Stuff You Should Know - The First Road Trip

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Back when cars were a brand new thing, before people even knew they'd stick around, two men and a dog drove from San Francisco to New York. This is their story. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell. On iHeart, mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt

conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck in. It's just the two of us, but we're going to make it just fine. We're going to make it if we try, as I like to say, sometimes when it's just the two of us, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I'm excited about this episode because this is a really, really great story that doesn't have, I kept waiting for something either bad to happen or someone to be exposed as awful.

And it's just a really fun, feel good story. I would go so far as to call it a home dinger. It's a home dinger, and we got to give huge credit to Ed, who helped us with this, and also because he helped Ed, who helped us, Ken Burns. Ken Burns has a great documentary about this topic, which is the first cross-country automobile road trip. It's called Horatio's Drive. It's a wonderful story, and you can find it on PBS. Hopefully, if you're a streamer, you pay for it and subscribe to the PBS app because it's a very worthwhile and great channel to subscribe to. Narrated by the great Keith David, one of the great, great voices. Just amazing, and such a great actor, too. And everything from they live to minute work,

to there's something about Mary. Yeah, he was in Platoon, too. He's just such a great actor. Love that guy. And because our protagonist in this story, who we'll introduce you to in a second, is such an affable, seemingly really good guy, they got none other than Tom Hanks to recreate his voice for his diary letters and stuff like that. We should also give a hat tip to Dayton Duncan, who's interviewed extensively in that documentary because he wrote a book on the drive, I believe. I would argue The Book. Yeah, let's just call it that. The Book on Horatio Nelson Jackson, right? Yeah, that's his name. Great name. So we're going to talk a lot more about him later, but we really want to lay the groundwork, bring the context as Flavor Flav would put it.

And just kind of give you an idea of what the times were like when Horatio Nelson Jackson decided to become the first person to travel cross country in a car. Right. So 1903, 9-1-1 was a joke. You like that one? It's okay. All right. Just a medium okay on that one. I'll take it. 1903 is when this happened, but to put this in context, like you said, the first transcontinental railroad was built and completed, or not built, but completed in 1869. And it was 1876 when you got your first cross country train trip that happened. So this was, what, like 25-ish years roughly after that. And people were still kind of only traveling by train because cars were pretty new and they were only for richies because I believe

in the documentary, they said like the cheapest car you could get that would cost more than the average American made in a year. So in the early 1900s, it was rich people who wanted to buy a super expensive unique toy that, and we'll hammer this home a lot, but they didn't even know was gonna end up being a real thing. Yeah, it could have turned out like the Segway. Totally right. I mean, this is kind of akin to somebody taking a trek across America on a Segway back in like 1995. Yeah, they did not know car, like a lot of people thought these cars will never amount to anything. You're silly. It'll always be trains and horses. Right. So to kind of get across why people thought it was just going

to be nothing but trains and horses, like that's how the American infrastructure was built. Like if you went any kind of lengthy distance, you took a train. If you were moving around locally, you took a horse, maybe a horse and a buggy or a horse and carriage or something like that. Stagecoach. You kind of drive a hump. Sure, if you wanted to be super wild west about it. Yeah. But there were at the time, say around 1900, the United States had 2.3 million miles of roads. Sounds like a lot. Pretty impressive. Yeah. 150 miles were paved. Right. And all of those were within big cities, right? So the vast, vast, vast majority of roads in the United States were rough, rutted, dusty or muddy or somehow both at the same time roads that you would not want to

walk over really, let alone ride a car over. Yeah. They were in bad shape, generally, about 14 million horses in the United States to about 8,000 cars. And like you said, people traveled locally. I think the average was like, people generally didn't go more than 12 miles from their house. And that even feels like the high end. I don't think that's an average. I think people probably didn't go within a few miles of their house. Yeah. Like me today, unless I'm traveling. Right. At the time, there were, and you still take trains for long distance travel sometimes. I try to. At the time, also, like you didn't really steer away from home because it took you so long to go anywhere on horse, right? I think at the time it was still a two-day journey,

