Futility Closet - 012-The Great Race, Grace Kelly's Tomahawk, and Dreadful Penmanship

Episode Date: June 2, 2014

The New York Times proposed an outrageous undertaking in 1908: An automobile race westward from New York to Paris, a journey of 22,000 miles across all of North America and Asia in an era when the motorcar was "the most fragile and capricious thing on earth." In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the six teams who took up the challenge and attempted "the most perilous trip ever undertaken by man."We'll also see how a tomahawk linked Alec Guinness and Grace Kelly for 25 years and hear poet Louis Phillips lament his wife's handwriting.

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 12. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon Ross. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll follow a 22,000-mile auto race from New York to Paris in 1908, learn the significance of tomahawks to Alec Guinness,

and hear poet Louis Phillips lament his wife's handwriting. We received a really nice email this week from Luke Burns. Luke wrote, I am a longtime reader and occasional submitter to Futility Closet, and I just wanted to say how fantastic your website is and what a staple it has become in my life. I bought your book, two copies, as soon as I could and have thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I listen to the podcast every week. You and your wife do such an excellent job and are both so well-spoken and entertaining. I don't know what plans you have for the future,

but I think your podcast would fit perfectly into a public radio segment and can see it becoming a syndicated regular among the other shows on NPR. So we just want to say, just in case anyone from NPR is actually listening, we are available. Drop us a line. We'll be happy to talk to you. Luke explains in his email that he began reading the Futility Closet website while he was up late studying pre-med, and he goes on to say, I feel it is

very fitting that as Futility Closet embarks on what appears to be a new generation, I will too, as I begin my first year of medical school in August. I look forward to again relying on your site and now podcast as a bright beacon during some of the more tedious library sessions of my first few years of medical school. Thank you again for everything you do. It has been wonderful to have Futility Closet by my side during this journey, and I hope you will please continue to make the internet a more fascinating and interesting place. Thank you so much, Luke, and good luck to you in medical school. We are so glad to be doing our part, helping out the next generation of doctors here. But seriously, though, actually, we get a rather small amount of feedback on both the website and the podcast, which is kind of an odd sensation because you put something out there

and you know people are listening and reading, but you don't know what they're actually thinking about what you're doing. So we really do appreciate getting feedback from listeners and reading, but you don't know what they're actually thinking about what you're doing. So we really do appreciate getting feedback from listeners and readers, and we appreciate everyone who's written to us so far. While we certainly enjoy getting such wonderful positive feedback like Luke's, we do find that constructive criticism can be really helpful too. So if anybody out there does have any feedback for us, what you like, what you don't like, what you'd like to see changed or added for either the podcast or the website, or if you know how we can get ourselves on to NPR, then we'd love to hear from you.

So you can always send us an email at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. I've been reading this week about the Great Race, which was this enormously long 22,000-mile automobile race that took place in 1908, where cars basically left New York City and then drove the long way to Paris, around the world, going west the whole way, across America and across all of Asia and Europe to get to Paris. When you first hear about that, you think that sounds a little crazy. And when you read about it, you find out it's very crazy. One New York Times reporter called it the longest and most perilous trip ever undertaken by man.

It's crazy for two reasons. One, the automobile was still practically in its infancy. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly you want to call the first automobile, but it was something like 20 years before this. And the automobile had only been around for about 10 years as any sort of practical conveyance. So it was very sort of delicate, or at least regarded that way. The London Daily Mail called the motor car the most fragile and capricious thing on earth. If you owned a car at all in 1908, you were probably rich, and you probably thought of it as this expensive plaything that you had to coddle somewhat.

They had what were called driving parks, which meant that you would take your expensive car to a dedicated park and drive it literally in circles and then take it carefully home again. No one was thinking of cars having any sort of practical utility for travel or for transportation. You know, it was basically an expensive toy. That's one reason the whole race idea was crazy. The second is that this enormous race was going to be so punishing on these delicate machines. It was like taking a poodle on safari with you.

