Happy Belated 100th Birthday - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

al76slc · #1 02-23-2008, 06:24 AM

New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago

THE telephone call that would change George Schuster’s life and, perhaps, the course of the automobile industry didn’t give him much time to prepare. He had barely 12 hours to catch an overnight train from New England so he would be in New York City the next morning, Feb. 12, 1908, for the start of the longest auto race in history: around the world, from New York to Paris.

A mechanic and jack-of-all-trades at the E. R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, Schuster packed light, thinking he wouldn’t be gone too long. As it turned out, six months passed before he returned.

By then, he would be an unlikely hero, a victor in the greatest automobile race ever. Unlikely, because Schuster was, after all, only supposed to ride along to keep his company’s car running.

Schuster and the winning Thomas Flyer he ended up driving are being honored with a 14-month retrospective at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada, commemorating that triumph of 100 years ago. The display includes the Thomas Flyer, which has been restored; the 1,400-pound trophy presented by The New York Times to the winner; and various artifacts from the trip including the 45-star American flag that Schuster carried the whole way. (The car will also be displayed in Florida at the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance on March 7-9.)

The 1965 movie “The Great Race” was loosely based on the 1908 event, which is being restaged for the centennial this year. On May 30, up to 40 teams are to leave New York in hopes of reaching Paris in about two months; they expect to cover 22,000 miles, of which 12,500 will be driven. Schuster estimated that his car traveled 13,341 miles under its own power and thousands of additional miles at sea.

In 1908, when the Thomas Flyer left Times Square on Lincoln’s Birthday to the applause of more than 250,000 onlookers, a dashing automobilist of the day, Montague Roberts, was driving. Riding along were Schuster and T. Walter Williams, a reporter for The Times, the main sponsor of the event.

Though 13 cars were entered, 7 were no-shows. The six starters zoomed up Broadway at speeds exceeding 30 miles an hour. The 1907-model Flyer roadster, powered by a 60-horsepower 4-cylinder engine, soon thundered into the lead. Behind it came a Zust from Italy; a Protos from Germany; and from France, a Motobloc, a DeDion and a tiny ill-prepared Sizaire-Naudin that did not survive the first day.

It was a historic undertaking; by 1908 only nine men had driven automobiles across the United States, none in winter. The fastest trip had taken 14 days.

The race contestants hoped to make it to the West Coast in 22 days despite winter weather, then travel by ship to Valdez, Alaska. There, organizers envisioned being able to drive over frozen rivers and dogsled trails to the Bering Strait, from which they would somehow find a way to cross to Siberia.

The head of the E. R. Thomas Motor Company had predicted that none of the six fragile horseless carriages, including his $4,000 luxury model, would make it as far as Chicago. That’s how far Williams, the reporter, lasted; he left in a huff, calling the event “insanity.” Another reporter, George MacAdam, replaced him in Seattle and traveled the rest of the way. MacAdam sent back daily reports by telegraph, telephone and carrier pigeon.

Roberts, the automobilist, begged off at Cheyenne, Wyo., citing prior commitments. His replacement, a Denver car dealer named E. Linn Mathewson, bowed out at Odgen, Utah. The next driver, Harold Brinker, withdrew at San Francisco (reached 41 days after the race began in New York).

By then, the Flyer had an eight-day lead. The second-place Zust was still in Utah. The DeDion and Protos were stuck in a Wyoming white-out. The crash-prone Motobloc never left Iowa.

The Flyer was shipped to Alaska, but travel there proved impossible because of the deep snow and thawing rivers. So the next day, the Flyer was back on a ship bound for Seattle, where it was shipped to Japan and then to Vladivostok, Russia. After San Francisco, the task of driving the Flyer fell to Schuster, a figure so unheralded that Times dispatches, when they mentioned him at all, misspelled his name in every possible way. But Schuster’s mechanical acumen kept the car running through blizzards, subzero temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he retuned the Flyer and repaired fresh damage. The Flyer had no heater and no top — not even a windshield.

Each participating nation promoted its car as a showcase of its technical expertise and ingenuity. Rivals said they were at a disadvantage because the Thomas team was permitted by patriotic rail operators to drive on trolley and train tracks. In the West, the Union Pacific even scheduled the Flyer on its tracks, as if it were a train.

The foreigners also protested Schuster’s repairs, which they said were so extensive that the Flyer was no longer the same vehicle that had left New York. The complaints were disallowed.

The Flyer was essentially a stock car, much the same as it had left the factory. The same could not be said for its main threat, the Protos. That car had been specially created for the race by a team of 600 workers at the behest of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The Protos, which in Siberia was sportingly rescued by Schuster’s Thomas Flyer from a mudhole, overtook the faltering Thomas as the cars approached Europe; a German Army lieutenant, Hans Koeppen, wheeled the Protos into Paris three days ahead of the Americans.

On July 30, the battered Thomas Flyer bearing Schuster; another mechanic, George Miller; and MacAdam, the Times reporter, reached Paris — and a gendarme would not let them proceed without a working headlight. A passer-by volunteered his bicycle’s light for the duty; the bike was lifted into the car, which arrived at the finish at 6 p.m.

It took weeks for organizers to rule the Thomas the winner; the Protos received a one-month penalty for various shortcuts (totaling 3,246 miles) such as missing Alaska and Japan, and for sending the broken-down vehicle from Pocatello, Idaho, to Seattle by train.

So the Flyer, which completed the race in 169 days, beat the Protos by 26 days. The only other finisher was the Zust, which trailed the Flyer by 48 days.

Schuster claimed to have kept his calm demeanor the whole way except for one incident: while in western Russia the Thomas company notified him that they wanted to send Montague Roberts to drive the Flyer the final miles to victory in Paris.

“This made me so mad I could have eaten nails,” Schuster wrote. The company backed off and Roberts stayed home — although he laid claim to having won the race until he died in 1957. Graciously, Schuster insisted that Roberts be on hand for the car’s triumphant return to Times Square on Aug. 17, 1908.

The Thomas Flyer’s victory, the first for an American car in international competition, had immediate history-changing consequences, Jeff Mahl, Schuster’s great-grandson, said in a recent interview at the opening of the Reno museum exhibit.

“The race proved the automobile to be a reliable and dependable form of transportation,” said Mr. Mahl, who has been a historical consultant for the 2008 event and makes appearances recounting the race in the guise of his great-grandfather. “It also marked the rise of the American automobile to prominence. Before 1908, most people thought Europeans built the better cars.”

Indeed, sales of American cars soared in the following years.

The race also generated scathing editorials decrying the state of America’s roads. Improvements began immediately. Asphalt was invented in 1910. Ground was broken for the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road, in 1912. Not coincidentally, that road — which inspired the interstate highway system — also started in Times Square and ended in San Francisco.

Schuster, who died in 1972 at age 99, did not collect the $1,000 prize that the Automobile Club of America had promised if he won. Sixty years after the race, The New York Times made good on the debt at a banquet honoring Schuster, then 95. He expressed appreciation but noted that the $1,000 did not have the same buying power in 1968 as it would have had in 1908.

Nor did the Flyer’s accomplishments help the fortunes of the Thomas auto company. According to Schuster, E. R. Thomas asserted that the race had cost him $100,000 — and “we just don’t have that kind of money” — as justification for not paying the driver the $10,000 to which he felt entitled for six months of round-the-clock, round-the-world work. But Schuster did receive the promise of a lifetime job “as long as there is a Thomas company.”

That turned out to be not very long: the automaker went into receivership in 1912.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/automobiles/10RACE.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=