basically, from New York to Philadelphia. By horse. So this is a big deal for somebody to be like, no, I'm going to try this. The other thing was the roads themselves weren't mapped. I mean, east of the Mississippi, there were maps and guidebooks that you could get pretty good directions from, right? And it's funny, in the documentary, they kind of show what the directions were like and one of them was like, turn right at the old stone horse trough. Yeah. Like those were the kind of directions and because that's what a local would tell you to do. So somebody had the bright idea to print those and put them down in a book form and transmit that information that way. And it still held up because there were no road names. There were no route numbers. There was

nothing like that because there was no reason for anything like that to exist. Yeah. And funny enough, that's how I prefer directions now because I'm very directionally challenged and famously so. And I also never know the names of roads. So I always ask people like, tell me, go to that diner and take a left and then go to that car wash and veer right. And that's how I prefer to get directions. I tend to zone out when people give me directions that I've asked for and you can just kind of see it on their faces. They can tell I'm going to get lost because it's just not sinking in. Well, all the fun of that is gone now because you just punch it into your app or whatever. But I'm basically talking about pre-GPS stuff. I remember. I remember.

I'm old enough to remember that. I am also smart enough to really appreciate ways though, too. Do you remember the fun of a road trip of opening that Rand McNally Atlas and saying like, I think we can go this way to get to this town or it looks like this other road we can go around. That was like, and I'm not like, oh, things were so much better when it was harder. But it was a really had a fun sort of magical adventuresome quality to it, I think. Yeah. I spent five weeks in a van driving around the Western United States doing that same thing. It was very cool. And like the amount of freedom is really hard to get across of like. Yeah. Not having anywhere you had to be at any particular time and saying like,

oh, that landmark sounds pretty cool. I'm going to go see that. It's pretty neat. You know what words you don't hear anymore is let's go here instead. That's true. Everything seems so locked down. You know, it's like, I don't know. People don't say, oh, no, let's just let's decide to go to this town instead of this town. I feel like we've entered the disgruntled aged old men era of stuff you should know because it seems like we do this almost every episode, dude. Yeah, maybe we're gonna have to pay more attention to that or else we're going to lose all the youngsters and just attract all the old stars and who cares? Well, hey, youngster, I encourage you to set out on a road trip with

a map and and enjoy it. Okay, there you go. Way to save it. I don't think I saved anything. So I think we've gotten across that it would be really hard to drive a car, right? Yeah, across the United States at the time. Yeah, hard to drive a car. But because cars were becoming a little more popular, they were trying to get a more positive publicity going for their cars and their companies. And so they said, hey, what a great way to do this, then like kind of sponsor a cross country car truck trip that will get a lot of press. And so they tried this with John and Louise Davis from the, how do you pronounce that car? Durea. It sounds like something you contract that you'd be really unhappy about. Okay, the Durea, I couldn't quite tell, but yeah,

it does sound like a disease of some sort. D-U-R-Y-E-A. Yeah, the Durea car company gave them a national, or I'm sorry, they weren't a car company. That was the car. The company was the national motor carriage company. Yeah, known today as the N-M-C-C. Oh, really? I'm just kidding. No, I thought you were going to say as Porsche. No, I would like to think that, but no, I don't think so. No, I don't think so either. So they sponsored this couple. This was in 1899. It did not work out. They very famously got beaten to, they started from New York and they got beaten to Syracuse by a one-armed bicyclist who gave them a 10-day head start. So press, it went opposite of how they wanted to. That was sort of, they lost track or lost interest very early on in this

sort of doomed thing. And I don't think they even know if they succeeded in getting the same. Well, I think they know they didn't, but they basically didn't really cover the story after that. No, they dropped off the map after about Chicago. They dropped off the GPS app. Sorry. So, no, it's good. It just took me a second to, for it to sink in. I thought that was pretty good. I'm trying to get our younger listeners back. So, we should make a tic-tac of all this then. Okay. Isn't that what people do? Sure. For now, we're the US government band. That was wonderful. You just saved me. Thank you. So, it was established though, even though the Davises didn't make it, that like, this is actually a really good way to

promote a car brand is to be the first to make it across the country. I mean, then everyone will know that's a good car because it's just so ridiculous to even think a car could do that. So, a couple years after the Davises, I guess 1901, a car maker named Alexander Winton, who had a Winton car company, handmade cars, beautiful cars. He tried it himself. I believe with his publicist, very smartly. He and his publicist hit the road. The acid hit them around Barstow, I think. The fat showed up and they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada. Yeah, but you bring up a thing that might be overlooked is they very smartly started from west to east because, as we mentioned, the west was untamed land and bad, bad, bad roads if there

