A WORLD OF FIRSTS On March 13

A WORLD OF FIRSTS On March 13,
1907; Charles Jasper Glidden entered
Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. He'd
already driven to the pyramids in Egypt
(facing page, left), accompanied by his
wife, Lucy (facing page, right, at
center), and his mechanic, Charles
Thomas (facing page, right, at right).
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BY JOE SHERMAN
Imagine it's 1901, and you're rich. Cars are the new thing. You book a steamer to England
and pick up the best one going, a four-passenger, four-cylinder, sixteen-horsepower Napier you ordered
last falLYou and your wife tour England and then France, the only country in Europe with decent roads.
The French get out there and sweep them smooth with brooms. Your advice to the folks back horne? Watch
out for old people who freeze in the middle of the road as you bear down on them. And for chickens. They
flap up at the last minute and land in your lap.
A year later, you're back. You do the Alps, six passes, and take a run
to the Pyrenees. The director of the new Massachusetts Automobile Club
joins you for some hair-raising descents. So does a New York actress
named Martha Waldron. TheAutocar follows your trip, a sporting thrill
your father never even dreamed of, made possible by engineering and
gasoline. You crow about the freedom of having your own wheels. You
tell readers about your twelve flats, about your descent of the St Gotthard
Pass in a surprise summer blizzard. The fuel line froze; your brakes
failed. Thank God for the rocks alongside the road! You nudged them
with the front fender while working the hand brake. The snow cleared
before Andermatt, and there a gendarme gave you a ticket. It's against
the law to drive up there, you know. You paid the fine and drove off.
For an encore, you drive around the world, intending to do fifty countries and 50,000 miles. It'll take another five years and include a number of firsts: first over the Arctic Circle; first to Bluff in New Zealand,
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the southernmost point reachable by road; first over the Khyber Pass;
first ever to motor into Jerusalem.
The guy who did all this was Charles Jasper Glidden, my distant
cousin, the first person to circumnavigate the globe by car. He traveled with
his wife, Lucy, and with Charles Thomas, his faithful Sancho Panza in the
back seat in an oily smock. A apier apprentice, Thomas was ready to crank
the engine, top up the transmission, or get the wicker basket down when
it was time to pull over for a picnic. Just before being assigned to Glidden,
he'd delivered a new car to the maharaja ofBalrumpur in India and stayed
a year, tinkering with the machine and teaching the maharaja to drive.
Automotive history buffs know a lot about the famous Glidden Tours,
a series of annual reliability races that Glidden started in 1904, which
were taken over by the fledgling American Automobile Association. Few
people know that his real focus in those years was on the world tour.
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From the Hotel Touraine in Boston, overlooking the Common, he plotted the next year's adventures: Swat, Annam, Alexandria to Tripoli, up
the Irrawaddy to Mandalay, across Canada on rails, and on and on. Lucy,
a big-boned woman very fond of hats, cared for her mother, who shared
the apartment with the world travelers when they were home.
All the traveling was in Napiers: a 16 HP model, a 20 HP, and, finally, a 24 HP with a specially built tonneau to hold a hundred maps, two
typewriters, tools, parts, and clothes, including waterproof dusters for
the inevitable downpours.
one of the cars had a windshield (Glidden
loved goggles, the wind in his face). Lubrication was complex: mechanically off the engine, by drip-feed valves mounted on the dash, and by
hand. The brakes were terrible and only on the rear wheels. "Front
brakes were inconsistent," said Evan Ide, the curator of the Larz Anderson Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts. He fished his hand around
in front of my eyes. "They'd just throw you all over."
I first learned about my long-dead ancestor's great ride while flipping
through a family genealogy. It said he'd made a fortune befriending Alexander Graham Bell when most people believed Bell was nuts to think people could talk to each other through a wire. Glidden, a twenty-year-old tele-
Edge's daring on the track and his knack for sales. Edge certainly sold
Glidden, who became one ofNapier's testimonials. Quotes from the American adventurer appeared in ads inviting prospects to come to the apier
factory in Acton and watch "a first-class automobile in the building:'
Glidden's third Napier was ready in June 1903. The 24 HP model
with the big custom tonneau for maps and clothes carried him, Lucy,
and Thomas to the famous Gordon Bennett race outside Dublin, where
Edge was defending his victory in the previous year's event.
Today it's hard to imagine a race, other than the Monaco Grand Prix,
with the buzz, glamour, and international prestige of the Gordon Bennett of1903. An American playboy, publisher, and sponsor of sea, land,
and air adventures for the rich, Bennett never showed up at any of the
extravaganzas he initiated. He didn't need to. Like the Irish affair, which
drew a million spectators-including
the two richest men in the world,
Baron de Rothschild and William Astor-his events had a cachet the
likes of which the world may never see again.
