The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Champion stayed in Paris.153 He apprenticed himself to auto companies to research how engines were built. His new endeavor was to become the sole US agent importing engine parts from French manufacturers.

  THEY LOVE TO “SPARK” IN THE DARK OLD PARK, AS THEY GO FLYING ALONG.

  SHE SAID SHE KNOWS WHY THE MOTOR GOES.

  THE “SPARKER” IS AWFULLY STRONG.

  —“IN MY MERRY OLDSMOBILE,” GUS EDWARDS AND VINCENT P. BRYAN, 19051

  What fascinated Champion the most about autos were electrical components that powered gas-combustion engines—in particular spark plugs, magnetos, and the coil wires that connected them together.2 While in Paris to prepare himself for importing French auto parts to America, two former motorpace rivals suffered excruciating deaths.

  First, there was Jimmy Michael,3 who had agreed to replace Champion for motorpace exhibitions in the Madison Square Garden six-day. However, he died while aboard the La Savoie en route to New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage from his earlier accident racing on the Friedenau track in Berlin. Officers of the ship wanted to bury him at sea. A number of French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, and Swiss cyclists accompanying Michael protested the tossing of his body into the cold Atlantic. They guaranteed the expenses of bringing him to New York. When La Savoie docked on October 26, Michael’s comrades gave him a hasty burial in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery.

  Then there was Charles Brécy, pedaling snugly behind his driver, who was seated over the rear wheel of the motorcycle, around the Parc des Princes track on a world-record pace of 56 mph for 100 kilometers (62.5 miles).4 Brécy had completed ninety-one kilometers as he flashed past a photographer with a camera mounted on a tripod at the end of the home straight. Brécy looked comfortable in the motorcycle’s slipstream. A long-sleeved jersey and shorts was all he needed that mid-November day. A wool cap covered his receding hair-line. Bare hands rested lightly on the handlebars. He sought to even the score after losing the national championship at this distance to Albert Champion. Seconds later on the back straight, without warning, the motorcycle engine quit. Brécy smashed into the roller bar hanging over the vehicle’s rear wheel.5 He was thrown to the cement and hurled with full force against the railing. An ambulance rushed him, bleeding from scrapes to his arms and legs, to Boucicaut Hospital. For twelve days, he shrieked in agony until he succumbed. He left a wife and three children.

  French historian Pierre Chany summed up the arc of a baker’s dozen such motorpace fatalities among Champion’s cohorts: flying along, a false move, a fall, the hospital, and the cemetery. Chany called the years from 1900 to 1904, “The Game of the Massacre.”6

  Michael and Brécy were laid to rest while Champion, the rare motorpacer to retire at the top of his game, found employment in a succession of auto plants to build up his knowledge and create his own supply network. Paris, the birthplace of the modern automobile, was home to an array of marques. Among them were Panhard, Darracq, Renault, De Dion-Bouton, Mors, and Aster. It was natural that he would work for his former boss, Adolphe Clément-Bayard, at the factory in Levallois-Perret.

  Clément-Bayard was purchasing from Edouard Nieuport the very electrical components that Champion planned to import to America, and, convenient for Clément-Bayard, Nieuport also had a plant in Levallois-Perret.7 Nieuport was causing a sensation in the continent’s auto world for producing spark plugs, magnetos, and coils for cars that were sweeping prestigious events in France and Belgium.8 Nieuport was among Champion’s oldest friends. He had won the race on the Vélodrome d’Hiver for the fastest lap in the program that culminated with Champion claiming the Paris city championship, Les Gosses Blanc.9 Champion’s employment included a stint at Nieuport’s cramped factory at 13 rue des Frères Herbert.10

  Edouard Nieuport had more coal-black hair on his head than he needed along with a thick mustache waxed with ends pointing up like a bull’s horns. He was a proud Parisian, although he had been born in Blida, Algeria when his father, Colonel Edmund Deniéport, commanded the army garrison in the French colony.11 He had attended an electrical engineering college in Paris and, though a top student, he’d abandoned classes at nineteen to race bicycles.12 His parents were indignant that he chose what they regarded a foolhardy pastime. So the family name would not be tainted in the eyes of his parents, their shy, modest son competed under the assumed name of “Nieuport.” He went by it for the rest of his life.

