles Rolls, who would create his own famous brand of automobile and die in a plane crash in 1910; and Charles Jarrott, winner of the 1902 Circuit des Ardennes.

  Although a number of American drivers also registered, all would drive European cars. Neither Ford nor Winton considered attempting the race—the Europeans were simply too far ahead. One of the American entrants was William Kissam Vanderbilt II, “Willie K.” to his friends, only twenty-five, great-grandson of the Commodore, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Willie K. had become so captivated by automobile racing during the family’s frequent trips to Europe that, in addition to driving, he had begun sponsoring automobile races in France while still a teenager.

  Willie would compete in the Paris-Madrid in his 80-horsepower Mors. The Mors epitomized the vast gulf between European and American automaking. In 1902, when Henry Ford was building his powerful but crude 999, Émile Mors was already employing a V-engine, pneumatic shock absorbers, a steel chassis, four-speed transmission, and rear-wheel brakes. For this race, he had designed an aerodynamic wedge nose, which would set a standard for decades to come.

  By early May, 280 vehicles had entered, and safety, both French and Spanish officials agreed, had indeed been manageable. “M. Tampier, the official timekeeper of the A.C.F., was officially appointed to examine the roads and report on them, with a view to enabling the racing committee of the Spanish and French Clubs to cho[o]se definitely the route for the Paris-Madrid motor-car race. M. Tampier, therefore, is the best authority on the question of the roads, as he has been over every inch of them carefully. He tells me that as far as Bordeaux the route is in an excellent condition, incomparably good.”2

  And on these incomparably good roads, great things were expected:

  The first stage will be the classic route from Paris to Bordeaux—straight and even, without serious hills. The distance is 362½ miles, and was covered in 1895 in about 24 hours, in 1898 in 15 hours, in 1899 in 11 hours 43 minutes and in 1901 in 6 hours 11 minutes, the present record. Presuming it is reduced to well under six hours by machines many of which are claimed to do 80 miles an hour on the level, some of the racers will be starting from Paris two hours after the leader arrives at Bordeaux.3

  Outside the racing community, the Paris-Madrid had kindled all the excitement the organizers had hoped for and then some. The day before the start, The New York Times reported:

  All the Americans are leaving Paris to-day en route for some point of vantage whence they can view the great Paris-Madrid automobile race, which starts from Versailles tomorrow, and every Parisian possessor of the humblest automobile, or the still humbler bicycle, will do likewise. It is estimated there will be an exodus of at least 100,000 people. The weather is magnificent. Every town in the neighborhood of Paris on the route of the race is already crammed to the last stretch of its accommodation. No such great motoring event has happened so far in the history of Paris.4

  As midnight approached, “Versailles presented a scene of extreme activity, the gaily illuminated cafés packed with people….5,000 automobiles were crowded in the thoroughfares, many of them decorated with Chinese lanterns. Many of the contestants arrived during the evening, their huge machines trembling and groaning.”5

  Most of those who had come to witness the start had never seen a racing automobile or the men—and one woman—who drove them. The woman was the remarkable Camille du Gast, who had also driven in the previous year’s Paris-Berlin race, finishing thirty-third in a field of one hundred. For this race, her 30-horsepower De Dietrich was decked with flowers, and at her arrival a great cheer rose from the crowd.*3 The scene was unforgettable for all who witnessed it. “The cars are denuded of all ornamentation, most of them reeking with oil and giving off foul vapors. The drive
rs wore rubber coats, drawn high and tight around the throat, and had their faces and heads completely enveloped in a mask. They did not wear goggles, but heavy plate glass was fixed in the mask, forming a miniature window. The contestants sat very low to minimize the resistance to the wind.”

  As the ACF had requested, ten thousand soldiers and police had been called out for crowd control along the route, and as the start approached, an honor guard lined the road from Versailles with bayonet-tipped rifles raised in salute. At 3:35, a cannon was fired and Charles Jarrott, who had drawn the first position, rolled to the line. Ten minutes later, the cannon fired again and Jarrott was off, to the cheers of the one hundred thousand spectators who had poured into Versailles to celebrate the historic event. For three hours, machines large and small, automobiles and motorcycles of every description, tore off the line at one- or two-minute intervals, the last not beginning the race until the rays of the morning sun had replaced the lanterns and electric lights.

