Eureka! I've invented the road trip!

January 26, 2016 11:46 AM

From 1914 to 1924, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and nature writer John Burroughs took off every summer to "rough it" (shaving was forbidden), camp on the roadside, and visit the country's most beautiful places by automobile, creating a media sensation and kicking off the tradition of the Great American Road Trip.

Of course, "roughing it" is a little different when you're a famous and wealthy inventor:

"Edison’s mobile electric generator kept their campsites fully illuminated, and the men slept in personal tents embossed with their names. They traveled in a convoy of chauffeured Ford automobiles with an entourage of cooks and attendants. Among the 50-vehicle caravan on the 1919 camping trip was a specially designed kitchen car, which Burroughs called a “Waldorf-Astoria on wheels,” that featured a gasoline stove and a built-in refrigerator that stored everything from fresh eggs to rib-eye steaks. Inside the spacious dining tent, jacketed waiters placed bowls of food and pitchers of beverages on the lazy Susan that spun around the enormous round camp table capable of seating 20 people."

The Henry Ford (museum)
Film footage 1, Film footage 2
Flickr set
Full 1918 album with photos, maps, and Burrough's text

posted by Eyebrows McGee (31 comments total)

The Aztecs Invented the Vacation!
posted by tommasz at 11:49 AM on January 26, 2016

Edison....the ultimate glamper.
posted by triage_lazarus at 11:53 AM on January 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

That's quite a nice little journal they kept. It certainly sounds like glamping compared to Horatio's road trip a decade earlier (Previously).

(Bonus: BASIC program simulating an actual 1908 race from New York to Paris)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:59 AM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

As part of a conference last fall, we visited The Henry Ford (museum) you link to, one evening. I highly recommend it. Thinking seriously about taking a road trip back up this spring, when I'm not limited by someone else's schedule. Part of me thought "ugh, how many cars can we look at?" but it was a fascinating collection all around. I mean, they've got a restored prototype of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, Rosa Parks' bus, and the Weinermobile.
posted by librarianamy at 12:12 PM on January 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

So much mutual respect between nature/environmentalism and industry - and Edison sampling plants to find a rubber substitute for Firestone. Really good stuff, this.

"...we were a luxuriously equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort."

That pretty much describes the REI-equipped crew I hike/camp/roadtrip with.
posted by headnsouth at 12:12 PM on January 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

They might have made an annual thing of it, but Horatio Nelson Jackson, with Sewall Crocker, a bicycle racer and mechanic, and a pitbull named Bud, crossed the US together by car -- in 1903.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:13 PM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I read that as Harvey Fierstein.
posted by goHermGO at 12:14 PM on January 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Another great early road trip story, this one from 1915: Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday. Come for the adventure and small town sketches, stay for the rants against organized religion.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 12:15 PM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

While I am not at the 50 car, chauffeur driven, jacketed waiter level, I will admit that the older I get, the more comfortable my camping experience seems to be.

We recently moved to cots from thermarests and I have to say, they are world's better for tent sleeping.
Similarly, a couple of years ago, we switched to a portable fridge over a cooler+ice and it has raised the level of our dining quite noticeably.

I am holding the line on generators and strung lights and definitely no TVs because at that point I might as well just give up and go RV.
posted by madajb at 12:19 PM on January 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

You might as well go with the TV madajb. We were lamenting on our last trip that soon half the hikers & campers would have drones ... and then realized that the other half would probably be open-carrying. So with a TV at your site you can at least catch the footage of all the drones being shot down out in nature.
posted by headnsouth at 12:22 PM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

An setup like they had might convince me to actually go camping but probably not.
posted by octothorpe at 12:34 PM on January 26, 2016

Instagram or it didn't happen.
posted by lydhre at 12:42 PM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but Nicola Tesla and Mark Twain did road trips in one car.
posted by Foosnark at 12:45 PM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is there a movie of this? There's a movie of this, right? How is this not a movie?
posted by tallthinone at 12:45 PM on January 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Burroughs had quite the life. he was friend and mentor to TR, who took him on a trip to Yellowstone in 1903.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:48 PM on January 26, 2016

A related, fun read: Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 12:48 PM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

We were lamenting on our last trip that soon half the hikers & campers would have drones ... and then realized that the other half would probably be open-carrying.

When drone pilots go to war with gun enthusiasts, nobody wi- actually, the gun nuts are probably getting fines and community service time for destroying another person's property, and the drone pilots are out the cost of a drone AND the opportunity to irritate me while I'm hiking.

