Moving Around: A Century of Transportation

Your Own Set of Wheels: The Automobile

Inventors and backyard tinkerers had been trying to develop self-propelled vehicles for more than a century before the Duryea Brothers built the first production run, gasoline-powered automobile in Springfield, Massachusetts in February 1896. By the end of 1896 they had built another 12 identical vehicles—the American automobile industry had been born. Early horseless carriage making owed much to the bicycle business, which provided a legacy of precision machining, production techniques, advanced steel metallurgy, drive-train concepts, and reduced-friction wheels with pneumatic tires.. Many well-known bicycle builders also became automobile builders. For a time, the nation’s leading bicycle builder, Pope Manufacturing of Hartford, was also the leading automobile builder. By 1906, early cars started to look less like ‘horseless carriages’ and more like European-type cars with a chassis that was lower to the ground slung between the front and rear sets of wheels. Over the next few decades, as the automobile proved itself to be convenient and reliable, it became a catalyst for change in American culture as Americans realized its potential for further increasing their personal freedom and independence.

< Five men ride in a touring car on a residential street in Ridgefield in 1904. Each of the men is dressed in a suit and wears some kind of hat, either a fedora, a driving-cap, or a straw skimmer or boater. Traveling by automobile was a dirty business until the advent of paved roads. Note the mud on the tires and under the fenders. Even when dirt roads were not wet from rain, in hot, dry summer months, roads were often wetted-down to keep down dust clouds caused by passing automobiles and the wind

Automobiles Ready to be Shipped via Railroad, Hartford, ca. 1916
Photograph by William J. Johnson
ca. 1916
Photo CD: 0552
File: img0010.pcd

< A long line of automobiles, possibly Pope Hartfords, wait beside a line of New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad boxcars around 1916. Once the effective mass-production of automobiles with standardized interchangeable parts began around 1910, many units of the same model of automobile could be made for sale to a mass market. This image with its long lines of automobiles and boxcars, juxtaposes the mass-transport of goods by rail with the mass-production of automobiles. While not necessarily a view of the new replacing the old, by the mid-20th century the automobile did replace the railroad in moving large numbers of people while today the railroad is still a primary mover of freight.

At the Station, Putnam
Photograph
Between 1910 and 1925
Photo CD: 0919 File: img0053.pcd

< The railroad station remains a point of intersection between modes of transport even today. This photographic image of Putnam Station taken sometime between 1910 and 1925 shows horses and
wagons, automobiles, and railroad passenger cars. As self-propelled vehicles became widely accepted in the early part of the twentieth century for transporting people and goods, the horse and horse-drawn vehicle would disappear quickly from common every day life. Even as the auto replaced the horse and, to a great extent, the passenger train, so too would the large freight-truck demand its share in the transport of freight from the railroad.

Link to other essays in this Journey:

>> Introduction: Moving Around: A Century of Transportation
>> Early Roads and Water
>> The Revolution of Steam on Land and Sea
>> Making Connections
>> ‘Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley’:
      Early Urban Mass Transit
>> Currents of Air
>> Your Own Set of Wheels: The Bicycle

>> Guideposts
>> Suggestions for further reading