weren't any at all. So, getting that hard part over first when the car was brand spanking new was really, really smart. But what they didn't count on was, and we'll see what Jackson learned, was driving through the desert in an old car like that is not good. Sand is not good for getting stuck. It's great for getting stuck. It's not good for making good time. Sand is not good for getting in carburetors and in oil and gas. These engines weren't these big closed systems like they are today. So, sand, no good. But Winton got this press, right? It helped, I think, still publicize his car company regardless. And again, the fact that no one had done this, but people were starting to try it, it kept being a thing. It was going to be a thing until somebody

did it. And so, a couple years after Winton tried, a guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson, who's the star of our story, was hanging out at the University Club of San Francisco. And apparently, a couple of fellow club members were saying that cars were basically useless and that they would never really go anywhere and there's no reason for anybody to have one. When Jackson, by this time, had really developed a real love of cars, had started collecting them even. And I guess to defend cars honor, he slapped down a $50 wager that he could make it across the United States from San Francisco to New York in less than 90 days. 90 days or less, I'm sorry. And that was about $1,500 that he threw down on the table right then. And the people took it.

They accepted his wager. And four days later, he set out for New York from San Francisco. It is madness to think about that he did this with that little planning. He didn't have a car to do it. I mean, he had cars, but not one to go across country at the time. Just quickly about Jackson, he was a doctor who got tuberculosis and quit his practice kind of at the same time that he married a very wealthy woman named Bertha Richardson Wells, a very wealthy New England family from Vermont. Her family made their money in celery compounds. It was like a tonic, basically. So he, as Ed put, did rich guy things, capital R, capital G. And his wife was super supportive. Like everyone was on board. She was like, that's awesome.

I'll take a train to Burlington. I'll meet you over there, honey. You have my blessing. And it seems like they had a really, like judging from the letters that, of course, it was voiced by Tom Hanks, too. So you're endeared immediately. But judging from the letters, it seems like they were just a great couple, a very loving family. He called her Swipes. No one knows why that nickname was there, but he signed it as Nelson and yours forever, Nelson. And my dear Swipes. And it was really, really sort of a beautiful story of this couple. And he knew he had to get a guy to go with him. And so he picked a great traveling partner. He was a small engine mechanic in a factory named Sewell Crocker, who was about 10 years younger. He's 22 years old,

I think. What was her ratio? It was like 31 or 32. Okay. So this guy could fix cars. He knew cars. And apparently, like, they really liked each other and were, which was a big deal. You know, you've been on road trips in regular cars. And that's a key factor. But especially back then, with all the troubles they were going to have, he had to have someone that you could get along with. That's a big one, for sure. So he asked Crocker, hey, man, what car should we get for this? And Crocker said, well, you have basically limitless funds. Get the best. Buy yourself a 1903 Winton touring car. And Ed points something out that I think is very astute. The reason why probably Sewell Crocker said get a Winton was because Winton had already shown that they were making

really good cars and not so that they were willing to try to make it across country in one of them. So that's exactly what Jackson did. Horatio did. He's the kind of guy you call him by his first name, because he's got a great first name, and he's Tom Hanks-like afterball, right? Yeah. Yeah. So Horatio bought himself a Winton touring car in 1903. Apparently, he paid essentially $100,000 for it. And it was used. Yeah, it was used. But it was the only one available. Yeah. So he just paid whatever the person wanted for it. And so I think in 1903 dollars, he paid $3,000. But he named it the Vermont, because that's where he and his wife Bertha lived. But a little bit about this car. It was open in every sense of the word. It was like if you took

a tub and put wheels on it and then had a steering wheel sticking out of it, that was the car. There was no windshield. There was no roof. There was no back windshield. There were no doors. There was no nothing. It looked kind of like a giant riding lawnmower with like wagon wheels. Well, it's funny that you bring up riding lawnmowers, Chuck, because the two-cylinder chain drive engine had 20 horsepower. And my friend, a John Deere X300 series riding mower has 22 horsepower. That's funny. That's really funny. This thing topped out at 30 miles per hour. I don't think that John Deere does that, but that's probably just because it's cutting grass at the same time. But imagine traveling the country on a riding lawn mower basically. Yeah.