Congrats, The Future, you finally invented a good war.
posted by Ryvar at 12:50 PM on January 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

As a longtime SE Michigander, I always thought of the Vagabonds as 4 guys sitting around a campfire, shootin' the breeze, deciding what the American way of life would be for the next 100 years.
posted by klarck at 12:54 PM on January 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I seem to remember mention of this in the great Ken Burns series on the National Parks. If anyone interested in this hasn't seen it, I highly recommend doing so!
posted by trackofalljades at 12:57 PM on January 26, 2016

I read that as Harvey Fierstein.

Henry Ford would make a Jew run behind the car, come on.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:06 PM on January 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Where would they get gas? Were gas stations common at that time? Was gas used for other purposes prior to the automobile?
posted by zeoslap at 1:20 PM on January 26, 2016

Pick me up if you swing through Minneapolis. I'm dying for a road trip.
posted by Sphinx at 1:25 PM on January 26, 2016

zeoslap: "Where would they get gas? Were gas stations common at that tim"

Gas was used by tractors. Places with a good sized farm supply would have gas available at a minimum.

And there were already ~7.5 million cars and trucks in the US.
posted by Mitheral at 1:35 PM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

They certainly seem to have invented the most "American" possible version of it.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:08 PM on January 26, 2016

Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. If you find yourself saying "not to Godwin the thread" maybe just refrain. Ford was an antisemite, but getting too far into his Nazi ties etc will make it impossible to talk about the actual subject of the thread here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:45 PM on January 26, 2016

Cars are coffins dude! In 1918 a British guy called Cyril K Shepherd rode across America (almost) by motorcycle. And then he wrote a book about it, called Across America by Motor-Cycle (A few years ago, a friend and I tried to recreate his route. The roads are different now of course, and we didn't have to fabricate engine parts out of bits of wood found by the side of the road, so it was a little different).
posted by rodlymight at 3:49 PM on January 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

To the above list of important historical road trips, add this: Following WWI, a young Dwight D. Eisenhower participated in the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy, a roadtrip in which 82 military vehicles traversed the US from D.C. to S.F. It took 62 days, and was miserable, by accounts, filled with impassible roads and breakdowns. Presumably Ike dealt with the same aggravation in France as he and the Allied forces roadtripped to Berlin in '44-45. The TMC was is generally considered to be the seed of inspiration for the Interstate Highway System he birthed as President.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:53 PM on January 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Sunburnt, thanks for sharing that. I've been looking for it, although admittedly not very hard. Thanks for making a lazy man happy!
posted by disclaimer at 5:00 PM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

That Smithsonian link is not mobile friendly and fumbled the dates.

"From 1914 to 1924, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and nature writer John Burroughs took off every summer..."

So, when Burroughs died in 1922, did Henry, Harvey and Tom hook up the sno-cone machine with a casket attachment...flew in some dry ice perhaps?
I believe Ford skipped a year when he was running for Senate.

Love this one.
"Ford also loved practical jokes. On one trip, he convinced the cooks to slice wooden tent stakes into thin strips and boil them in the soup, just so he could watch Firestone, who was proud of the gourmet food he provided, chomping into them."

The 1919 cook wagon did not have refrigeration, but a built in ice box, Fords rival, Billy Durant owned refrigeration.

What a fun post, like darts.
posted by clavdivs at 7:37 PM on January 26, 2016

Of course, "roughing it" is a little different when you're a famous and wealthy inventor:

Ah, the perks of modern civilization. Too bad the trips didn't civilize Ford or his companions.

It was a discovery about those road trips that led author Neil Baldwin to write the book Henry Ford and the Jews. Burroughs took down transcripts of Ford's fireside rants against Jews in his journal, which Baldwin discovered in a visit to the New York Public Library while he was writing a biography of Thomas Edison. . According to Burroughs' transcripts, Edison also participated in Ford's Jew-bashing, albeit to a lesser extent.
posted by zarq at 10:32 AM on January 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I seem to remember mention of this in the great Ken Burns series on the National Parks. If anyone interested in this hasn't seen it, I highly recommend doing so!

Yeah, the history of road trips in the US and the history of the National Park Service are very closely intertwined. Some places (like Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park) were essentially designed for road trips. The documentary series goes on to point out that after a few years of that sort of policy the National Park Service had predictable problems when too many people started to show up in cars. Some parks still have that problem to this day.

The Ken Burns documentary features Edward and Margaret Gehrke, who took so many road trips to National Parks that Edward built his own RV, called the Bungie-Weck. He took pictures; she took notes. When my wife and I belatedly watched the series on Amazon Prime we were already in the midst of planning a two-week trip to a bunch of National Parks ourselves, and we realized that the two of them were basically our new heroes. Like me, Edward took a lot of pictures. We're renting an SUV and not building an RV, though.
posted by fedward at 10:39 AM on January 27, 2016