  Short in stature, he had small hands and narrow shoulders. He also had a clever tactical mind and had racked up ten straight handicap victories one summer.13 He and Champion would have seen each other in action at the Paris vélodromes. Nieuport had scored third in a national sprint championship. He was thrilled by speed and fearless; that is, until he competed in a paced race behind three men pedaling a triplet tandem on the Vélodrome de la Seine. He crossed the line first, only to black out and crash.14 A doctor prescribed a different occupation.

  Nieuport was eager to take what he had learned about aerodynamics from cycling and apply it to autos and new gliders that were gaining attention. In the summer of 1898, he had decided to invest prize money he had saved to go into business, although he had no plan. All he had was a fascination with autos and an irresistible curiosity about the mystery of the electrical ignition in gas-combustion engines, still scarcely explored as an area of expertise. Nieuport buried himself in the family library and read books and journals about the physical sciences, particularly the study of electricity.15 His younger brother and sister had to tread quietly as he proceeded in his willful education about what makes electrons flow, the force of volts carrying electricity, and electricity’s role in making autos go. Research led him to learn about the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir, who had lived in Paris and invented the first spark plug in 1860 for an engine to propel carriages. Lenoir’s archetype was an integral unit containing the three elements used ever since—an insulator, two electrodes, and the spark gap. Back then, only a small number of engines were mounted on carriages. The engines were notoriously inefficient, loud, and prone to overheating. Nieuport overlooked their shortcomings and, indeed, considered their potential.

  His mother grew concerned.16 She prevailed on friends to find him an accounting job in a bank. Her son rejected the intrusion. He subsequently decided to manufacture spark plugs, spark coils, and magnetos. He rented a shop in Levallois-Perret. His funds, however, disappeared fast. Fortunately, despite the sting they had felt over his refusal to follow a military career like his father and both grandfathers, his parents did not hesitate to help.

  Spark plugs are simple. They are narrow cylinders less than three inches long and weighing only ounces. In gas-combustion engines, however, they are indispensable in firing the pistons that propel vehicles weighing thousands of pounds.

  The top of these modern spark plugs had a terminal connected by a wire to a magneto that created high-voltage electricity. An electrical insulator, printed with the name of the manufacturer, descended the length of the plug to provide electric insulation for the central electrode. A metal combustion seal prevented leakage from the combustion chamber. The bottom metal jacket removed heat from the insulator and acted as a ground for the spark passing through the central electrode to the side electrode. The outside of this metal jacket was threaded for fastening the spark plug to the engine. The magneto created an electric pulse strong enough to spark the gap between the center and side electrodes to ignite the fuel and air mixture in the chamber and drive the piston down.

  Though more and more gas-powered autos chugged along roads in the 1890s, spark plugs were still a pesky work in progress. Motor enthusiasts inquired, “What is a spark plug?”17 Ideal ones fired the spark that ignited gas fumes and air at the right time in the piston chamber to push the piston down for the power stroke, driving the vehicle ahead. Yet the vast majority of spark plugs for sale misfired. Nieuport examined how to improve spark plugs and produce efficient ones.

  Nieuport figured that existing spark plugs
performed poorly due to inferior materials. The best materials were as critical to spark plugs as the best ingredients are to a cook making a meal. For the central electrode point that fired in the engine, Nieuport settled on platinum,18 or at least nickel as an alternative, because of the durability and tolerance of those metals for extremely high temperatures—hotter than one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. He devised spark plugs timed to hit the power stroke at the proper time. His products relied on porcelain as the electrical insulator to keep the plugs watertight. He ruled out the soapstone and lava insulators favored by other brands.

  The craft of firing clay into porcelain for mass-producing dinner plates and vases had been around France for a couple centuries, thanks to King Louis XIV banning the import of foreign porcelain, chiefly from China, to protect French ceramists.19 Nieuport’s spark plugs with porcelain insulators were why cars that used his spark plugs won prizes.

