Yahoo Autos The First Cross Country American Road Trip Sucked Up 600 Gallons Of Gas
Some of us have four day weekends to burn here in the U.S. thanks to the 4th of July weekend and a ton of Americans — 43.2 million, as projected by AAA — are planning to hit the road and travel over 50 miles from your home. But were did it all start?
The first cross-country road trip would take a little bit longer than a long weekend to complete, but it took only an instant and a $50 bet to spark the idea.
Read more
On May 19, 1903 Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson was hanging out at a private social club in San Francisco as a guest when some of the club members began a debate about cars. Almost no one thought the four (sometimes three)-wheeled personal conveyance was going to catch on. Cars were both unreliable and unsafe, especially on America’s rough, unpaved roads.
Jackson, a native of Vermont, was already something of an adventurer. After contracting tuberculosis forced him to leave his medical practice, Jackson went looking for gold in Alaska and Mexico.
It’s fair to say he was both a rambling man and car enthusiast — though not a mechanic. He was so incensed by the anti-car talk he bet $50 that he could drive from San Francisco to New York in under 90 days. After all, he needed to head to the East Coast anyway.
Now, that may seem like a generous amount of time — the transcontinental railroad, for instance, only took three and a half days to shuttle Americans cross-country — but Jackson and all assembled knew this would be a difficult journey. He’d be driving across deserts, mountains and forests sometimes without any roads at all. There were no road maps, because often there were no roads.
But Jackson wanted that $50. So he hired Sewall K. Crocker to ride along as his mechanic. The pair bought a two-cylinder, 20-horsepower 1903 Winton. When they set off on that fine May 23 day, just four days after the initial bet was placed, things immediately began to prove dicy:
