Prices at the Dawn of the Gasoline Age, Dusk of the Equine

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Pat Holscher
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From the Natrona County Tribune, a century ago, as reprinted today in the Casper Star Tribune.
"A Dozen Will be in Service During This Summer.

"... J. P. Cantillon, superintendent of the Wyoming & Northwestern railroad company, ... was the first of Casper's citizens to start the fashion. Mr. Cantillon owns a Pope-Toledo, 20 horse power. ... (T)o its use is due the fact that very few of the ranchers about here now have any teams that are afraid to meet an auto in the road. ...

"C. M. Elgin ... has a Chalmers-Detroit 30-horse power," which he drove to Casper after purchase. "The time made on the trip ... (was) eighteen hours and forty-five minutes from Denver.

" ... M. N. Castle (Shorty) owns a 20-horse power Reo . ... (He) deserves credit for a new mixture ... for fuel for his machine, but he only used it once, and says that he will never do so again if he can help it. ... (H)e ran out of gasoline and could procure no more, but the ranch where he stopped had plenty of coal oil. Shorty tanked up with the coal oil and the mixture ... sufficed to run him into town, a distance of twelve miles."
Pat Holscher
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Pat Holscher wrote:From the Natrona County Tribune, a century ago, as reprinted today in the Casper Star Tribune.
"A Dozen Will be in Service During This Summer.

"... J. P. Cantillon, superintendent of the Wyoming & Northwestern railroad company, ... was the first of Casper's citizens to start the fashion. Mr. Cantillon owns a Pope-Toledo, 20 horse power. ... (T)o its use is due the fact that very few of the ranchers about here now have any teams that are afraid to meet an auto in the road. ...

"C. M. Elgin ... has a Chalmers-Detroit 30-horse power," which he drove to Casper after purchase. "The time made on the trip ... (was) eighteen hours and forty-five minutes from Denver.

" ... M. N. Castle (Shorty) owns a 20-horse power Reo . ... (He) deserves credit for a new mixture ... for fuel for his machine, but he only used it once, and says that he will never do so again if he can help it. ... (H)e ran out of gasoline and could procure no more, but the ranch where he stopped had plenty of coal oil. Shorty tanked up with the coal oil and the mixture ... sufficed to run him into town, a distance of twelve miles."
The Reo in question:

http://images.townnews.com/casperstartr ... 211a07.jpg
JV Puleo
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A 2-cylinder 20HP. The engine is under the seat.

Here's another one... a 1910 Model R 30HP

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Pat Holscher
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JV Puleo wrote:A 2-cylinder 20HP. The engine is under the seat.

Here's another one... a 1910 Model R 30HP

Image
Under the seat?

Hmmm. . . I think that driver looks familiar.
JV Puleo
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The engine's up front in the conventional place on the 30HP.
The driver is a lot older now but just as tired looking.
Joseph Sullivan
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Joe:

Is that authentic 1910 plywood on the cargo hold?
JV Puleo
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Yes... restoration grade plywood. Actually the sides of the body were made of an early form of plywood. It wasn't very successful so in 1911 they went to paper mache.

Joe P
Pat Holscher
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What's that car like to drive?
JV Puleo
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The steering is very light... those front tires are 36" in diameter and react very quickly to the wheel. The transmission has straight cut gears and shifts very easily but is quite loud by modern standards although on an open car you don't hear it. When closed bodies became fashionable in the late 20s the makers went to hellical cut gears which were quieter but far more difficult to shift. This is when "double clutching" and "syncromesh" appear on the scene.

The brakes are on the rear wheels only. The hand brake is the one you use if you are really stopping because the long handle has far more leverage than the foot pedals. You can lock up the wheels but because they have so little surface in contact with the road this will not always stop you. I find the late Edwardian cars (1907-1914) very easy to drive. Most are really modern in the way they work and anyone whose driven a standard-transmission pickup truck can adapt themselves to it very quickly.
Pat Holscher
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Pat Holscher wrote:

"C. M. Elgin ... has a Chalmers-Detroit 30-horse power," which he drove to Casper after purchase. "The time made on the trip ... (was) eighteen hours and forty-five minutes from Denver.
Nineteen hours.

