The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  On the final day, Friday, two thousand Chicagoans flocked to the park.36 A light breeze wafted and the ground was again dry for fast conditions. The program was devoted to speed trials timed against the stopwatches. In a fifty-mile exhibition, Winton drove solo around the circular track. When he roared across the finish line, three official timers jammed their thumbs down on their watches. Winton had set an American record for fifty miles on a circular track, in 1 hour 17 minutes 50 seconds, an average of 38 mph.37 He was awarded the Chicago Auto Club Challenge Cup,38 valued at $500—about what a typical worker could expect to earn that year.

  Then Champion mounted his Orient motor-tricycle and cut Winton’s time by almost two minutes, to 1:15:51.39 Most important, the Frenchman became the first in America to drive a motor vehicle an average of 40 mph.40

  Driving headfirst into history as the first in America to hit forty miles per hour, Champion’s average for fifty miles in 1900 around the Washington Park horse track in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Cherie Champion.

  “It can be seen that had the Frenchman been allowed to go against Winton, he might have defeated him,” John J. Donovan speculated in the Globe.41

  The meet concluded with Champion and Wridgeway in a five-mile match. Champion won by breaking his record from Charles River Park in Cambridge. His time of 6:50-3/5 averaged 45 mph.42

  The records reported in Chicago newspapers were unofficial, but they had credibility on a track certified by the governing body for turf racing. Champion had displayed the capabilities of motorized three-wheelers. And he’d scooped up $500 in cash prizes.43 His announced goal of breaking the minute for the mile remained in the future.

  Champion lingered in the Windy City long enough to experience the local specialty of Wrigley juicy fruit chewing gum and possibly to ride on the brand-new El—the elevated train line radiating from downtown into the neighborhoods. He returned to Boston for a week before leaving with his Orient motor-tricycle to compete against Kenneth A. Skinner at the Great St. Louis Fair.44

  On October 5, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat estimated that close to one hundred thousand people ambled through the fairground gates on Big Thursday.45 Champion’s excursion into America’s heartland coincided with the throwing of confetti, as practiced in New Orleans during Mardi Gras—sprinkling little patches of red, white, blue, and yellow paper over the gowns of women and jackets of men strolling the fairgrounds.46 The contests Champion chose to ride at the mile-long dirt horse track, with its majestic grandstand, were a sideshow. St. Louis, America’s fourth-largest city, fulfilled its role as the nation’s gateway to the West.47 Famed pace horse Joe Patchen came with Coney, acclaimed as the next harness wonder.48 Even the equines had to vie for attention against exhibits of pigs, cattle, fowls, textiles, and embroidery along with steam-powered farm equipment for threshing and collecting hay. One man dug a well for every person who would watch.49 Barkers emphasized the advantages of their hog traps and cattle-loading platforms. In the amphitheater were vaudeville and circus acts. One performer delighted the audience when he jumped from a pole 110 feet tall onto a ten-foot net stretched above the ground.50

  Unruffled by the clamor of all the diversions, Champion stepped onto the track under the glaring sun, aware that the crowd was watching him as the prerace favorite. He won a pair of ten-mile motor-tricycle matches against his would-be nemesis Kenneth A. Skinner. An anonymous Globe-Democrat journalist was moved to write, “These machines can beat any race horse.”51

  The next month Champion boarded another train from Boston, in the company of Charles Herman Metz, bound for New York. Metz directed porters to load crates of Orient motor-tricycles with De Dion-Bouton engines, motor-buckboards, the prototype Orient Motorcycle, even bicycles for what was ambitiously advertised as the First Annual Automobile Show,52 November 3 through November 10. The title’s bravado suited Madison Square Garden and the nation’s premier city, with 3.4 million people.53 The sponsor was the Automobile Club of America, formed a year earlier by auto manufacturers and owners demanding decent roads.

  Metz’s Waltham Manufacturing Company joined thirty-four businesses exhibiting motor vehicles,54 the majority of them open-topped two- and four-passenger autos with leather upholstered bench seats like those common in horse carriages. Also among the exhibitors were seventeen parts-and-accessories firms in the garden’s great hall. Alexander Winton had exhibition space displaying Winton Motor Carriage Company vehicles near the exhibit of a one-year-old company from Warren, Ohio, offering an auto called Ohio Model A. It had a one-cylinder gas engine and a tiller for steering, and it was sold without a top or windshield. The Ohio Model A was made by James Ward Packard.

