January 2011

IN 1896, TWO ILLINOIS BOYS WHO HAD set up a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, built and sold thirteen automobiles (two seats and a two-cylinder, six-horsepower engine with 138-cubic-inch displacement: $1500). Thus Charles and Frank Duryea inaugurated our automotive industry. The fact that Barnum & Bailey bought one of the cars from this first of all model years suggests how enthralled Americans were by the device a century ago; the world around you suggests how enthralled we remain.

Detroit has spent the year celebrating the anniversary of the enterprise with which the city is synonymous, and, in this issue, American Heritage does too.

When I told our indispensable contributor John Lukacs over lunch the other day that we were doing a special issue on the automobile in America, he said, “I hope you won’t make it too”—a diplomatic pause—“rosy.”

AS OF FEBRUARY 1908, ONLY NINE people had ever driven across the United States, and no car had ever driven across Alaska. No car had driven across Japan. As for Siberia, which had yet to see its first automobile, there was only one man who had ever driven across it alone in any kind of vehicle. It happened in 1791, according to the St. Petersburg newspaper Nichevo, and he had driven a herd of reindeer. Across the countrysides of both continents, the only roads were local roads—unkempt paths for people on errands, not on trips. France was different, though; it had roads designed by civic planners and built by engineers. Tantalizing stretches of smooth white highway incubated something there that was largely foreign to the United States, let alone to Siberia: the pleasure of the open road. French roads were so good that people could race on them, so good that race drivers could go too fast and be killed on them, and so good that city-to-city automobile racing actually had to be outlawed.

WITH FREDERICK JACKSON Turner’s declaration that America’s Western frontier was closed, in 1893—soon after the first concrete street was paved, in Bellefontaine, Ohio—a new era began in travel writing. For just because the virgin land was vanishing didn’t mean that American wanderlust had seen its day. To the contrary, movement for movement’s sake was still a national obsession, and Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” first published in 1856 as “Poem of the Road,” still served as the literary wellspring of democratic enlightenment. Whitman, whom D. H. Lawrence called the first “white aboriginal,” said that listening to the “cheerful voice of the public road” led to wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it more succinctly: “There is no truth but in transit.” And as long as people moved about, there would be travel journals.

TECHNOLOGY HAS AN ENOR inous influence on history, and automobiles are perhaps the most familiar example of this truism. Their influence didn’t end with the invention of the gasoline engine or when the first Model T left the factory; every new development in automotive engineering has ramifications throughout our car-dependent nation. The following list presents American Heritage ’s choice of the ten technological innovations that have made the greatest difference in Americans’ lives.

THE AUTOMOBILE IS NOT AN AMERICAN invention. But an industry capable of manufacturing automobiles in vast numbers at prices the common man can afford most certainly is. And it is this invention that changed the world.

To get some idea of just how much, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine it is six o’clock in the afternoon of a late August day in the year 1900. We are standing at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York City. On the southwest corner rises the great ivy-clad receiving reservoir of the city’s water supply. Now empty, it will soon be torn down to make way for the New York Public Library.

In 1962 Brown Military Academy in Glendora, California, was a boarding school modeled after the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Like our older counterpart on the Hudson, we endured the indignities of plebe year, stood countless inspections, and wore full-dress uniforms of a pattern first seen in the War of 1812.

On ceremonial occasions we stood resplendent in tight gray coatees, trousers, crossbelts, and white gloves, all surmounted by “tar bucket” shakos. Cadet officers merited the added glory of sabers, red sashes, and feathered plumes. Such splendor was not achieved without a good deal of effort.

Before parades we spent hours spitshining our shoes and polishing the brass chest-plates and the countless buttons on our jackets. Nor did we neglect our M-1 rifles (much carried but never fired). I spent ages rubbing the wooden stock of my rifle with linseed oil in order to bring it to the requisite state of gleaming perfection.

In the 1950s Georgetown University’s McDonough Gymnasium was the largest clean auditorium in Washington, D.C. (The Armory was larger, but it was filthy.) In the spring of 1953 the chamber of commerce held its annual banquet in the gym and invited President Eisenhower to be the principal speaker. Although campuses were relatively quiet in those days, the Secret Service treated this occasion as it would any other public appearance by the President.

The campaign for student-government elections was under way, and my friend Frank Van Steenberg was a candidate for president of the junior class. His campaign manager was Francis Murphy, a flamboyant New Yorker. Murphy thought he could use the banquet to help his man, so late in the afternoon he walked into the gym, found Eisenhower’s place at the head table, and slipped a “Frank Van Steenberg for Junior Class President” card under the grapefruit plate. Nobody objected or even paid any attention.

The year was 1955, and the U.S. Army had embarked on a program of developing relatively small tactical nuclear weapons that could be used on the battlefield. A series of atmospheric tests in Nevada had convinced military scientists that properly trained soldiers could not only survive such explosions but also take part in maneuvers planned to exploit these weapons.

These hypotheses, however, had never been tested, and the atomic bomb had taken on very frightening connotations. So to demonstrate that the weapons were “safe,” the Army decided to run a test with live soldiers. The purpose of the test was to teach troops that the bomh was just another weapon of war.

For information on the island’s attractions and hotels, call the CuraÇao Tourist Board in the United States (1-800-332-8266). From a variety of accommodations—ranging from guesthouses to j large resorts and even including a converted landhuis (Cas Abao)—I selected two. Each turned out, in its way, to be the perfect choice.

The Avila Beach Hotel, on a pretty, if small, strip of beach on the outskirts of town, is built around an eighteenthcentury governor’s mansion. A string of newer beachfront villas in a traditional Dutch style features larger, more elegantly furnished rooms, but nothing could be more pleasant than my thirdfloor room in the old wing, opening onto a loggia and open too to the sights and sounds of the sea just below. It was clear right away that the Avila Beach is the hotel of choice for the Dutch tourists who fill the island in search of winter sun and in some cases come to CuraÇao to explore family histories (Oil 5999 614377).

To promote their Caribbean island, the Curaçao tourism authorities like to use a specific image. It shows up as the line drawing in a logo or as a seductive sun-struck photograph. The waterfront block of narrow buildings, painted in bright, luscious colors—“tropicalized Dutch,” someone has called it—offers an exuberant variety of gables that to gather form a complex yet unforgettable icon. You can understand its persistence as an advertising tool. But I wondered if, when I went there, I would find that Handelskade, as the street is called, was no more substantial than the false front of an old town in the American West. Would the city of Willemstad and the island that stretched beyond it turn out to be a dusty disappointment?