Now, as long as it isn't early in the morning, I'll drive to Denver if I have work there, to it, and return to town the same day.

And I'd bet that you'd feel beat to heck after that nineteen hour drive.
JV Puleo
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After six hours at the wheel of one of those cars I'd be completely exhausted...and that was 25 years ago. It might bear a stronger resemblance to six hours on a horse than it does to what we think of as driving.
Pat Holscher
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JV Puleo wrote:After six hours at the wheel of one of those cars I'd be completely exhausted...and that was 25 years ago. It might bear a stronger resemblance to six hours on a horse than it does to what we think of as driving.
I'd guess that six hours on a horse, while tiring, might be less tiring than driving on those roads, with a vehicle of that type. The advantage, of course, is that it'd take at least three days, on the same roads, in good weather, and with hard riding, to cover that distance on a horse.

At one time I used a 1962 Dodge W300 Power Wagon as a daily driver. When I drove between Casper and Laramie, 140 miles, I felt tired and a bit beat up. And I was in my 20s at the time.
Joseph Sullivan
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Right. I feel more beaten up after riding in a vehicle with a bad suspension than I do after the same time on horseback. In my youth I spent many days of 6 or so hours on horseback and didn't think anything of it.
JV Puleo
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I don't really have anything to compare it to...I'm just going by the historical references to how tiring a long ride can be. I think much of it is stress related. It can be genuinely nerve wracking to be constantly on the lookout for nitwits that want to "check out the old car". My favorite stunt is to pull in front and jack up on the brakes so the guy in the back seat can "read the radiator". That can be very exciting.
Pat Holscher
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JV Puleo wrote:I don't really have anything to compare it to...I'm just going by the historical references to how tiring a long ride can be. I think much of it is stress related. It can be genuinely nerve wracking to be constantly on the lookout for nitwits that want to "check out the old car". My favorite stunt is to pull in front and jack up on the brakes so the guy in the back seat can "read the radiator". That can be very exciting.
At least in my experience, the first day of a really long ride is the hardest. That's likely because a person has to get back into riding shape, if they haven't for awhile, and that's always the case for me when I engage in a really long ride. When we trail cattle in the spring or early summer, it always happens that the first day is the longest and driest, and you really do feel very beat up. Thereafter, however, it's usually okay and the after a couple of days you don't notice it. At least for me, however, a long drive in a heavy truck of the old fashioned type is always fatiguing. This is much less the case with a modern truck with power steering and all (I don't own a real car, only trucks, if a person also considers a Suburban a truck). For a long time owned a 1954 Chevrolet car, and I don't recall that being true for it. It was a fairly modern riding car really.

