The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  It wasn't speed alone for which his racing days would be remembered. In 1903—the date is usually given as September 9—Fisher apparently entered a county fair race in Zanesville, Ohio. He brought along two Mohawks, one of which he drove; the other, depending on whom you believe, was piloted by either popular racer Earl Kiser or Fisher's own brother Earle.

  As one of these Mohawks roared around the dirt track, its driver—one of the aforementioned three, but beyond that, all bets are off—lost control of the car. It blew through a fence and flipped end over end into the crowd, killing at least one spectator outright and injuring a dozen others.

  Early auto racing was as lethal to onlookers as to participants. On the same day in Grosse Point, Michigan, Barney Oldfield's car blew a front tire, veered off the track, sailed fifty feet through the air, and landed on a bystander, who died a few minutes later. Oldfield suffered lacerations and a broken rib, which knocked him out of a race three days later in Milwaukee; a substitute took his car and became the first American driver to die in competition.

  Regardless of whether Fisher was at the wheel in Zanesville, he took responsibility for the accident. Asked years later about it, he admitted that he didn't know how many spectators had been killed, as " they were dying for the next two years."

  After that, Fisher's racing tapered off in the interest of other business. He wasn't easy to work with—Fisher could be impatient and abrupt, was quick to anger, and regardless of mood cursed in long and imaginative streaks. But his eighteen-hour workdays yielded results. He sold a lot of Packards, Oldsmobiles, and REOs, so many that he outgrew the shop and moved up to a three-story brick showroom on a prominent downtown corner.

  In 1904, an inventor named Percy C. Avery approached him for backing on a project he couldn't bring to market himself. Until then, automotive headlights had been lifted, unchanged, from horse-drawn carriages—they relied on kerosene or candles, which blew out at any speed above a horse's trot. Driving was thus a strictly daytime endeavor for all but the foolhardy. Avery had hit on a new and better idea: compressed acetylene was fed to gas lamps from a small tank, producing a hard, white light that outshone anything Fisher had seen. That September he, Avery, and one of Fisher's old cycling friends, James Allison, incorporated as the Concentrated Acetylene Company, better known as Prest-O-Lite, and started making the first practical headlight.

  It was revolutionary. The driver turned a valve to start the gas flow, turned it off to kill the lights, and when the tank ran low turned it in for a refill. Prest-O-Lite headlights became original equipment on many American makes, beginning with the 1904 Packard; photos of just about any high-end car taken between 1905 and, say, 1913 depict a tank on the running board. Fisher and Allison became rich beyond their dreams.

  Stuffing metal tanks with combustible gas wasn't a safe line of work, however. In August 1907, several Prest-O-Lite workers narrowly missed death when their factory blew up. Another explosion ripped through a company plant in December, killing one worker and badly injuring three others. In June 1908, four distinct blasts ripped through a Prest-O-Lite facility, all but demolishing a firehouse next door and breaking every window in a neighboring hospital. Those were just the Indianapolis explosions. The partners had plants around the country, and in all, fifteen blew; the dangers that Prest-O-Lite posed to surrounding homes and businesses got a lot of ink.

  It was only with unflagging effort that Fisher maintained his reputation as a local hero and grand-scale prankster. Among the makes he sold in 1907 was a personal favorite, Stoddard-Dayton, a big, high-end car built in Ohio. In a promotion reminiscent of his bike shop days, he announced he would push a Stoddard-Dayton off the roof of a downtown building to demonstrate its toughness. How he pulled off the trick is a mystery; the car was structurally reinforced and its tires partly deflated to absorb the impact, but getting the huge vehicle to land upright was largely beyond his control. He managed it, however, and in a parting flourish had the car driven from the scene.

  His greatest stunt came on October 30, 1908, when he rigged a Stoddard-Dayton roadster to a massive balloon and flew it over Indianapolis, vowing to drive back into town from wherever he landed. In reality, he'd stripped the car of its heavy engine and swapped it on the sly for a matching Stoddard-Dayton driven out to meet him. If the press was wise to the switch, it didn't let on. The city loved him.