That's about what they were doing. But yes, you're right. 30 miles an hour is substantially more. That's what it could do max. In no way did they average 30 miles an hour. Not even close. It was red, a really good looking car. You'll only see black and whites, but someone on Reddit, that's the picture I sent you, did a very fun, colorized picture of Horatio and Crocker in a third party to be named later and colorized it. And it just, it looks awesome. And this car is so cool-looking. Yeah. I don't mean to detract from it. It was a cool-looking car. Very cool. But as far as comfort goes, it was not at all comfortable. No. I say we take a break and then set out on the road trip with these guys, huh? Oh, let's do it.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University. And I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic occult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller, part supernatural horror. The truth? Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the lore. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cathege from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of iHeart radio,

Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thicker the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two-thirds of my life are done. Zero to 30, 30 to 60, and now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it. With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people

I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim. The list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so as we will see, there were other car manufacturers planning to do the same thing at the time, and a couple of them ended up, you know, it ended up sort of being a race against like a corporation versus a human, even though he was driving, you know, it's not like a car he built himself, it was a Winton. But he was doing it himself with

this other guy. He wasn't sponsored, it was about the spirit of adventure. He, all these, as we'll see, all these other companies sent like supplies ahead, and they had teams of mechanics. He didn't have anything to prove. He'd put this together in four days, including buying the car. And that's just, I really want to get across the spirit of this whole thing was just this optimist who was like, let me see if I can do this crazy thing. Yeah. So two months after Horatio and Sewell set out on their trip, Packard sent a team out. And like you said, they were very well outfitted. They had a mechanic on board, there was gasoline for them at every stop. Because gasoline was, there were no gas stations. And definitely there were no gas stations out west. You would go to the general

store and be like, I'd like a can of your most dangerous, volatile liquid, please. And they would hand you some gasoline and a can and you'd buy a few of them to drive around with. It was incredibly dangerous. But that's how you didn't run out of gas. Packard had the advantage of like every town or every X number of miles, there was gasoline waiting for them. So they essentially had gas stations that were reserved exclusively for them. Horatio and Sewell did not have anything remotely like that. And so they got into all sorts of fun little adventures like the time that Sewell Crocker had to bike dozens of miles on a borrowed bicycle to go to and fro to fill up their gas can and bring it back and fill it up again and then bring it back. And that's why he was there. Right,

exactly. And it's fun now in retrospect, us talking about it here in 2023 in the studio, I'm sure it was not a great day for Sewell Crocker. No, I don't think they were drawing straws though, you know what I mean? Like the rich 31 year old which had TB is definitely saying, all right, hit the road on the bike, my friend. Yeah, we're equals in almost every way. But hit the trail on the bike. Right. All right, so Packard did so two months later, like he said, and Oldsmobile did the same thing a month after that, I believe, much the same operation, you know, fully sponsored and like rigged up and everything. So they threw out the backseat on this Wynton. I don't think we mentioned this thing

could go 250 miles with their tank of fuel, which was way more than I thought. Yeah, for sure. I was super impressed. So they ripped out the backseat, which doesn't look like it was much of one anyway, and packed, you know, cooking kit, tons of rope, something that would probably be the most valuable thing in the whole car was a pulley system, a block and tackle. Yeah, for sure. They had a Kodak camera, they had sleeping bags, they had a shovel and axe, they had a bunch of guns and ammunition, because they might be hunting for food out in the middle of nowhere, or just maybe you want to murder someone. Yeah, or just like shooting out of a untapped car is probably pretty fun when no one's around. But that is fun.