  Champion spent enough time with Nieuport to learn that his friend did a lot of thinking while driving a little blunt-nosed Darracq. While leaning over the steering wheel to scan the road ahead and avoid potholes, Nieuport formulated how to make a better, higher-voltage magneto—consisting of a coil of copper wire wound between the poles of a magnet to provide electrical current that ignited a spark plug.20 After trial and error, he produced his Nieuport Magneto. He advertised it as simpler and stronger than other brands.21 His magneto fitted in the palm of his hand, so light he could easily lift it with his fingertips. He also made Nieuport batteries.

  Inferior electric components had caused the engine of the motorcycle pacing Brécy to cease working all of a sudden. If his pacing machine had kept going just minutes longer, he would have clinched the prized world record, assuring him higher appearance fees for the next season to support his family with more comfort. However, the motorcycle suffered a failure of its spark plugs, coils, or magneto—a frequent inconvenience, but fatal for Brécy. His driver had finished unharmed.22 Nieuport and Champion, mindful of this tragic crash on a track they knew like the faces they shaved, were resolved to create better ignition accessories.

  In the meantime, orders poured in for Nieuport’s products. He was fascinated with autos and motorcycles, and even more passionate about combustion engines for what they would mean for flying airplanes.

  Before Champion left Nieuport’s factory to continue his study of autos, Nieuport agreed to sell him wholesale all the electric-ignition parts he wanted.

  Frank Duane Stranahan grew impatient to embark on a new career before he turned thirty. For the last seven years, he had been managing the Savoy Hotel on Washington Street in downtown Boston’s bustling shopping and theater district.23 The hotel, celebrated for luxury and refinement, gave Stranahan a comfortable life and stature in the business community. Yet he had met all the challenges many times over. The hotelier’s long hours, intermittent emergencies, and humdrum routines over time agitated him to do more with his talents. If he had been in the audience at Charles River Park witnessing Champion careen on his motorcycle around the track on his way to setting a new world record for the mile, Stranahan would have admired his freedom and his panache.

  The automobiles rollicking and honking through city streets appealed to Stranahan as a way to change his life. He monitored their progress in the business community. In 1898 a half-dozen electric, steam, and gas-powered autos manufactured in Massachusetts had been accepted in a general exhibition that embraced all sorts of industrial machinery on display in the Mechanics Building.24 Along Huntington Avenue on the Back Bay, the brick structure crouched with arches over windows like raised eyebrows. The Mechanics Building claimed the largest exhibition space in all six New England states.25 As novelties, autos were exhibited in the basement; the street level was dedicated to displaying motor boats from the leading builders from around the country. At subsequent industrial exhibitions in the Mechanics Building, auto companies clamored for their own show. He heard the talk buzzing around town about meetings convened by the building’s trustees to open additional street-floor space to auto exhibits.

  When the Boston Automobile Dealers’ Association took over the auto shows in 1903,26 the building’s Exhibition Hall and Grand Hall quickly sold out. Trustees had barred motor vehicles from Paul Revere Hall. Its polished wooden floor was rarely available except for dancing during major social occasions. Exhibition overflow was diverted up the avenue to the Horticultural Hall. To Bostonians accustomed to viewing rare commonwealth orchids and roses, huge motor trucks looked strange. By the next year, demand for more exhibition space forced trustees to surrender Paul Revere Hall to the invasion of motorcars.27 Exhibits of motor boats were relegated to the basement. The Boston auto shows boasted that they ranked second only to those in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Stranahan anticipated a new business ascending.

  Savoy guests noticed Frank D. Stranahan, an earnest man with impeccable dress and good manners. His barbered dark hair and mustache could pass military inspection. He welcomed strangers and friends alike. His hospitality came from experience greeting customers, negotiating with shifty vendors, supervising disinclined staff, and managing income against expenses for his livelihood. As a result, he ensured return visits from tourists and business travelers. When traffic turned quiet, he headed to the billiard room to hone his shooting skills.