  Even as Carl Fisher sold increasingly sophisticated cars capable of ever-greater speeds, a good road to drive them on remained hard to find. America's principal overland routes were descended from prehistory— they'd started as game trails, had been commandeered by Native American hunting parties, and later were widened into wagon roads by white settlers. Over decades of use, they'd been cleared of stumps—at least the big ones—but much of their engineering remained the work of buffalo and elk.

  Improving on that was no easy matter. A concentration of heavy freight wagons, or " horse trucks," had forced cities to pave their business districts, but the stone used for the purpose was far too expensive for the longer and less-traveled roads of the hinterlands; those were usually built and maintained by county and local governments, which had little discretionary income and could tax their citizens only so much.

  Rains continued to turn rural roads into quagmires. No event brought that to light quite so publicly as the great New York to Paris Race of 1908. Six cars—three French, one German, an Italian, and an American—left Times Square on February 12 on a twenty-two-thousand-mile marathon around the planet. As the race was originally conceived, they would traverse the States to San Francisco, travel by ship to Valdez, Alaska, and cross roadless tundra to Nome. From there the racers would drive the frozen Bering Strait to Siberia, then across Mongolia, Russia, and all of Europe to Paris.

  It couldn't be done in a modern hovercraft, let alone in one of the enormous, balky racing cars of 1908. The German entry, a three-ton Protos, was nudged forward by an anemic four-cylinder engine of forty horsepower; the French De Dion, even heavier, packed just thirty horses. Mechanical shortcomings were the least of the teams' troubles. Hours after a quarter-million people watched them leave New York, the racers encountered four-foot snowdrifts; by day's end, one of the French cars had quit. Once past the snow, they hit mud, which seemed to worsen with each westward mile.

  On day nineteen, one car paused on a steeply crowned Iowa road to ask for directions and " gently and firmly slid off the crest into a small-sized ditch." The mud-spattered Frenchmen in the De Dion " look like Negroes," a New York Times headline announced, and were quoted as saying they wouldn't want to live among such roads—surely Alaska's were better. Two days later, the American driver insisted that " people in the East don't know what bad roads are." On reaching Omaha, he compounded the insult: " Never before have I piloted any car through such fields of mud, through such horrible road conditions as have been found in the last two hundred miles."

  It didn't help that the drivers were provided few clues as to where, exactly, they wallowed. The same driver, Montague Roberts of Newark, New Jersey, wrote that Iowa had no road signs " except the few at various points which point out to the wayfarer that he can save money by purchasing his socks or tea at Podger's Universal Store. A hand points to the direction in which the economical traveler should go, but it does not state whether Podger's Store is located in Cedar Rapids or Sacramento."

  Much of the Midwest was no better, and even the best country road of the early twentieth century was primitive. The most common " improvement" was simply to grade a dirt road's surface, in an attempt to smooth its bumps and fill its ruts. A step up was sand-clay construction, for which a mix of the two soils would be imported and spread on an earthen bed; the result, at least in theory, was a surface that drained well and with traffic achieved a smooth hardness. It also broke down quickly under heavy loads.

  A little better was the gravel road, on which river rock or broken stone was spread on a graded bed; it held up better than dirt, especially to horse traffic, but had to be
dressed regularly to keep the gravel from scattering, and it was stripped bare by the skinny tires and higher speeds of cars and trucks.

  The most popular solution to that dilemma was macadam. It predated the automobile by nearly eighty years: Scottish road builder John Loudon MacAdam noticed that gravel highways didn't become smooth and durable until a lot of traffic had compressed their stone into a unified, interlocking mass, so on an 1816 turnpike job he covered a firm, smooth dirt bed with a ten-inch layer of stone broken especially for the purpose by workers armed with small hammers, then passed over the rock with a heavy, horse-drawn roller. The sharp-edged stones knitted into a tight bond.

  American road builders refined his system by spreading a thick layer of large broken stone onto graded earth, rolling it, covering it with a second layer of much smaller stone, and rolling it again. They then sprinkled the surface with rock dust, hosed the whole business down with water, and rolled it a third time.