  At some point Champion and Packard likely met at the show. Packard, thirty-seven, wore rimless spectacles, a bow tie, and a fresh, white collar. He exuded self-assurance from operating the thriving Packard Electric Company. It produced electric light bulbs, transformers, and cables. James Ward Packard earned millions in profits, which he deployed as capital for his auto company.55

  James Ward Packard was a mechanical engineer from Lehigh University. He had researched Panhard-Levassor auto bodies, which were built with steel, as opposed to American autos, which relied on wood. He would have sought from Champion personal anecdotes about the men behind the Panhard-Levassor Motor Company. Packard even had a ready conversation icebreaker—he had founded the Lehigh University Bicycle Club.56 Albert, for his part, was under the influence of what he saw, and he contemplated how to find his way into the auto industry.

  Nineteen companies in the garden’s great hall displayed automobiles that used gas-combustion engines, seven companies displayed autos powered by steam, two hawked autos with engines that used a combination of gasoline and electric (forerunners to today’s hybrids), and six companies exhibited engines that were electric, running on lead-acid batteries.57 Prices ranged from $250 for an Orient motor-tricycle to $10,000 for a Columbia- Electric Vehicle Company automobile.58 The Columbia-Electric Vehicle Company of Hartford stood out as America’s biggest auto company—in 1899 it had manufactured 2,092 vehicles, accounting for half the cars made that year.59 Hartford was ready to become synonymous with automobile manufacturing in the twentieth century.

  America in 1900 had more electric than steam-powered autos; gasoline-fueled autos were the minority.60 Each technology had strengths and weaknesses. The technology that overcame its weaknesses would rule the industry.

  Electrics had a range approximating forty miles, were capable of a speedy 30 mph, and easily conquered hills.61 Urban women favored electrics, which started by pushing the ignition button, and the motor ran smooth and silent. However, lead-acid batteries were heavy—the Columbia-Electric Vehicle Company battery weighed twelve hundred pounds,62 the weight of a big workhorse. Electricity to charge batteries was exclusive to metropolitan communities; rural America, then home to most of the nation’s population, lacked power into the 1940s.63 Thomas Edison, illustrious for inventing the first electric light bulb, the phonograph, and other modern wonders, announced from his research and development laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, that he planned to make a game-changer nickel-iron battery that would store extra energy and have a longer life.64 The wizard of Menlo Park raised expectations for electrics to win the automobile war.

  Steam-powered autos, called “steamers,” were promoted for the virtues of simple steam power over complex internal-combustion engines, derided by steamer manufacturers as relying on a sinister “internal-explosion.”65 The Stanley Steamer used only thirteen moving parts in its two-cylinder motor—eliminating the need for a transmission or gearshift.66 However, owners of steamers complained that up to twenty minutes were required to heat the boilers before the vehicles could move, and once underway they needed frequent stops to add water.

  The first American to build a steam automobile may have been Ransom Eli Olds in Lansing, Michigan, in 1894, although in two years Olds had switched to making autos running on gasoline, which he offered at the 1900 New York s
how. Olds, Winton, and other automakers with internal-combustion engines used primitive fuels such as coal oil (a form of which was trademarked as Kerosene), ethanol, benzene, alcohol, naphtha (a flammable liquid distilled from petroleum, coal tar, and natural gas), and gasoline.67

  Of all the fuels, gasoline was the Cinderella. It was long regarded as an unwanted byproduct of Kerosene until around the 1890s and the advent of electric lights, which weakened Kerosene’s commercial beauty while gasoline was found—by trial and error—to boost combustion-engine horsepower. Winton advertised that driving his motor carriages cost the attractive price of a half-cent per mile. Gasoline sold for fifteen cents a gallon,68 although it was available only in limited quantities. The engines fired up by inserting a hand crank into the front of the vehicle and turning the crank, a process requiring muscle.

