The machine was geared rather high for any but favorable conditions, and could make thirty-five miles an hour on level macadam, and race down grade at an even higher rate. Before reaching Buffalo we found the gearing too high for some grades and for deep sand.
On the whole, the roads of Northern Indiana are good, better than the roads of any adjoining State, and we were told the roads of the entire State are very good. The system of improvement under State laws seems to be quite advanced. It is a little galling to the people of Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio to find the humble Hoosier is far ahead in the matter of road building. If all the roads between Chicago and New York averaged as good as those of Indiana, the trip would present fewer difficulties and many more delights.
The Professor notes that up to this point nine and three-quarters gallons of gasoline have been consumed,—seventeen miles to the gallon. When a motor is working perfectly, the consumption of gasoline is always a pretty fair indication of the character of the roads. Our machine was supposed to make twenty miles to the gallon, and so it would on level roads, with the spark well advanced and the intake valve operating to a nicety; but under adverse conditions more gasoline is used, and with the hill-climbing gear four times the gasoline is used per mile.
The long run of this first day was most encouraging; but the test is not the first day, nor the second, nor even the first week, nor the second, but the steady pull of week in and week out.
With every mile there is a theoretical decrease in the life and total efficiency of the machine; after a run of five hundred or a thousand miles this decrease is very perceptible. The trouble is that while the distance covered increases in arithmetical progression, the deterioration of the machine is in geometrical. During the first few days a good machine requires comparatively little attention each day; during the last weeks of a long tour it requires double the attention and ten times the work.
No one who has not tried it can appreciate the great strain and the wear and tear incidental to long rides on American roads. Going at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour in a machine with thirty-two-inch wheels and short wheel-base gives about the same exercise one gets on a horse; one is lifted from the seat and thrown from side to side, until you learn to ride the machine as you would a trotter and take the bumps, accordingly. It is trying to the nerves and the temper, it exercises every muscle in the body, and at night one is ready for a good rest.
Lovers of the horse frequently say that automobiling is to coaching as steam yachting is to sailing,—all of which argues the densest ignorance concerning automobiling, since there is no sport which affords anything like the same measure of exhilaration and danger, and requires anything like the same amount of nerve, dash, and daring. Since the days of Roman chariot racing the records of man describe nothing that parallels automobile racing, and, so far as we have any knowledge, chariot racing, save for the plaudits of vast throngs of spectators, was tame and uneventful compared with the frightful pace of sixty and eighty miles an hour in a throbbing, bounding, careering road locomotive, over roads practically unknown, passing persons, teams, vehicles, cattle, obstacles, and obstructions of all kinds, with a thousand hair-breadth escapes from wreck and destruction.
The sport may not be pretty and graceful; it lacks the sanction of convention, the halo of tradition. It does not admit of smart gowns and gay trappings; it is the last product of a mechanical age, the triumph of mechanical ingenuity, the harnessing of mechanical forces for pleasure instead of profit,—the automobile is the mechanical horse, and, while not as graceful, is infinitely more powerful, capricious, and dangerous than the ancient beast.
CHAPTER THREE THE START THE RAILROAD SPIKE
A five o'clock call, though quite in accordance with orders, was received with some resentment and responded to reluctantly, the Professor remarking that it seemed but fair to give the slow-going sun a reasonable start as against the automobile.