The fortnight affair had hardly ended when Glidden crossed the Irish
Sea, drove to Hull, steamed to Denmark, and headed north for his first
SIGHTS TO SEE Parked above the Arctic Circle in 1903 (left); at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, 1907 (center); "Cannibal Tom" at the wheel in Fiji, 1906 (right).
graph manager in Lowell, Massachusetts, set up one of the first phone
systems for Bell. Lines were run to customers' businesses through a window to a switchboard manned by Jacob Glidden, a younger brother. By
1900, Charles Jasper Glidden was president of the Bell System and flush
enough to retire at forty-two. Childless, a first adopter of new technologies, and adventurous in a practical sort of way, he got interested in cars.
Cars were so new that ''you carried your mechanic with you;' Michael
Ware, the director of the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, England,
told me several years ago. "In fact, it wasn't unusual for a gentleman to
buy a car and a mechanic at the same time. Blacksmiths adapted as quick1yas they could, but none of them had been trained to fix a car."
That explained why twenty-something Charles Thomas virtually lived
with Glidden for six years. I met Thomas's daughter, Laura Jepson, in
an ancient English tavern in Rottingdean to talk about her dad. Jepson
was eighty-nine. Her husband, WUf, was ninety-two. Later, at their
home, they showed me old albums of travel photos taken by Thomas.
There were brittle, faded shots of Asia and the South Pacific.
"They stayed at the Raffles Hotel soon after it opened;' Laura said. I
looked at her milky eyes; she seemed to be daydreaming.
"Here's ew Zealand and Tasmania;' Wilf interrupted, handing me
more photo albums. "Here's Japan:'
Laura said her dad joined Napier because of Selwyn Francis Edge. He
had collaborated with Montague Napier, an engineer, to create a company with mechanical know-how and sales chutzpah. Napier's success
preceded that of Rolls-Royce, a similar collaboration between Henry
Royce, a gifted engineer, and Charles Rolls, the marque's master salesman. After 1910, Rolls-Royce became Napier's strongest competition.
Early success came from Montague Napier's mechanical strengths and
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"first;' the crossing of the Arctic Circle in a car that Norwegian officials
suddenly wanted little to do with. They insisted that the American publish his route, notify every town of his arrival time, and pay a man on horseback to ride ahead and warn people that a car was coming. Glidden liked
challenges and logistics, but this was ridiculous. He drove north through
Sweden, where officials were more progressive.
In Stockholm, Glidden counted five cars. Then none. A long, empty road
cut through hundreds of miles of dark forests. The going was slow, mysterious. Each evening, he typed dispatches to mail to editors who were following his exploits. In Lapland, it rained. Long-distance driving, as much
a show of stamina as of technology, made its own fashion statement in
the wet as waterproof dusters, boots, gloves, and hats were pulled on. Some
Swedes and Lapps who came out to watch the strange, noisy, muddy, newfangled thing roll by with its goggled passengers must have thought it was
from outer space. A few raised flags; the Napier was the first car they had
ever seen. Lapps didn't like having their pictures taken, though, Glidden
noted. He stuck with one of his rules: no shots without permission.
On August 16, he parked above the Arctic Circle. A photo shows
him and Lucy bundled up, a local postmaster standing by the fender,
flags crisscrossed in front of the radiator. The travelers look beat.
Glidden wasn't alone in his hunger for automotive firsts. While he
slogged through Sweden, Dr. H. elson Jackson was crossing the bad
American roads that Europeans liked to poke fun at. Jackson drove a 20horsepower Winton, With him on the first car trip across America were
a mechanic named Sewall Crocker and a goggle-wearing dog named Bud.
In 1904, Glidden bagged two more firsts. Beginning in Minneapolis,
he drove to Vancouver on tracks of the Soo Pacific and Canadian Pacific
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Railways, using custom-made wheels with steel flanges. "Steel wheels
against steel rails make considerable noise;' he told readers of The Car. "We
found it advisable to stuff our ears with cotton." The Napier didn't sway,
though, like a normal train, and the view of the mountains was magnificent. "I see no reason why an automobile could not make as good time
across the continent as a locomotive;' Glidden said.
In Vancouver, he announced the Glidden Tour, with a rotating trophy
designed by Tiffany (now on display in the lobby of AAA headquarters in
Orlando). Before steaming for the South Pacific with the Napier lashed
on deck, Glidden lectured to a packed house in Vancouver's City Hall. He
wowed the audience with the latest visual technology, a stereopticon. He
showed 160 pictures from eighteen countries. He passed along a tip for
driving in the mountains: "Drive close to the wall side in event of the car
stopping and the brakes failing. You can back quickly against the wall,
which I have been obliged to do on exceedingly steep grades three times:'
Several months later, in Sydney, the "world girdling motorist;' his own
girth having expanded considerably since 1901 ("We eat well;' he said), gave
a rare kind of interview; it was personal. Typically dour, semiformal, and
detached, Glidden may have lightened up because of his new first: reach-
science-loving, liberal capitalists that the twentieth century already adored.