  At the First Annual Automobile Show, the New York host club sought to win the public’s confidence by constructing a wooden track twenty feet wide to show customers how to drive and maneuver around barrels, placed as decorator barriers.69 The board oval surrounded the rows and columns of 160 different vehicles parked on display—allowing drivers to commute from the exhibit floor onto the smooth track and prove the vehicles ran as advertised.

  Companies selling accessories had stalls in the great hall’s balcony. One stall was taken by the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Newark, manufacturer of tapered, flexible roller bearings made of celluloid, an early plastic that featured a spring-like quality that yielded to irregularities caused by poor manufacture.70 Hyatt’s general manager was Alfred P. Sloan Jr. He and his sales director were watching the cars go through their paces around the track like show horses when a tall man, slender as a reed, stopped by the counter and lifted his bowler to wipe his forehead. Sloan’s sales director invited the man to step past Hyatt’s front counter to the rear of the stall by the gallery’s railing and offered a chair, like sharing a box seat. Sloan was introduced to Henry Ford,71 then building a racing car in Detroit with Hyatt roller bearings. Ford tilted back in a chair,72 heels locked in the topmost rung, knees even with the level of his chin. The three talked for hours, innocent that Ford, a self-taught mechanic, would make an auto that would dominate the industry, and that Sloan, a recent MIT graduate with an engineering degree, would overtake Ford with a greater enterprise.

  The Mobile Company of America, manufacturer of steamers in the New York suburb of Tarrytown, had missed the display-space deadline, but the company annexed a zone of its own with a dizzying publicity stunt. Madison Square Garden soared 320 feet above the sidewalk and featured a roof-garden restaurant crowned by a tower supporting a statute. Peaking at 485 feet, the Greek Goddess Diana was mounted on ball bearings so her bow and arrow continually pointed into the wind. The Mobile Company of America rented the roof garden and built an outdoor board ramp two hundred feet long with a wooden “hill”73 ascending fifty-three feet, the height of five stories, to demonstrate the steamer’s climbing and braking powers.74 A driver titillated audiences looking up from the street by motoring twenty times a day up the ramp toward Diana, then turning around to go back down. On each descent, the driver halted on two or three occasions to show off the grabbing and holding efficiency of the brakes—to the awe of pedestrians down below.

  The eight-day show averaged six thousand daily spectators handing over fifty cents admission,75 a modest draw compared with the garden’s six-day bicycle races, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and other extravaganzas. Automotive journalist Chris Sinsabaugh would later recall that the show amounted to “something like a morgue as to attendance, for in those days there were many people who had never seen a gas car.”76 Those venturing into the aisles could welcome motor vehicles as a way to reduce the 450,000 tons of horse manure and 15,000 horse carcasses removed from the city’s streets each year.77

  Hardly any of the automobile companies survived long enough to display at later shows. Among the first to vanish was the Mobile Company of America, one of some fifteen hundred US auto companies that would form and dissolve between 1895 and 1930.78

  A ghost of the First Annual Automobile Show still flutters every Memorial Day weekend in the Midwest. Twenty-six-year-old Carl Graham Fisher had locked the front door of his Indianapolis bicycle shop and climbed aboard a train to New York to see what he had only read about in trade publications or heard from friends who had visited Cleveland or Chicago, noted for their car companies. Fisher located the Waltham Manufacturing Company exhibit. He strolled around with a roll of cash the size of his fist and nonchalantly pulled it out from a trouser pocket as though he wondered what to do with it.79 Impressed with the Orient motor-tricycle, he bought one.80 Champion would have instructed him in the care of the De Dion-Bouton engine and how to drive the machine. Fisher took it back home. He zipped around on his motor-trike to flaunt it, spellbound with the engine’s sound and smell. In a flash of inspiration, he wheeled toward the future of Indianapolis as a motor city.

  In 1900, Champion’s first year in America, nearly 4,200 automobiles—1,681 steamers, 1,575 electrics, and 936 powered by gasoline—were manufactured.81 That doubled the number built between 1895, the year of his adopted country’s first-ever car race, in Chicago, and 1900.82 Thus, the United States entered the twentieth century with approximately eight thousand autos83 for 75 million people.84 Most vehicle owners lived in metropolitan areas. Albert had every reason to join enthusiasts expecting that by the next decade autos would outnumber horses in US cities.

