Fast and Flurrious
The slippery, snowy story of America’s first automobile race
One bright morning in July of 1893, brothers Charles and Frank Duryea invited a small group to gather on a country road near Springfield, Massachusetts. The men were promised the chance to witness a miracle. Instead, they saw only a carriage.
The only thing out of the ordinary was what they didn’t see — a horse or mule anywhere nearby to pull the contraption. So when Frank climbed into the driver’s seat, the onlookers were puzzled. When Charles went to the rear of the carriage and began to turn a crank, they were intrigued. And when the apparatus spat out a few curious noises and sputtered to life, they were downright flabbergasted.
With a thrust of his arm, Frank shifted a lever causing the machine to lurch forward and, with a playful wave, proceeded on a rollicking 18-mile loop through the surrounding countryside. The spectators looked on in amazement. The Duryea Brothers had just demonstrated the first functional vehicle powered by a gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine built in America.
When a newspaper account was published detailing another demonstration a short time later, the public was enthralled. Ambitious engineers, tinkerers and handymen across the country scrambled into their workshops to create their own motorized marvels. Some dreamed of reaping millions. Others simply wanted to outdo the vehicles being produced by friends or rivals. But one thing was abundantly clear: the new contraptions had captured the imaginations of Americans everywhere.
By the spring of 1895, the hoopla concerning the new conveyances caught the attention of Herman Henry Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald. Kohlsaat had been searching for ideas to intrigue readers and sell more newspapers ever since interest in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 had begun to wane. He’d also read a newspaper account of a “motor wagon” race that had recently taken place in France, where automobile development was already considerably more advanced. The spectacle had garnered significant interest across Europe.
Kohlsaat had his eureka moment. In May, the Chicago Times-Herald announced it would sponsor a race along with the promise of $5,000 in prizes for “inventors who can construct practicable, self propelling road carriages.” To help ensure throngs of cheering spectators, the event was scheduled for the Fourth of July.
Kohlsaat had two goals. Most obvious, he wanted to sell newspapers — and creating America’s first race featuring the amazing new machines that were capable of gamboling about without being reined to horse or mule offered the perfect opportunity. In the months leading up to the race, his reporters would be able to write countless stories to hook readers with details about the wheeled wonders and the men who built and drove them. But Kohlsaat was also genuinely intrigued by the machines and wanted to promote their development as well as America’s budding auto industry.
Automobiles were still so new, in fact, no one could even agree what to call them. Among the newspaper’s first efforts to promote the race was a contest offering $500 to the reader who conceived the best term for the novel contrivances. Suggestions included “horseless carriage”, “motor wagon”, and most curiously, “vehicle motor”. The terms “automobile” and “automobile carriage” were dismissed for sounding “too Frenchy”. Eventually, a winner was selected: “Moto-cycle”.
And so America’s first automobile race became known, confusingly — at least in the context of our modern vernacular — as “The Chicago Herald-Times Moto-cycle Race”.
Organizers originally planned the race route to extend from Chicago to Milwaukee and back, hoping to capture the interest of readers in another major city as well. However, when an inspection was made, it was determined that the roads north of Kenosha, Wisconsin, were neither wide enough nor sufficiently leveled for the primitive cars to traverse. So the turnaround was instead changed to Evanston, Illinois, shortening the course to just under 53 miles.
The date Kohlsaat had set for the event presented its own problem. After the race was announced in May, as many as 83 parties expressed interest in entering. But many were essentially hoping to build an automobile from scratch, in their spare time, on barely two months’ notice. As July 4th loomed closer, competitors begged race organizers for more time to assemble their entries. When it became clear just one functioning automobile would be on hand on race day, the easy decision was made to postpone the event until Labor Day. That date also proved optimistic. So the race was pushed back again to November 2nd, then once more to November 28th, Thanksgiving Day.
As anyone familiar with the whims of weather in the Upper Midwest can attest, delaying the event into late fall was playing with fire. Or more accurately, ice and snow. The evening before the race, an early season blizzard dumped six inches of fresh powder over much of the area. It was enough to shut down rail service into Chicago and prevent several entrants who did manage to cobble together functioning machines from being able to transport them into the city in time for the race. Another driver was forced to withdraw after crashing his vehicle while trying to avoid a streetcar on the slick city streets en route to the starting line.
While the weather delivered one obstacle, the law posed another. Days before the race, two contestants were stopped by police on their way into the city and told they weren’t allowed to drive their machines on public streets out of concern for scaring horses. Both drivers were forced to hire teams of horses to have their vehicles towed through the streets to the garages where they would be housed. In order to secure permission for the race to be run at all, organizers were forced to get city officials to pass an emergency ordinance allowing the use of motorized vehicles within Chicago.