  He had absorbed the hotel trade from his father, the wheeling and dealing if occasionally cavalier Robert Allen Stranahan, renowned as the ideal hotel man—open, generous, courteous, and solicitous of the welfare of his guests.28 The Boston Journal called him one of Boston’s most popular landlords. In 1896 when he bought the lease to the Savoy Hotel, he was only forty-six and suffering from tuberculosis. Frank ran the hotel’s day-to-day affairs. In the summer of 1898 the elder Stranahan was thrown from a carriage and badly injured.29 Soon afterward, he lost his battle against tuberculosis.30

  As the eldest son of a Victorian-era household, Frank had stepped up to provide for his widowed mother Lizzie; sister Anna, sixteen; brother Spencer, fourteen; and twelve-year-old Robert Allen Jr. An older sister, Ada, lived with her husband in Brookline. Frank inherited his father’s lease to the Savoy and inaugurated upgrades.31 The restaurant enjoyed an excellent reputation. He brought in an orchestra to entertain evening diners. He opened a billiards parlor and furnished all rooms with every modern appliance and comfort. The Boston Herald predicted Frank could “become as popular in the hotel world as his late lamented father.”32

  In spite of the encouragement, he had an entrepreneurial streak and looked for a way to break from the hotel world—and his beloved father’s shadow. Robert Allen Stranahan had been sued in 1889 for personal gain over a bond issue he was charged with floating under the guise of raising money for a gas company in Buffalo, where the family then lived.33 The suit sullied his name and threw his financial stability into jeopardy. In the late nineteenth century, for almost all troubles short of murder you could give yourself a fresh start simply by leaving town. A third-generation Scotch-Irish, he had moved his family to Boston to blend among the large concentration of Irish and begin anew in the hotel business. Even after his father’s death, however, Frank and his mother were left to clean up Robert Allen Stranahan’s remaining debts from the Buffalo scandal. As a consequence, Lizzie, her curly dark hair graying, drilled Frank and his siblings well into their adulthood over the ethics of careful social and financial behavior.34

  The Savoy located Frank Stranahan in the midst of Boston’s theater district, which cultivated his taste for the stage and a passion for musicals. In May 1902 he had attended a road show of a Chinese musical comedy titled San Toy at the Boston Museum Theater on Tremont Street.35 The cast included the chic, vivacious, and fetching Marie Celeste. She had been entertaining audiences and impressing theater critics with her singing and dancing for more than a decade.36 Bewitched, Stranahan arranged to meet her after a show.

  He had only two weeks to win her heart before she was to leave town with the troupe, and he had competiti
on from a pack of stage-door Johnnies lavishing her with bouquets of roses and wedding proposals.37 Caught in whirlwind courtship, he delegated duties at the Savoy so as to attend evening and matinee performances. Before the curtain went down after the final act, he elbowed through a bunch of male admirers and stole her away.

  Beyond the footlights and without makeup, she was a demure, straight-laced New Yorker. She had studied music at a Gotham observatory as preparation to sing opera.38 However, when she was sixteen, her father died, forcing her to earn a living. First, she had gone all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to win an audition in a stock company. Later she moved to a company in Portland, Maine, to sing light opera. That led to performing as the leading woman on Broadway in Mother Goose and Son Toy. Her real name was Marie Celeste Martin. Stranahan campaigned to change her family name to his.

  She assessed him as a capable businessman from a loving family—a loyal son and responsible older brother—and ardent about auditioning as her leading man. When San Toy concluded and the stagehands packed the sets to leave for their next engagement, the couple announced their engagement.39 They married on the morning of June 2, 1902.40 The ceremony in the nearly deserted Church of Our Savior lacked any of the usual wedding features. No marriage date was announced, a strategy he relied on to evade adversaries vying for her hand. Only twelve persons were present—Frank’s mother and siblings and some of the bride’s cast friends. Everyone had to pledge the utmost secrecy. The bride’s mother was still in New York. After her vows, Marie announced her retirement from the stage to live with her husband in Brookline.

  By the time the trustees of the Mechanics Building acquiesced to make Paul Revere Hall available to the Boston Automobile Dealers for the auto show, Frank and Marie had a son, Duane. Frank decided to jump into the auto business in time for the third annual show in March 1905. Following his strategies from playing billiards, he planned at least three moves ahead.