The original route that they'd planned out for this race was the racers would leave New York City, drive west all across the United States, turn right, go up into Alaska, drive along the frozen Yukon River, drive across the frozen Bering Strait in cars, then into Siberia, across all of Asia in Russia, and then get into Europe and cross finally into Paris, as I say, 22,000 miles. Carlton Mabley, a New York automobile importer, said, The cars will have to climb mountains several times to an altitude of over 10,000 feet and drop down the sides of mountain ranges on passes and roads that are well-nigh impassable, even to sure-footed beasts of burden. The drivers will have to go through rivers, which in many cases will completely cover the wheels and flooring of the car, and the motor will have to do its work at temperatures of 100 degrees as well as at 50 below zero, all of which turned out to be pretty much true. It wasn't completely unprecedented. In the previous year, 1907,

there'd been a similar race from Peking to Paris, which was more than 9,000 miles, but this was twice as far. And the really onerous thing was that they were going to do it in winter because the timing had to work out so that the Yukon River was still frozen when they reached it, because they had to drive literally along the surface of the frozen river. So that meant that they had to start while it was still very cold. At this point, only half a dozen cars had ever crossed North America at all, and no one had even tried it in winter. But no one was really thinking that deeply about it when they planned out the route. Most people who had cars didn't drive them at all in winter. The self-starter hadn't been invented yet, so you had to crank it into life, which was difficult.

There were no snow plows, no filling stations, no road maps. In much of the country, there were no snow plows, no filling stations, no road maps. In much of the country, there were no roads at all. So as they were driving, most of the teams just would have to stop continually and ask for directions to find out where they were going. Anyway, they decided to go ahead with it. 13 teams had entered the race, but only six turned up at the starting line to start on February 12, 1908. There were three French teams, German, an Italian, and one American team. And because of all this uncertainty, the cars, one writer said, looked like rolling hardware stores. The American car had two shovels, picks, axes, lanterns, three searchlights, extra springs, 500 feet of rope, a rifle, woolen underwear, fur coats, goggles, ponchos, rubber boots,

a coffee pot, a water pail, tire chains, thermos bottles, four spare tires, and a foot-powered air pump to inflate it. I like how they wanted to make sure they brought the coffee pot. Well, first things first. The impressive thing, I think, about the car, the American car was what was called a Thomas Flyer. They didn't make them much longer after that. But it was basically a stock car. It was the car that you could, in those days, buy on the showroom. I mean, they hadn't really fixed it up a whole lot.

It had no heater, and it had no top. It didn't even have a windshield because they thought that glass was too dangerous to put into an automobile in those days. So you would just sit there with your hat and your goggles and your gloves and hope that it didn't snow very hard. I mean, it had sort of, it had hoops that you could sort of pull a canvas cover over, like a covered wagon, but that's the best you could do. The, some of the European entries, by contrast, had been heavily customized. One of the French cars carried a sail that they planned to use to just sail across Siberia, which I wish had worked but didn't.

That same car had seven gas tanks carrying 154 gallons of gas, which gave it a range of more than 1,500 miles, which is impressive, but I don't know how much it helped them. The German car had specially created for the race by a team of 600 workers at the behest of Kaiser Wilhelm II. They had sort of promised they would win the race, so there was all this pressure behind them. So anyway, they all got started and immediately ran into trouble. It was going to be a very snowy trip. It was a very snowy winter then,

but on top of that, the roads were very bad. The Italian driver said, my heart is full of evil thoughts about the men who make the roads. The Germans had four flat tires by the time they reached Utica. The driver said, what terrible roads we have met. Why, if we were in Germany, we would be in Chicago now. In fact, one of the French teams had this little one-cylinder car that wasn't going to make it anyway, but it dropped out after 96 miles. It died on the first day, basically. And the reason for that is they hadn't hit the snow yet quite so badly, but the roads themselves were in bad shape. One of the authors I read, Julie Fenster, who wrote a book called Race of the Century, pointed out that the roads in this country were actually better in 1808 than they

were in 1908. Because once we had railroads, we just depended on them. It was the fastest, most reliable means of transportation between cities. So we kind of let nature start to reclaim our roads. They were just in terrible disrepair. That's interesting. So it was bad news for the drivers. There were a lot of flat tires. There were a lot of... Throughout this whole 22,000-mile trip, they weren't so much driving along

as just continually repairing cars that had broken down and shoveling and pulling them out of mires and stuff. There was a lot of cursing and struggling and not a whole lot of driving as such. And the snow didn't help with that. In Indiana, it took 14 Clydesdales to pull the Thomas Flyer, the American car, through the snow. The other teams, this was technically against the rules because you had to advance under your own power, but the other teams only objected temporarily because they all wound up doing that.

It took, the Germans eventually needed 17 draft horses to get them past Michigan City, Indiana. It was just unbelievably snowy. So they were just constantly shoveling and pulling the cars along. But all of this, because the race was sponsored by two newspapers, was getting a lot of publicity. The New York Times and the French newspaper Les Matins were both the co-sponsors of the race. And because of that, we're just continually giving updates. Both because it was sort of newsworthy and also because they were the sponsors. So everybody's following along. Which is important, yes.