  The race had also caught the fancy of high society. Among the luminaries listed in the society pages were the Duchess of Marlborough and Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor, as well as Biddles, Mellons, and others from the cream of the American and European elites. Many had paid for fancy viewing stations, and some had even constructed pavilions overlooking the track. Refreshments were served by retainers as the rich waited to experience the breathless excitement of the race.

  What they witnessed was a bloodbath.

  Moments after the cannon sent Jarrott on his way, the dazzling ignorance of the sponsors became manifest. The road was too narrow, the surface too dusty, and the complement of soldiers not nearly sufficient to hold back the crowds. Willie Vanderbilt could not even start until the crowds that had surged in front of his car were shoved out of the way. Jarrott, in the lead, tried slowing his De Dietrich to 40 miles per hour to avoid the spectators who jumped from the path of his car only at the last moment, but the lower speed merely caused the crowd to linger longer in the road.

  The frustrations of getting up to speed pushed the drivers to more aggressive driving in those sections in which they could maneuver. In one case, a soldier dashed onto the course to push away a toddler who had gotten loose from his parents and wandered into the path of an oncoming two-ton racer; the soldier was killed. Another driver would die after striking the inevitable dog. Drivers crashed because they were blinded by the clouds of dust thrown up by other racers who had just passed. In the mishmash of sizes and shapes, underpowered vehicles were run down or sideswiped by more formidable machines.

  In the end, only 110 of the 224 vehicles that began the race arrived at Bordeaux. Louis Renault, in his lightweight racer, crossed the line first—despite running over “three or four dogs”—with an adjusted time of 5 hours 40 minutes. But Renault’s joy would be short-lived. He soon learned that his brother Marcel had been terribly injured, with two broken legs and a fractured skull, when his car overturned after hitting a tree.

  And Louis, despite arriving first, was also not the winner of the stage. Fernand Gabriel, in an 80-horsepower Mors, starting from position 168—Renault had been number 3—had incredibly weaved his way through the dust, animals, spectators, and wreckage to finish with an adjusted time of 5 hours 13 minutes, shattering all previous records. A Mors had also finished second in the heavy-car class, with a Mercedes third and a De Dietrich fourth. Panhard could do no better than fifth. Camille du Gast finished forty-fifth after stopping to help a fellow driver who had crashed and would have died without her assistance. Before she pulled off the road, she had been racing in the top ten.

  Marcel Renault (driving) moments before his crash

  But the news focused a good deal more on those who had not finished than on those who had. Scores of accidents sent both drivers and spectators to hospitals or the morgue. At least five drivers or riding mechanics were killed—including Marcel Renault, who died two days later—and more were maimed, some when their cars struck a variety of obstacles, others after their vehicles flipped over and caught fire.

  Joseph Pennell, a reporter for The London Chronicle, described the scene from Chartres:

  As the cars fell—there is no other word for it—down the slopes and approached the narrow bridge, jumped with a bound across it, and flew with a scream up the rise beyond, one could see by the twitch of the wheels, not half of which was caused by the road, how agonizing was the strain on the driver, forced to make his way through the endless, uncontrolled crowds which littered the road from Paris to Bordeaux.6

  Pennell did not have kind words for the soldiers overwhelmed by the crush of humans and animals that either lined the course or strode across it.

  Though on the stretch of eight kilometres between Chartres and the first village there were from 5,000 to 10,000 people and 500 to 1,000 cars, no attempt was made to control the crowds, mostly made up of peasants and people from Paris who knew nothing about automobiles. The horse-drawn traffic was stopped during the race, but the fools on bicycles and the imbeciles on motors careened about and drew up anywhere all over the road and only escaped killing themselves and the racing men by the sheer dumb luck which is said to protect drunken men, children and fools.

  Even as the last vehicles were leaving Versailles, it had become clear that the race was a debacle. Original reports had scores dead and hundreds injured, although the numbers quickly shrank. Still, the injuries were horrific and unprecedented.