  Business commitments and travels didn’t slow down Champion from exchanging letters with Elise Delpuech in Paris. He was free to cavort with local girlfriends like Eliza Holaway, but Elise knew where he came from and was knowledgeable about his brothers Louis, Henri, and Prosper. Elise remained his tie to their Batignolles neighborhood, unique for quirky serpentine cobblestone streets and window boxes growing flowers. His first love, she owned a piece of his heart.

  Champion, with his chronic urge to work and earn money, craved attention and could inundate Elise with letters bulging with newspaper clips mentioning him from cities she might consider exotic. Mail between Paris and Boston took seven to ten days. By early 1901, Albert and Elise made plans for her to join him.

  Elise turned twenty-four in December 1900 and, as an adult, was entitled to make her own decisions.85 France was not large enough for her Albert. He had greater prospects in America. In addition, if he tried to return to France, he would be arrested. She had to cross the Atlantic for him. She was willing, but it was up to him to provide her with passage.

  Albert was still sending a portion of his salary to his family. To bring Elise over, he required more money. He had to have a successful season racing in 1901—or he would lose Elise.

  Winter weather forced Champion indoors to train again in the Park Square Coliseum with Orient teammates—tall, lanky Harry Elkes and short Johnny Nelson, of Chicago’s Swedish community, who had to stand on tip toes to reach the height of five feet. Nelson was twenty and competed with fierceness that made him more successful than his older brother, pro cyclist Joe Nelson. Newspaper artists and photographers depicted Johnny Nelson in profile on the bike, back arched like an attacking cat.

  Champion, Elkes, and Johnny Nelson used special Orient aero-pacing bicycles, fitted with a smaller front wheel, eighteen inches in diameter, than the standard twenty-seven-inch rear wheel. The innovation lowered the cyclists’ center of gravity and put his chest and shoulders—the greatest source of wind resistance—closer to the pacing machine to improve drafting and balance.

  The aero pacing bike prompted Champion to update his publicity photo. Around Boston, Elmer Chickering was distinguished for portraits of athletes, theater actors, politicians, and public figures. Chickering had taken the vintage photo of heavyweight boxing champion James J. Corbett—chest bared, arms cocked, wielding the fists that pulverized John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy, for the world title. When Champion visited Chickering’s studio at 21 West Street in central Boston to make an
appointment, he met Chickering, in his early forties, a flower in the lapel of his jacket over a crisp white shirt, a bow tie, thin hair submitting to a crossover, and the intent eyes of an avid listener. Chickering scheduled Champion to come back with his bicycle, shorts, jersey, and shoes. Champion returned, freshly barbered. Chickering posed him on the saddle, hands gripping the handlebar drops—as spectators would see him. Albert ordered prints in cardboard frames for his family and Elise in Paris and extras to hand out to the press.

  Champion posed for noted Boston society photographer Elmer Chickering on his aero motor-pace bicycle, with the front wheel smaller than the rear wheel to lower his center of gravity for better pacing behind motor-powered tandems. Champion gave out dozens of copies to the press for publicity along the Eastern Seaboard racing circuit. Photo by Elmer Chickering. From the collection of Lorne Shields, Thornhill, ON, Canada.

  Champion put his 1901 season in jeopardy on a Sunday afternoon program with a disastrous crash before Christmas at the Park Square Coliseum, racing a motor-tricycle against compatriot Henri Fournier. Champion could hardly pass up the opportunity to drive against Fournier, seven years his senior. With a barrel chest, bold mustache, and an insouciant attitude, Fournier personified Gallic swagger. In Paris Fournier had been chauffeur to Mistinguett,86 the husky-voiced cabaret singer whose smile beamed from hundreds of posters plastered around the City of Light. He also rode in the shotgun seat as mechanic for Fernand Charron in ultra-long auto races between cities across France—forerunners of Grand Prix auto racing—before he set his own world records. One of Fournier’s American marks of distinction, in late 1898, was that he was the first to drive a motor-tricycle around Madison Square Garden, a one-mile demonstration pacing a US cyclist to the garden’s fastest mile.