Because the whole race was starting to change the public's perception of what a car could do. And beginning to give life to the idea of the car culture that we have now, where you can take a car anywhere. But it sort of informed the national discourse. The president of the National Bible Institute said, in this great automobile race, the reward will come to the men who patiently persevere in the face of gigantic obstacles. This quality is essential also in the running of the race of life. Which is true.

See, turned the whole thing into a metaphor. Right. So they struggled on through the Midwest into the West, which is the West still pretty much in 1908. When they reached Wyoming, George Schuster, who was the American mechanic, was advised to get a gun with a holster. He was told it will be wide open country from here on.

And it certainly was. They got to the point where they couldn't continue on roads in southwestern Wyoming. They finally had to get a right-of-way to ride along railroad tracks because it was the only way to keep going. They were classed as a special train and were allowed to sort of bump along the railroad ties for a while there. Finally, the Americans reached San Francisco on March 24th after 41 days, and they'd opened up. They were doing very well. They had a 900-mile lead over the second-place team at this point, which was the Italians. The second French team had given up in Iowa on March 17th, and the others were scattered around

the West. But strange to say, at this point, they'd reached the West. Americans had reached the West Coast but weren't sure where to go next. According to the original plan, as I said, they would go up into Alaska at this point. But the race committee, which was in Paris, was changing its mind because of weather. They couldn't be sure that the Yukon would still stay frozen, which they needed it to be. So after some dithering, they told the Americans to go on up into Alaska while the others caught up. The Americans did and immediately found out this was completely out of the question. They said it was just impassable. Alaska was just too rough to take a car through. They said if they want to proceed at all, they'd have to disassemble the

cars and put them on dog sleds. That was the only way to keep going. So this is an important, two important things happen here. The Americans, the race committee says, all right, forget Alaska, just come back down to Seattle and you can all just cross the Pacific by steamer, which is what happened. But because the Americans had taken this difficult detour up to go check on Alaska, they were given a credit of 15 days on the clock. That's one thing. The other thing is, while this was happening, the Germans found themselves just completely broken down in Ogden, Utah. And out of despair, they wound up just shipping the car by train from Utah to Seattle, which was against the rules, but they figured it was the only chance they had of continuing. So they wound up, the Germans had a 15 day penalty assessed against them. So those don't get racked up until the end of the race, but it's going to be important.

Anyway, at this point, they all just get on steamers and cross the Pacific. Most of them wind up in Vladivostok in Russia. The Americans wound up, had visa trouble and wound up bouncing through Japan, but they all wound up in Russia going west. They had thought this would be better than the snowy Americans, but it was actually, if anything, worse because Siberia was one continuous bog. There's a thawing season in Siberia, and they had hit it, and so there's a lot of digging.

Instead of digging your car out of snow almost continuously, now you're digging it out of mud. Mud, yeah. And Siberia, it turns out, is a rather large place, so there was a lot of digging. But there was kind of a sense of comradeship here. The last French car dropped out in Vladivostok. So now we're just down to three teams.

There's the Americans, the Germans, and the Italians. The Italians will finish the race eventually, but they drop pretty far behind. So it's really down to the Germans and the Americans. And this is very dramatic all the way across really the rest of the race, but particularly through Russia, because they're constantly leapfrogging each other. Basically, one team would get stuck or get into some real difficult mechanical difficulty, and the other would pass them. But then the others would, you know, they would constantly get rid of them. And then the next team would get stuck, yeah.

But I have to say, it's done with sort of the spirit of gallantry and good fellowship. But I have to say, it's done with sort of the spirit of gallantry and good fellowship. It wasn't really a vicious competition because they were both sort of advancing the idea of the utility of the car. And what they were doing was impossible to begin with, and they both knew it. So there's a famous painting of an episode that took place 20 miles out of Vladivostok where the Germans were bogged down in the mire and the Americans were starting to pass them and someone said let's help them and they did they stopped the car and got a tow rope and actually spent some time digging the Germans out so they could all continue the Germans actually gave them some champagne for that and then the same thing happened many miles later as they were approaching Moscow the Germans had taken the lead again,

but had some mechanical trouble, and so the Americans passed them. And a reporter that was traveling with the Americans wrote, As the Thomas flew by, a great shout burst involuntarily from the throats of the four men in unison. The Germans responded with the best of feeling, waving their hats and cheering. At one point, the Germans, just as the Americans had in the United States, tried to actually ride along the Trans-Siberian Railway because it seemed to be the most expedient way to do it. They couldn't ride on the rails, but they'd bump along the ties. One writer says that's like riding a bicycle downstairs. It's really hard on you,

but it's also really hard on the car. They were just continually getting flat tires, so that didn't last very long. This inventive American mechanic, George Schuster, actually wired the race committee asking. He had some extra wheels and thought he could adapt the rim flanges so he could actually drive along the railway like a train, basically. But they said he'd be disqualified for doing that. Anyway, they finally struggle out of Russia and into Europe, where the roads are somewhat better.