  " Water-bound macadam," this was called, and it performed well under normal loads and low speeds. To keep dust down, some highway workers topped it with a thin layer of asphalt, a black, sticky, molasses-like petroleum goop that occurs in natural deposits around the world. Soon enough, engineers realized that asphalt or its coal-derived substitute, tar, also kept the rock in place, and began using it even where dust wasn't an issue. The bituminous macadam road, or tarmac, was born.

  In the years since, non-engineers have lazily dropped the " bituminous," and " macadam" has evolved into a synonym for blacktop. In truth, it's one of several kinds, the most common of which—and the sort usually laid today—is asphaltic concrete, also known as flexible concrete, also known as scrimshaw, a blend of asphalt or tar and an aggregate, or filler, most commonly broken rock or gravel.

  The highest type of road construction, the darling of engineers everywhere, was Portland cement concrete, but it was still in its infancy as a road material. A few cities had experimented with it on small jobs, and the French were singing its praises, but its first real American test was just then getting under way in Wayne County, Michigan, outside Detroit.

  At the end of 1909 the country had 2.2 million miles of state and county road. Just 8 percent, or 190,400 miles, was improved in any way; more than half of that good road was gravel. Concrete accounted for all of 9 miles.

  Carl Fisher had grown rich by recognizing trends ahead of the next guy, and though he was now enjoying a full-on boom in auto sales, it was plain that it couldn't last. The industry would achieve its full potential only if the country's sad road situation were fixed—and only if, in the meantime, cars improved to better navigate roads as they were.

  Every year, America's more than 250 automakers achieved new advances in safety and practicality—their products were sturdier, faster-stopping, more reliably free of catastrophic flaw. But they didn't measure up to their European kin, a fact underscored whenever they raced. Fisher came away from one such contest with the seed of an idea, that what the country needed was a big, high-speed proving ground where new cars and ideas could be put through their paces, a place where reliability, speed, and strength could be tested. " It seems to me," he wrote to Motor Age magazine, that " a five-mile track, properly laid out, without fences to endanger drivers, with proper grandstands, supply stores for gasoline and oil, and other accommodations would net for one meet...a sufficient amount to pay half of the entire cost of the track." He was convinced, too, that Indianapolis, which at the time vied with Detroit as an automotive center, was a logical place for it.

  In the fall of 1908, he bought a farm northwest of the city and the following February incorporated the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Company with James Allison and two other old friends: Arthur Newby, his bike and car barnstorming partner, who'd gone on to create the National brand of motorcar; and Frank H. Wheeler, the head of a carburetor company. The four hired a New York engineer to design a 2.5-mile rectangular track with steeply banked corners. Having judged concrete or brick too expensive, they decided on a driving surface of crushed stone and asphalt, laid over clay.

  The plans drew ridicule from many in town, who pointed out that attending a race would require a long buggy ride. But in June 1909, the twelve-thousand-seat grandstand was up, along with wooden garages, viewing stands, and a hospital, and by early July the track was far enough along that Barney Oldfield was able to take a spin and pronounce its turns " so perfectly graded that two miles a minute can be made with no greater danger to the driver than on the flat."

  That was even before Fisher's crews completed the track's layer-cake surfacing, a variation on bituminous macadam. The finished track was " said to be the fastest automobile racecourse in the world," the New York Times advised. " Expense has not been spared in the effort to give the public the best that can be had in the racing line."

  Ah, but forgoing a hard surface turned out to be a false economy, and a caution for road builders everywhere. Even bituminous macadam, sturdy and long-lasting as it had proved to be under slow-turning wheels, was no match for fast-spinning rubber tires. The first hint of trouble came when motorcycle racers showed up for the track's warm-up weekend and immediately complained about loose rock. Only six of forty entrants agreed to actually race. Two of them were injured. The program ended early.