Thomas took dozens of photographs: a girl draped in bamboo cages
holding songbirds; the humanity-swarmed streets ofJava, where suspicious
Dutch officials retained Glidden for days; the Napier on the Indus River,
boards wedged beneath the tires to keep it from rolling off a raft. In Asia,
there were no laws yet to rein in the freedom, speed, and arrogance of the
car. Motoring remained a grand adventure with few boundaries. And if you
were affluent and well connected, like Glidden, there were prime ministers to meet, princes to take for spins, natives to pose behind the wheel for
a photo op. This last stunt included the trundling forth of "Cannibal Tom;'
who bragged he'd enjoyed twenty-six feasts of human flesh. As happened
to most parading imperialists, Glidden fell victim to manipulating the exotic. The photos show uncomfortable-looking Maori chiefs crowded into the
front seat (Lucy sits by them, grinning so broadly her eyes are squeezed
shut), a monkey clutching the steering wheel, skinny Japanese men shoving a four-car rickshaw train uphill in Ata.mi with Glidden enjoying the ride.
Of the places visited in those years, the one that most impressed Glidden
was India. Exotic, crisscrossed with excellent roads (the British put Indians to work laying macadam surfaces as a way to payoff their famine
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Who knows what Glidden was really like? Having looked at hundreds
of photos of him, I can say he never smiled, frowned, winced, scowled,
or laughed before the lens. He was raised in a mill town, became a telegraph messenger boy at sixteen, was a wealthy man in his twenties, and
then developed the stiff upper lip, the inscrutable glare, the I'm-aboveit-all air of the Edwardian gentleman. Laura Jepson told me he smoked
constantly, but not a single photo shows him with a butt between his
lips. Then he died oflung cancer. Could he simply have been a closet
adrenaline junkie? A classic type A personality with a hunger for thrills,
a need for a daily jolt beyond caffeine, an addiction to wind in his ears
as he motored along, spending more every day for logistics and hotels
than the average American made in two weeks? Did he need the vital
"bumps;' as Bruce Chatwin called the wrinkles of travel in his classic
Anatomy of Restiessness, in order to keep the adrenaline pumping?
Asia did wonders for Glidden. Driving in Indonesia, Siam, Indochina,
India, Ceylon, China, the Philippines, and Japan in 1905 and 1906, he
reached a personal apogee, a zenith of wandering. It seems to me that
Glidden briefly became "Ulysses of the Motor ear;' as one magazine labeled
him. No heroic wanderer in the classical sense-he lacked the band offaithful followers, the hero's return to Boston-he did venture into colorful lands,
overcame immense challenges, and was a man of princely status. Of course,
he was also privileged, white, and symbolic of the technologically driven,
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The Napier can't drive across the water (left); an Egyptian monkey can't drive at all (center); other traffic passes on a flooded street in Java.
ing Bluff, the southernmost point in the world accessible by road. After a
1145-mile drive from Auckland, he'd parked overlooking the Foveaux Strait
and distant Stewart Island, a dark lump in the ocean haze. He told a
reporter that the reason behind all his traveling was one word-"Pleasure"and that he'd had no accidents to date but had run over 740 dogs.
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relief), India was a land veneered with English affectations, just like Glidden. Sweltering in waistcoat and pith helmet, he traveled 4405 miles, the
longest drive yet in the country. The Grand Trunk was "the equal of any
highway in the world;' he claimed. From the Afghan frontier, he wrote the
Dunlop Tyre Company to say that neither the plains nor the mountains
"affected the Dunlops with which his car is shod:' Always the gentleman,
he didn't allude to the dozens of flats Thomas had dealt with elsewhere.
Today, it's tough to believe that in 1905, India had the best roads in the
world. But back then, its population was only 275 million. You could park
right in front of the Thj Mahal; Thomas remembered inlaid gems flashing in the moonlight. There was time to ride huge elephants with a
maharaja, to inhale the rank smoke of bodies on funeral pyres along the
Ganges, to gawk at pilgrims from Nepal dressed in skins. Madras, Pondicherry, Burma. Then to Mandalay, where Glidden counted only two
cars in the city made famous by Kipling. On to Siam, to China (the roads
were "wretched;' and troops were stationed everywhere after the Boxer
Rebellion), to Korea, to Japan. "Sakes! What a man!" raved TheAutocar.