I know what you mean regarding stress. When I used to use the Power Wagon for a daily driver, I used to have some tense highway moments as people would go to pass it assuming it was slow, which it wasn't, and thereby putting you and everyone else into a tight spot. While people would often erroneously assume it was slow, for some reason they'd also assume it had really good modern brakes, which they do not. So people would pull in and stop short, which is scary. I had the same experience while driving the old Korean War vintage 6x6s the Guard still had in the 80s, as people would pass them on the highway and then pull in short when we were going downhill. Going downhill they'd pick up a lot of speed. It was a scary deal to have a stationwagon full of kids waving at you as their father pulled in short, knowing that there was no way you could stop if you really had to.
Joseph Sullivan
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I agree that the first day of serious riding after a layoff can be rough. All those ligaments getting stretched out again has a lot to do with it.
Pat Holscher
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Pat Holscher wrote:
Pat Holscher wrote:
JV Puleo wrote:Chauffeurs were definately supposed to maintain the car as well as drive it although that often entailed knowing who to take it to when something actually broke. Lots of chauffeurs knwe almost as little as the car owners, at least to begin with. One of my great-uncles worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy family in New London, Connecticut around . I have a picture of him at the wheel of the huge Locomobile he drove and another in the little Hudson runabout that the family bought so that he could use it to run errands for them without using the "big" car. At the time he was hired he didn't know how to drive, which his employers fully understood. He did have a reputation for being a very clever mechanic (he ended up teaching at MIT near the end of his life) and that was what was really needed. Learning to actually drive was the lesser part of the job.
Prior to WWI almost no owners of expensive cars actually drove them. The French Baron Rothchild who volunteered himself and his Rolls-Royce for service with the French Army in 1914 went along as the assistant to his own chauffer. When the driver was wounded the Baron tried driving it himself. He turned it over in a ditch so as soon as the driver was attended to he took the train to Paris, bought another Rolls, hired another driver and went back to the front!
A whole industry grew up around selling "chauffeur's specials" i.e. overpriced tires and parts that included a kickback for the chauffeur who had the responsibility of maintaining the cars.
Another story...the famous British eccentric, Lord Lonsdale, known as the "Yellow Earle" because all his cars and even his private train were painted yellow, was once stuck because his driver broke his arm cranking the car. After that he never went anywhere unless there were two drivers on the car.

Joe P
On this, it's interesting to note that you can find WWI vintage U.S. Army recruiting posters advertising for men who knew how to drive a vehicle. By WWII you no longer find those types of ads, and it was likely assumed that darned near any man knew how to drive.

Some examples.

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Some of these are from war related private organizations, but there are similar military ones with the same theme.
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Pat Holscher
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An interesting item from the early internal combustion engine:

http://www.casperstartribune.net/articl ... 7f23b0.txt
Pat Holscher
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Somewhat related to this topic, recent news here has been creating a lot of attention on wind energy and electric cars.

Now, I'm sure that this is the case everywhere. The price of fuel, global warming, etc., has been creating a lot of interest in these topics everywhere.

Here, however, the attention is a little different. I think some are concerned about the possible arrival of electric cars, as the state produces a lot of petroleum oil. If oil goes, the thought is, that's bad. The concern is likely very premature, as I doubt that electric cars will be everywhere soon.

Wind energy has been in the news darned near every day. In regards to wind energy, there is more than mere speculation causing this. Two years ago I went across the state to some depositions and was shocked to see the huge wind generators going up down around Evanston. They were enormous. I'd seen wind generators before, but nothing like these ones.

Now I can look out from my house and see a huge wind farm on the horizon. And a wind farm is going in on across the river which will border the town.

Reaction to this has been very mixed. Some people are really enthused, as they view this as a source of cash from something, the wind, that's otherwise really irritating. Others are mad, as they don't like the way the generators look. There's been some concern that the location of generators, like the location of oil and gas wells, might disrupt sage chickens. Sage chickens are in very plentiful supply around here, but there's a movement to put them on the endangered list as the numbers are down in other areas (this is no surprise, down in Colorado, for example, people build houses all over what had been wild land, and then are shocked to learn that it is no longer wild land. Geez, there's no sage chickens in my back yard either. D'oh!). Given this concern the governor recently placed a lot of areas off limits to wind development (the industry says 75% of the potential good areas).

All this seems really knew, but on electric cars, I recall my father telling me that it was one of his earliest memories to see President Eisenhower's mother in law (at that time, he wouldn't have been President, but probably something like Captain Eisenhower) driving her electric car in Denver. Apparently she kept the car through the rest of her life, and even in the 50s, if she needed to drive somewhere, she drove it. Early in the automobile era there were steam cars, gas cars, and electric cars. I guess there was some technological rivalry as to which would come out on top. Perhaps we're somewhat repeating that era?

And on wind generators, I've been told more than once that prior to the Depression, a lot of ranchers and farmers would put up a generator on an old windmill. Granted, they were really only powering a few lights and a radio, and it must have been very unreliable, but it's interesting to see how that has come back.
Pat Holscher
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