Transport: Dub

“I still remain the dub who thought people desired cheap transportation, only to see them adopt ‘traveling houses’ finished and upholstered better than their own homes and furniture.”

Thus bitterly did grey, puttery Charles Edgar Duryea, acknowledged father of the U.S. automobile, sum up his career a few years back. On April 19, 1892 he first scooted his pace-setting gasoline buggy along leafy Taylor Street in Springfield, Mass, to give the four-billion-dollar automobile industry its first real push. His contraption was pretty primitive. It grew out of a love for horses (“Think of it. We have no tails to dock, no checkreins, no whips, no blinders, no sore backs”) and at one stage in the gasoline buggy’s development he even considered building a buggy with a tractor unit shaped like a horse in order not to frighten real horses in traffic.

But others soon steered the auto industry into less horse-conscious ways. Next year Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds had patents, year after that Elwood Haynes and the Apperson brothers joined the motorcade. Sketchily financed at the start, the Duryea car that won the first U.S. automobile race (Chicago, 1895) and led the parade for several years with Barnum’s circus, never burned up the roads in a business way. Duryea was for simplification, economy. One model had only three wheels, another had all the functions of steering, braking, gear shifting, spark control and acceleration combined in a single lever. His competitors went out for speed and class, an abundance of gadgets. By 1914 Duryea had quit competing.

In recent years Charles Edgar Duryea, as a Philadelphia consulting engineer, lived in simple gentility in the Tioga section, writing letters in simplified spelling, championing prohibition, loans at 1% to make America the world’s workshop, Esperanto, anti-Darwinism, community ownership of natural wealth, and a slipknot of his own devising. Philadelphia reporters liked to drop in and chat with him on his birthdays, listen to him play his ancient reed organ. They went around to the little house in North 18th Street one day last week, but not to get a birthday story. They came to ask about the funeral arrangements.