In Yokohama, looking alarmed, Glidden emerged from a telegraph
office. He told Thomas there had been a devastating earthquake in San
Francisco. After the marvels of the East, it was a bad omen.
Back home, Glidden found that the second tour run by AAA in his
name wasn't an amiable drive among friends from New York to the White
Mountains of New Hampshire and back but a competitive free-for-all
among America's young, aggressive automakers who wanted the prestigious trophy. Reo, Packard, Pierce-Arrow, Peerless, and all the other
marques wanted to win. When the competitiveness got to Glidden, he
urged AAA to choose the winner by the luck of the draw. AAA declined.
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Then Thomas told him he was calling it quits. His days of packing
the screw-down grease lubricators, checking the chain and the springloaded clutch, tightening bolts that had worked loose from the steel-andash frame, and adjusting the acetylene lamps were over. After 35,000
miles of the dusty back seat, he'd had enough. Or his wife back in
Rottingdean had had enough. "'Gone to Bombay,' 'Gone to Mexico';
those were the telegrams Mother got," the mechanic's daughter recalled.
"I think she got sick of it."
Thomas dropped this bomb after the tour's first serious accident. It
occurred just north of Mexico City in late 1906. The Napier was again
riding the rails. It hit a stone, went airborne, and rolled 90 feet. Shaken
up but maintaining his sangfroid, Glidden rummaged through the tonneau for his camera and took some shots. Then he hooked up his portable
telegraph outfit to an overhead line, sat on a barrel, and tapped out the
details of the situation. The Napier was a mess: front wheels splintered,
axles sprung, upholstery ripped. But he and his two passengers were OK.
The Napier went to London for extensive repairs. Glidden picked it
up that fall. At the Cafe Royal he spoke to Edge, Napier, and some
Sphinx, then west from Alexandria. That's right, west, across the desert
sands all the way to Tripoli in Libya. 'fry doing that today without air
cover. "A apier will go anywhere," Glidden had once boasted, insisting he'd visit oases with his. Now he did it, although he admitted that
he hit some real soft spots on his 400-mile desert run.
Off Haifa, the aging Napier almost ended its odyssey at the bottom of
the Mediterranean. It was on a schooner bound for Palestine when strong
winds toppled the mast and waves ripped the rudder free. Three crewmen leaped overboard near shore and managed to haul the boat in with
ropes, much to Glidden's relief-he'd worked for three years to get permission from the sultan ofThrkey to drive into the world's most holy city.
On March 13, he did it. Glidden entered Jerusalem. Thousands of awed
Arabs surrounded the Napier as he worked the clutch to get through the
Jaffa Gate. Later, no one took rifle shots at him and Lucy or at the American
consul, T. R. Wallace, and his wife in the rear seat, as they posed in front
of the Damascus Gate, which sat in the crenellated limestone wall of the
Old City. Wallace accompanied Glidden around the Sea of Galilee but not
on to Damascus or to Beirut. A final jaunt through Greece, up the coast
START YOUR ENGINES Intrepid automobilists pose at the top of a volcano in New Zealand (left); the start of the 1903 Gordon Bennett race in Ireland (right).
reporters, praising the workhorse he had decided to keep driving. He
bragged that he'd made 1000 new friends on the road, many of whom
he was updating about his travels. He'd fmish them in 1911, he said, at
50/50: fifty countries, 50,000 miles.
It was a false boast. Though reconditioned, the Napier was old and
outdated. A Darracq had just broken the two-miles-per-minute
barrier
in "a perfect tornado of sound," with four exhaust pipes on either side
of the engine and no silencers. The auto industry's hero now was Henry
Ford, a man seeking "a car for the great multitudes," not Edge and Napier
and their elitist partnership or magnificent amateur travelers such as
Glidden. These truths didn't make motoring in the Middle East any less
exciting, however. And that's where the "most indefatigable globe-circler in existence," as Automotor Journal labeled him, headed next.
Glidden, Lucy, and a new mechanic went to the pyramids and the
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of Croatia, through Trieste, over the Dolomites, to Paris, and back to
London, and Glidden's world travels by car were through.
What would it take to repeat Glidden'sjourney? Probably no amount
of money could get you through Israel and into Syria today or over the
Khyber Pass and into Mghanistan. Glidden's worries focused on logistics, securing gasoline and oil, contingencies for breakdowns. Today's
road warrior must deal with politics, terrorism, poverty, and hate, tougher
by far than worrying about when the needed valves would arrive or where
you'd find your next can of gasoline.
Still, with modifications, the great ride could be repeated. But is there
someone willing to undertake such a trip? Is there justification? Or will my
dour, adventurous, cool-under-all-conditions forebear remain king of the
world's long-distance drivers until cars are mostly dust?
r~'
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