Overlanding: The Early Years

"SWITAWI" (switawi) 06/15/2015 at 14:27 • Filed to: None

4

4

First off, I cannot take any credit here other than passing this on. My good friend Count Lee Bower (no lie) sent this to me as ‘relevant to my interests’ basically. So here we go ...

“In 1902 bicycle store owner Lewis Birdsong acquired San Antonio’s second gasoline powered horseless carriage. The first was a Haynes-Apperson delivered in person by a factory representative. Birdsong’s “Curved Dash” Oldsmobile was delivered by a mule drawn wagon from a train in a crate. Birdsong and his business partner, Frank Crothers, neither of whom had ever seen an “automobile” had to assemble the vehicle and then teach themselves how to drive it. The daring young men they were, they promptly took it from the house over unpaved city streets to a local horse racing track see what it would do. The attached 1904 image shows Birdsong on an Oldsmobile sponsored tour of South Texas. This vehicle was one of the first to be seen in many Texas towns and cities.”

(Originally posted on the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! Facebook page.)

I can barely imagine what it was like to travel by this means in that day and age. I’m sure the track width for the vehicle was probably the same as used in buggy construction, but I can also imagine there being no tracks for a lot of places you wanted to go.

Brian, The Life of > SWITAWI 06/15/2015 at 14:50

3

Neat! I am absolutely fascinated by Henry Ford’s early car camping trips he did with his little group of friends he called the “Vagabonds” back in the day: Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs. I’d love to go back in time and hang around that campfire. Wow.

HammerheadFistpunch > SWITAWI 06/15/2015 at 14:50

1

Not to mention no spares (or hard to get) and the thing probably broke all the time. Nutty.

SWITAWI > HammerheadFistpunch 06/15/2015 at 14:58

1

And fuel... Where the devil did they get their fuel from?

I’m guessing they were using kerosene which would have been much more widely available as a replenishment item.

SWITAWI > Brian, The Life of 06/15/2015 at 15:20

0

I’m sure that was the absolute best rural advertising Ford could get at the time.

I my mind the buyer’s market in the big cities would get exposed to print ads and would see the horseless carriages before anywhere else, and would take care of itself so to speak. But American population was still very rural then, and nothing was going to stir the masses board like having one of these early cars rolling through a small town.