And in Berlin, the Germans, as you can imagine, got a huge reception on their way to Paris. There were mounted police and hundreds of thousands of people throwing the streets. And the Americans, so the Germans finally reached, the finish line was the offices of the French newspaper that was co-sponsoring the race. That's where you had to arrive to have completed the race. The Germans actually got there before the Americans, four days before, and got a big reception. And the Americans had kind of an interesting final chapter there. They had come 22,000 miles, had reached Paris,

and were, I think, half a mile from the newspaper offices when a policeman stopped them because it was evening, and the policeman said, it's illegal to operate a car on the streets of Paris at night unless you have a light which they didn't have so they were trying not to argue with us but to convince him to let them keep going this crowd had gathered around them to try to explain to the police officer that they had come all this way and only had half a mile left to go right finally a Parisian man who had a bicycle with a light on it just picked it up and deposited it in the seat,

and the policeman finally let them go by, so they made it finally to the offices. So the Germans were the first to reach Paris, but as I say, the Americans had a 15-day credit for going to Alaska, and the Germans had a 15-day penalty for having shipped their car way back in America. Right. So there's kind of a twist at the end, like in Around the World in 80 Days.

Actually, on paper then, the Americans won by 26 days, if you count that in. And then the Italians did finish, but they limped in 48 days after that, which is... Oh, wow. Well, I guess it's a big achievement that they even made it. Yeah. Anyway, this made, obviously, worldwide news. Speakers called the achievement the most remarkable ever undertaken in the history of sport. Schuster, the leader of the American team, said,

We're glad to have made the trip, but none of the three of us would undertake it again for anything in the world. He said, We've been running on three hours sleep per night for so long and have had so little acquaintance with real beds for the last four months that I doubt if we should be able to sleep tonight. He said, there was as much hardship on this trip as any of us desired, but we're glad that we have got first place for America. And as I said, this whole enterprise had so captured the attention of the world that it had started. it had started and just the fact that anybody had finished such a crazy undertaking showed that cars were a lot more, uh, reliable and had a lot more potential than anyone had realized before,

which is really historically the most important thing about this. In an editorial on August 1st, the New York times wrote the self moving car is to play a very important part in our future history. It is to be used for freight as well as passenger traffic. Also, it fostered a lot of interest in improving the roads, which people found to be terrible shit. Anyway, there's kind of a, I don't know if it's sad or funny, a capper on the whole story.

No one was undertaking this race for the money, but there was a prize. The Automobile Club of America had offered $1,000 to the team that took first place. But somehow, even though the Americans were the clear winners of that, they never got around to paying them this $1,000 to the team that took first place. But somehow, even though the Americans were the clear winners of that, they never got around to paying them this $1,000. George Schuster, who's this mechanic who had worked all kinds of wonders for the Americans along the whole trip, lived to be 99 years old. So he saw this whole flowering of the car culture that we've got now

where if you want to go to Alaska, you can drive there. You can drive anywhere. So they had in 60 years after the race, the car finally returned to Times Square in 1968. They were going to do

a transcontinental tour just sort of marking the anniversary of this whole historic race. And he was there for that. And the New York Times, the other co-sponsor of the race, finally gave him a check for $1,000.

It called it the slowest payoff in racing history. And he accepted this as graciously as he could. He said he was glad to have the $1,000, but it didn't have quite the same buying power that it had in 1908. But he died in 1972 at age 99. And I've always thought that's the best part of the story, is that he got to see the effect that the whole race had had in people's minds and the potential that it had finally realized that the car is really central to our culture today.

Right. We'll have a photo of all the cars at the starting line and a map of the whole 22,000-mile race route in our show notes. We want to remind you that if you've been enjoying the offbeat topics that we talk about in our podcasts, then you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which contains hundreds of assorted curiosities, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes and discover why other readers have called it a wonderful collection of fascinating nonsense

and the most useless book you absolutely need to own. This is just one of my favorite Hollywood stories. In 1956, Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness were filming a movie called The Swan in North Carolina. Grace Kelly apparently had a wicked sense of humor. She found out that Alec Guinness was worried about this zealous fan of his named Alice. He was worried that she'd find him in a costume in the hotel. So Grace Kelly arranged for the hotel to page him continuously, saying that someone named Alice was He was worried that she'd find him in a costume in the hotel. So Grace Kelly arranged for the hotel to page him continuously saying that someone named Alice was looking for him. Just to get under his skin. Just to mess with him. So they got through the filming and everyone was

packing up to go home. And one of their co-stars had acquired a tomahawk of all things from Summer, this big unwieldy tomahawk, and didn't want it because it was heavy and difficult to travel with. So she gave it to Alec Guinness. He didn't want it either for the same reason. So on an impulse, he paid the hotel porter to put it in Grace Kelly's bed. And then he packed up and went home. He went back to the English stage. She went on to marry Prince Rainier later that year in 1956.