  A three-day extravaganza of auto racing loomed, and as the arriving competitors started to practice—among them Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet, a Frenchman who'd soon lend his name to a division of just-created General Motors—the track's asphalt lost its tenuous grip on the gravel beneath. Deep gouges opened in the turns. Tires kicked up clouds of dust and stone. By the first day of auto racing at America's first speedway—Thursday, August 19, 1909—the track was wildly dangerous, its surface shredded, the air filled with shrapnel. Just past halfway in a 250-mile race, Chevrolet caught a rock in his goggles that sent glass into his eye, and had to be walked to the hospital. Minutes later, the car carrying Wilfred Bourque and his mechanician, Harry Holcomb, veered off the track, nosed into a ditch, and flipped, slinging Holcomb into a fence post that " laid bare his brain," as the Times put it, and trapping Bourque beneath his machine. " The accident was witnessed by nearly 10,000 persons," the newspaper reported, " and women fainted and the faces of men blanched as they saw the car leave the track and turn over upon the daring occupants, crushing out their lives."

  The American Automobile Association, which sanctioned early races, threatened to withdraw if the track wasn't overhauled by the next day. Fisher vowed that it would be, and indeed, things went better on Friday; the speedway's surface, patched overnight by an army of workers and mules, held together. But in the last event of the meet's third and final day, the right front tire on a car driven by local boy Charles Merz exploded as he rounded the first turn. His big National rocketed off the track, through a fence, and into a group of spectators. " The machine was in the midst of the crowd almost before its coming was realized," the Times said, " and a panic immediately followed." When it calmed, two spectators and the car's riding mechanician were found dead in the dirt.

  A few days later, the county coroner blamed Fisher and his partners for the deaths of Bourque and Holcomb, charging that the trackside ditch likely had made a survivable wreck fatal. At a separate inquest, the coroner found that Merz's blowout was caused by " the unfinished track, and that the Indianapolis Speedway Company put on the races before the track was completed and safe." Out-of-town criticism was even harder on the partners. The Cincinnati Automobile Club passed resolutions branding the races " hazardous and detrimental to the advancement of the automobile." In New York, the Times denounced the entire sport as " useless and barbarous" and " an amusement congenial only to savages."

  Word reached Fisher that the AAA was thinking about washing its hands of the speedway for good. He persuaded Newby to underwrite paving the entire track with ten-pound bricks, then went to the papers. " We are ready to spend $100,000 or more, if necessary, to make the speedway safe for spectators as well as drivers," he announced
. " When the job is completed, we definitely will have the world's finest and safest race course; and I'm sure everyone connected with racing will want to return to Indianapolis at the earliest opportunity."

  Crews laid down 3.2 million bricks over the next two months. Turns were rimmed with concrete walls. The Brickyard was born. The first Indianapolis 500 took place two springs later, and eighty thousand fans showed up. Carl Fisher drove the pace car.

  ***

  Fisher was as busy as ever after the speedway's opening. He married a teenaged admirer, Jane Watts; with several partners, he founded his own car company, Empire, and produced a middling couple of models; he started an aeronautics firm that didn't amount to much; he, Allison, and Wheeler built lavish estates on adjoining properties on Indianapolis's north side. He weathered another Prest-O-Lite tragedy, this one the costliest of all—the deaths of ten men in a construction accident at a new plant. And somehow he found time to drive, and to grow increasingly frustrated behind the wheel.

  Most of the roads in and around Indianapolis, as everywhere else, remained bare-dirt scars flanked by deep and weedy ditches. The newer ones had high crowns, their edges sloping downhill from their centers to drain water, but it wasn't long before they were mashed into concavity and diabolically rutted. Some highways were dragged, meaning that after a rain a neighboring landowner would hitch a horse to a rig of split logs and pull it over the ruts to flatten them out. Rebuilding a road consisted of shoveling dirt from its sides into the middle, then tamping it down. Grading with a horse-drawn blade was a cause for local celebration. But even well-built and well-maintained roads doglegged to nowhere or jogged along section lines surveyed a century before. Theoretically, 382 miles of local road had been improved, but you wouldn't know it; outside of the city proper, the area's only modern, reliable stretch of pavement was on the way to the speedway, and Fisher and his partners had built it.