COLM POWER tells the story of the Duryea brothers, Charles and Frank, pioneers of car manufacture

 

‘I will build a car for the great multitude,’ proclaimed Henry Ford when he announced the birth of his Model T car in October, 1908. At the time his statement seemed a little extravagant, but it proved to be prophetic.
In the nineteen years of the existence of his Model T, he sold 15,500,000 of the cars in the United States, as well as almost 1,000,000 in Canada and a further 250,000 in Great Britain. Incredibly, Ford’s total production amounted to half the entire auto output of the world.

Ford’s vision helped to change the way we live. He ushered in the age of the motor because he saw the car as a tool to help the ordinary man and broaden his horizons rather than an expensive toy for the wealthy.
Ford’s foresight eventually led to an industry that made him and his family billionaires.

Strangely enough, Henry Ford was not the first to produce a working American gasoline-powered car. This distinction is claimed by Charles Edgar Duryea, whose family also had Irish ancestry.
Duryea, the co-founder of Duryea Motor Wagon Company, was born on 15th December, 1861, near Canton, Illinois, but he spent most of his working life in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Charles and his younger brother, Frank, were originally bicycle makers, but later turned to making cars. The task of engineering the cars usually fell to Charles, while Frank built the cars as well as testing and racing them.

The Duryea brothers road-tested the first-ever gasoline-powered automobile on 20th September, 1893, in Springfield. Their ‘motor wagon’ was a modified horse-drawn buggy which they had bought for seventy dollars. To the buggy, they had attached a 4 h.p. single cylinder gasoline engine.

They continued to work on their ‘motor wagon’ and by 1895, they were ready to enter the first automobile road race in the history of the United States. The race was fifty-four miles long, from Chicago to Evansville and back, and it was sponsored by the Chicago-Times Herald. The prize for the winner was two thousand dollars and a gold medal, and the event was scheduled to take place on Thanksgiving Day, 28th November.

The excitement leading up to the race day was amazing, and the sponsors were confidently predicting that there would be a hundred entries. However, on the Monday before the big race, Chicago was covered in a blanket of snow at least ten inches deep. Many of the drivers backed out because of the unfavourable conditions, but the sponsors declared that the race would go ahead.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own