Those who did make it to the start line may have wished they hadn’t. The wet slush made travel through downtown streets a dicey proposition. Dirt roads in outlying areas were rendered nearly impassable, with gusting winds piling drifts up to 24 inches deep.
In the end, just six automobiles rolled up to the starting line in Jackson Park, near the current location of the Museum of Science and Industry. Four of the entries were powered by gasoline engines. These included vehicles entered by the Duryea Brothers and three others made in Germany by Benz. The other two “moto-cycles” were electric, powered by large batteries.
As a crowd of several thousand looked on, the contestants departed one at a time, with Frank Duryea setting off first at 8:35 a.m. Before the field could even clear the border of Jackson Park, two of the contestants were forced to retire — unable to withstand the cold, the batteries of both electric vehicles simply petered out, leaving their drivers stranded at the side of the road.
The Benz sponsored and driven by R.H. Macy of New York bolted out to an early lead, hurtling along at a break-neck pace likely not exceeding 20 mph. Still, it may have been too fast. On Sheridan Drive, Macy butted into the rear end of a streetcar (evidently, a nearly unavoidable threat for early motorists) and the operator was forced to momentarily dismount to assess the damage before continuing.
A short time later, the Duryea moto-cycle appeared along the same stretch. Trailing just behind in a wagon being pulled by a single horse, a race umpire shouted to a policeman inquiring how long before the leader had passed by. “Twenty minutes, son!” the policeman responded.” “We’ll overhaul him pretty soon!” the man in the wagon declared.
The prediction proved correct. By the time the two vehicles reached Evanston, Frank Duryea was hot on Macy’s heels. In accordance with the established rules for the race, the leader drew to one side to allow the faster competitor to pass. Thrilled by the extraordinary sight of one horseless carriage overtaking another, spectators lining the city’s streets erupted in cheers.
For Macy, the pass initiated a series of mishaps that would eventually spell his demise. Not long after, Macy smacked into an overturned sleigh that had caught its runner in the tracks at a railroad crossing. Avoiding any major damage to his machine, the dazed driver continued back to Chicago, where he promptly collided with a horse-drawn hackney cab that had failed to yield the right of way. The crash rendered Macy’s steering gear useless. When it was discovered the width of his vehicle matched the gauge of the nearby streetcar tracks, Macy simply pushed the wheels of his machine into the grooves and continued into the city. However, when the vehicle’s engine stalled at a downtown intersection and couldn’t be revived, Macy finally had to call it quits.
As temperatures fell along with darkness, just 50 spectators remained by 7 p.m. to see Frank Duryea round the final corner and cross the finish line — 10 hours and 23 minutes after departing the same spot. Duryea’s official running time was set at 7 hours and 53 minutes. At some point along the course, Duryea’s vehicle snapped a steering arm, forcing him to stop at a blacksmith shop to have the part welded back together. The amended running time put Duryea’s average speed for the 52.4-mile course at 6.66 mph, about the pace of a brisk jog.
An hour-and-a-half after Duryea made his return, the only other vehicle to complete the course also crossed the finish. However, to the surprise of many, there was a different driver at the tiller — one of the race’s umpires. When the original driver, Oscar Mueller, and his passenger had both grown so cold that they became nearly comatose from exposure, the official boarded the vehicle and took over the controls for the final hour to the finish. While Mueller’s passenger was loaded onto a sleigh and taken to a hospital, the driver had insisted on remaining in his vehicle to the end.
What became of the sixth and final vehicle to have started the race that morning? Shortly after departing, the driver struck a horse and likely decided that a warm bath and brandy was far preferable to a long day dashing through the snow in a horseless open sleigh.
In the end, race officials determined that all of the competitors, including the two finishers, had violated the rules of the contest. At various points along the route, each of the racers had enlisted the help of non-contestants to extricate their vehicles from ditches or snowdrifts, make repairs, or in the case of Mueller, drive their automobile to the finish line.
Still, the judges felt compelled to award prizes based on how the vehicles were designed or performed during the race. The Duryeas took home the biggest prize, $2,000 (around $60,000 in today’s money), while eight other entrants, including two who did not race at all, were awarded lesser amounts.
Despite the many challenges and mishaps, the race’s sponsor deemed the event a tremendous success. Speaking on behalf of Chicago Times-Herald publisher H.H. Kohlsaat, reporter Frederick U. Adams declared that the progress in automobile engineering made as a result of the race was “watched by thousands of manufacturers in every part of the world, and there is no doubt that there will be great interest in the manufacture of these horseless vehicles now that it has been demonstrated what can be done with them.”