  Long before the time when news of the first arrival in Bordeaux set experts figuring out records, the total of the day’s casualties had been summed up as follows: Dead.—Pierre Roderiz, Mr. Barrow’s machinist; Nixon, Mr. Porter’s machinist; Normand, M. Tourand’s machinist; Dupuy, soldier, at Angouleme; Gaillon, cyclist, at Angouleme; unknown peasant woman, at Ablis. Injured.—Mr. Barrow, pelvis and thigh broken, amputation likely; M. Marcel Renault, fatally injured (since dead); Mr. L. Porter, cut and bruised; Mr. Stead, overturned, badly injured; Mr. Stead’s machinist, head cut open; Lesna, champion cyclist, broken knee-cap; Georges Richard, chest crushed, ribs broken; Henry Jeannot, Mr. Richard’s machinist, shoulder fractured; E. Chard, head cut open; Tourand, severely bruised; Gaston Raffet, boy, skull fractured, leg and arm broken; Marcel Renault’s machinist, severely bruised; Mme. Chayscas, both limbs cut off.7

  Charles Jarrott, whose number one start had allowed him to avoid the carnage, lost his lead when he slammed into an immense mastiff, which he carried across the front of his car for a couple of miles before it fell off, nearly every bone in its body broken. He later surveyed the course on his return to Paris. “I marveled, not that several had been killed, but that so many had escaped. Cars in fragments, cars in fields, some upside down, others with no wheels.”8

  Willie Vanderbilt, as it turned out, had been lucky, although he didn’t see it that way.

  Further up the street was another car with a huge gash in the tire of one wheel, the other tire down, and the whole twisted and bent, in the hands of a dozen workmen. Walking away therefrom was a being with part of a cap over one ear and part of a pair of goggles over the other, plastered with mud and oil, in the rags and tatters of what had once been a suit of clothes. It opened its mouth and said in a voice choked with tears, and in the American language: “I don’t mind breaking down again; but it makes me so very angry.” It was Mr. Vanderbilt, and he had been in a ditch.9

  A cracked cylinder had sent him spinning off the road—and perhaps saved his life.

  The slaughter was so great that, over the objections of the ACF and many of the drivers, the race was terminated at Bordeaux. French officials, to be certain there would be no more deaths, ordered that all remaining race cars be towed by horse to the rail station and then shipped back to Paris. The ACF and the Spanish auto club made one last attempt to have the race restarted at the Spanish border, but Spanish officials refused.

  French ministers, from Combes on down, were unanimous in their denunciations of the spectacle, and blamed the French auto club for so grossly underestimating t
he dangers. After an emergency meeting, they announced a ban on races on public roads. The ACF, in turn, was incensed at the government for failing to take the proper precautions or supervise the police and soldiers who were often little more than spectators as the cars roared into view.

  In the wake of the tragedy, trade magazines fell over themselves decrying the excesses of an event that they had previously extolled for the challenges it offered to automobile and driver. An editorial in Automobile Topics was typical: “No more Paris-Madrid, Paris-Vienna, Paris-Berlin, or Paris-anywhere else. The annual saturnalia on wheels has gone, never, I hope, to return. It has died hard, and claimed its victims wholesale in dying. It was a species of mid-summer madness which should never have been allowed to reach the stage it did.”10 Motor Car Journal added, “The avalanche of fatality which rushed down the route of the Paris-Madrid race has struck a note of horror throughout the world, and will do much to stem the tide of the reckless daring that threatened to overwhelm the motoring community….The result of this neglect was disaster, a disaster which threatened and still threatens, to injure materially the motor-car industry.”11 Horseless Age had a rather more xenophobic observation:

  A more sudden change of public opinion has seldom been witnessed than that in France on May 24. The hundreds of thousands of people lining the road near the start in the small morning hours of that day were for the most part deeply impressed with the importance of the event they had come to witness, and the conversation centered on such subjects as the progress of practical science, La France once more taking the lead of the progress of the world, etc., but before the day was over these same people were clamoring loudly for the Government to stop the race. The French are naturally an impulsive race and one that easily forgets its lessons.12