One of the innumerable tests in which the staying qualities of the automobile were brought out was the trip from Pittsburg to Philadelphia by way of Gettysburg by S.D. Waldon and four passengers in a Packard car, September 20, 1910. This run of 303 miles over three mountain ranges, with the usual accompaniments of steep grades, rocks, ruts, and thank-you-ma'ms to rack the machinery and bruise the feelings of the riders, was made in 12 hours and 51 minutes.
A little run of three or four hundred miles, though, is scarcely worth mentioning by way of showing what an auto can do in a real endurance contest. A much more notable trip was the non-stop run from Jackson, Michigan, to Bangor, Maine, in November, 1909, by E.P. Blake and Dr. Charles Percival. The distance of 1,600 miles was covered in 123 hours, which meant traveling at an average speed of 13 miles an hour in rain and snow and mud over country roads at their worst. In all that time the motor never once stopped. In the Munsey historical tour of 1910 a Brush single-cylinder car covered the 1,550 miles of a schedule designed for big cars and came through with a perfect score. If you know the hill roads of Pennsylvania you'll realize what that means in the way of car performance.
Still more remarkable endurance tests are the transcontinental trips which are undertaken so frequently nowadays that they no longer attract attention. One such trip which shows what very little trouble an automobile gives when handled with reasonable care was that made in 1909 by George C. Rew, W.H. Aldrich, Jr., R.A. Luckey, and H.G. Toney. Traveling by daylight only, they made the journey of 2,800 miles from San Francisco to Chicago in nineteen days in a Stearns car. They might have done better if they had not loitered along the way. On one occasion they stopped to haul water a distance of twenty-five miles for some cowboys on a round-up. The motor gave no trouble whatever, while the only trouble with tires was a single puncture caused by a spike when they tried to avoid a bad stretch of road by running on a railroad track.
The time record from ocean to ocean was held by L.L. Whitman, who left New York in a Reo four-thirty at 12.01 A.M. on Monday, August 8, 1910, and arrived in San Francisco on the 18th, covering the 3,557 miles in 10 days 15 hours and 13 minutes. This achievement may be more fully appreciated by comparing it with the transcontinental relay race in which a courier carried a message from President Taft to President Chilberg, of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, in September-October, 1909, in 10 days 5 hours, by using thirty-two cars and as many different drivers who knew the roads over which they ran.
Those who are fortunate enough to have friends who own cars know that automobiles can climb hills; and that the accepted way to do it is to throw in the extra special high gear, tear the throttle out by the roots, advance the spark twenty minutes, and push hard on the steering wheel. The fact that the car will overlook such treatment and go ahead is a source of never-failing wonder. Indeed, when it comes to hill-climbing the automobile is so far ahead of the locomotive that it seems like wanton cruelty to drag the latter into the discussion at all.
The steepest grade on a railroad doing a miscellaneous transportation business climbed by a locomotive relying on adhesion only is on the Leopoldina system in Brazil between Bocca do Monte and Theodoso, where there is a stretch of 8-1/3 per cent. grade with curves of 130 feet radius. There are some logging roads in the United States with grades of 16 per cent. How trifling this seems when compared with the feat of a Thomas car which climbed Fillmore Street, San Francisco, which is alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons on board. As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon the car must have been.
Enthusiasm may be expected to run high in the presence of such astounding triumphs, and it should, therefore, not be deemed surprising that accounts of hill-climbing contests are generally lacking in definiteness. The name of the car and the driver are always given with scrupulous care, but such incidental details as length of ascent, minimum, maximum, and average gradient, maximum curvature, and so on, are generally left to the imagination.
Among the few exceptions to this rule was the hill-climbing contest at Port Jefferson, Long Island, in which Ralph de Palma went up an ascent of two thousand feet with an average gradient of 10 per cent. and a maximum of 15 per cent. in 20.48 seconds in his 190-horse-power Fiat. A little Hupmobile, one of the lightest cars built, reached the top in 1 minute 10 seconds. De Palma climbed the "Giant's Despair" near Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, an ascent six thousand feet long, with grades varying from 10 to 22 per cent., in his big machine in 1 minute 28-2/5 seconds. A Marmon stock car reached the top in 1 minute 50-1/5 seconds. Pike's Peak, Mount Washington, Ensign Mountain, in Utah, and lesser mountains elsewhere have also been climbed repeatedly by automobiles. As the mere announcement of the fact vividly exhibits the staying powers of the auto in a long, stiff climb, the engineering details may be disregarded.
Next to its ability to do the exceptional things when required, the most useful accomplishment of the automobile is its wonderful capacity for standing up to its work day in and day out in fair weather or foul, regardless of the condition of the roads. This is shown every year in the spectacular Glidden tours, otherwise the National Reliability tests, in which a number of cars of various makes cover a scheduled route of two or three thousand miles, in which are included all the different kinds of abominations facetiously termed "roads." Other tests without number are constantly being evolved to demonstrate the already established fact that an automobile can do anything required of it.
There was the New York to Paris race, for instance. Starting from New York on February 12, 1908, when traveling was at its worst, and arriving in Paris July 30, the winner floundered in snow, mud, sand, and rocks, over mountain ranges and through swamps, in eighty-eight days' running time for the 12,116 miles of land travel. That was a demonstration of what an automobile can do that has never been surpassed. Yet the Thomas car that did it was restored to its original condition at a cost of only $90 after the trip was ended.