And he thought nothing more about it until a few years later when he returned one evening from a performance in London and found the tomahawk in his bed. In his house? In his house. Oh, my. And his wife said she knew nothing about it. So he thought, alright. And by this time he waited two or three more years

until he heard that Grace Kelly would be visiting the United States on a tour of poetry readings, which she did from time to time. And on this tour, she was accompanied by the Shakespearean actor Richard Pascoe. So Guinness made some calls and found out that Pascoe and he had a mutual friend, and so he called him and explained what he wanted. And during the poetry tour, Grace Kelly in Minneapolis returned to her hotel room and found a tomahawk in her bed.

The best part of that piece is that the next morning she came down and asked Richard Pascoe, do you know the actor Alec Guinness? And Pascoe was able to say truthfully, no, I've never met him, because it had all been arranged through this mutual friend. Guinness said that really baffled her. I think that would have been in the 1960s, and nothing further happened until 1980 when Alec Guinness came to Hollywood to accept a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. After the ceremonies, he went back to his room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and found a tomahawk in his bed,

which is sort of impressive because he knew that she was in Monaco at the time. Apparently, she had made arrangements with the hotel staff, but no one really knows how she managed some of these things. And then the final exchange came in the following year, uh, when she was on a poetry reading tour in England this time and found the tomahawk in her suitcase in Chichester. That was in 1981. And then she died the next year. So that was the end of it. Um, which was kind of funny because during that whole struggle, 25 years, neither of them acknowledged that any of this was happening. They never said anything. They just did it. No, it's funny.

Afterwards, Alec Guinness was willing to talk about it. He mentioned it in a few interviews. But I've been through four different biographies of Grace Kelly, and I cannot find that she ever mentioned this to anyone. She's never discussed it with anyone. I mean, obviously she had some conspirators to pull off some of these tricks, but I think she kept it entirely to herself apart from that. We'll have a link to our story about the tomahawk in our show notes.

This is the part of the show where we usually do the weekly challenge, but it's been a little hit or miss how many entries we've been getting each week. And this was unfortunately another low week for the challenge, with not really enough entries to make for a proper contest. So we're thinking we're going to have to give the challenge a rest for a little while and maybe try something different for now. We'd be happy to hear your ideas about how to make the challenge work better, or what contests we might want to run in its place,

or what you think you might like to see in this spot in the show. We do want to thank the people that did send in entries this week, as well as everyone who's participated in the past. In place of the challenge this week, I want to read a humorous verse by Lewis Phillips, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. If you read Futility Closet, you know I've run a few of his poems in the past. This is one of my favorites. It's called On Not Being Able to Read My Wife's Handwriting. I think of my wife's penmanship as a race of dwarves drowning in a cursive swamp, or lost, hands waving as consonants rush face-to-face

into unmitigated vowels. On the door to our refrigerator, one early morning note, or a map of Tasmania with spasmodic Xs, which might mean kisses or malfunctioning Ts. Oh mama, mama, why didn't you warn me? Never marry a woman whose handwriting you cannot read. Full-blown capital Rs turned on their sides. My wife has either run off with the plumber, or is it carpenter, to inaugurate correspondences from Paris, or she wishes me to purchase for supper hornet butter, three pounds of javelins, and or one large rat to stab behind the heiress. Am I holding her message upside down? Possibly. Now I shall suffer in suspense all day until night to discover the full-mouthed truth of her scrawl.

I am quite sure that this is one of your favorite poems because it sort of describes your handwriting. I can't read my own handwriting anymore, and yours is fine. Yeah, it actually is kind of sad that he has to really struggle to read anything that he's written himself. And it's getting worse. Yeah. to really struggle to read anything that he's written himself. And it's getting worse. Yeah. We want to thank everyone who has taken the podcast survey so far.

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So use the link in our show notes or go to www.podsurvey.com slash futility. That's www.podsurvey.com slash futility to take our survey and get your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Well, that's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for the book on Amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com,

where you can sample over 8,000 bytes of intelligent entertainment, Thank you. or iTunes, or click the donate button on the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Futility Closet is a member of the Boing Boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.