So yeah, the problem is, is like, they weren't experts at tying down their gear, and they would get to like a stop, probably basically every day and find that something they needed had dropped off at some point, like back on their trail, and that they'd gone too far to go back to try to find it. So they lost like cooking utensils, Horatio lost multiple pairs of his eyeglasses. It's just crazy to me that they weren't like, put a tarp on it, wrap the tarp up, and then put rope on the tarp, you know, who knows. But they did lose a lot of stuff, and luckily, like you said, they didn't lose that block and tackle, it would really come into play multiple times. But they made a really good decision early on. Number one, they followed, I can't remember

his first name, Mr. Wittons, Alexander Wittons example, and started out west. So what they would be doing is getting the hardest part of the trip out of the way first, while the car had very few miles on it, right? Yeah, which was, you know, a nice little copy. But then they made a really, really great decision. And I think the decision that frankly made them a success in the end, did I just spoil it? I guess we talked about what a great story it was, it wouldn't be great if they conked out in Michigan. True, true. But they decided to go at hundreds of miles to their trip by not just taking a right and going across the country, but going north up through Oregon to avoid that Nevada desert. And that, my friend, even though there was some treacherous mountains

that they had to go through, avoiding that desert, I think is what ultimately made them successful. Yeah, I mean, hundreds of miles added to the trip. But it was incredibly smart because again, Winton had bottomed out in that sand, that sand wasn't going anywhere. At the very least, there were wagon trails and stuff up in Oregon. And they were able to kind of make their way along these, the railroad tracks that were there. So there were railroad right-of-ways, which is the land cleared on either side of a railroad track. And they would drive on those, or if they had to, drive on the railway themselves. And they would, they would ride on railroad bridges in a car that could go 30 miles per hour max and hope to God that there wasn't a train that was going to come.

And I was like, man, I'm so glad I watched Stand By Me a couple of days ago. I was just about to bring that up. I knew you watched it. It's such a great part of that movie. And then I was telling you, that was a masterpiece. Like, that is Rob Reiner's masterpiece. And he's made some pretty great movies. But it is exponentially better than I even remembered as a kid. I'll throw a spinal tap in there, but I know you have, you still not seen that? That's what I'm saying. No, it's great. That's a great movie. I think when Harry Met Sally is a great movie, like there's tons of great movies Rob Reiner's made.

But I think Stand By Me might be the best. Yeah, it's a great movie. I love that scene when he, they put their hands on the rail. And it just gets real quiet. And they're listening. They're like, do you feel any vibration at all? And that's probably what these guys were doing. I'm sure. But they were doing it bumping along in their open car. Also shout out, I don't know if Will Wheaton still listens to us. I know he used to, but man, all of those kids did a great job. But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie. So way to go Wheaton listening. Totally.

Great movie. I love it. I'm going to watch it too. Now talking about it in Vegas, it made me nostalgic for it for sure. All right. All right. So we are at leave time, which was May 23rd, 1903. It was a Saturday. Apparently it was a hot spring in California. And it rained that afternoon and they took off from San Francisco and very quickly blew a tire out. It was like Romeo and Michelle. Yeah, totally. And the the Chronicle in San Francisco wasn't even covering it, basically. The San Francisco examiner had a very short little piece about it, about a

horseless carriage going from sea to sea. But it would build, as you will see with the press, as things went along. But it wasn't well covered at first. And the tire thing, it was an issue. I mean, the car tires at the time would routinely blow out. They had a hard time on the trip finding new tubes. They would stock up on used tubes whenever they went to a town. It seemed like that had any kind of tubes, they would just buy them. Right. Give you your tubes. Yeah. And it was tires were an issue. That was seemed like one of the main issues. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because I mean, you can imagine, there's not people

selling car tires because there were so few cars and out west, they kept encountering people who had never seen a car. I saw a mention of that Packard team that was riding. I think Tom Fetch was the Packard guy who was driving the car. And they pulled into one town where a murder had just been committed. And so few people had seen a car in that town that everybody left the fresh murder scene, including the sheriff, to come look at the car that had just rolled into town. Like that was like what it was like out west at the time. So of course, you weren't going to find car tires easily. You had to improvise any way you could.

Sure. And a murdered body out there back then was a dime a dozen. Dime a dozen, yeah. It's not going anywhere. That's right. Let's go check out that new car. Yeah, it's not going anywhere. So they're going east. They're going through some treacherous terrain. They're going through the Cascade Mountains. It's fun in the documentary to hear the diary or letters home to his wife, where he was talking about, you know, the roads that are basically big enough for one car because I can't remember exactly how I said it.

But like because nature has made it that way, basically like it's a cliffside on the side of a mountain. So, oh, man, luckily, you know, they're having to share the road with stage coaches and horses and stuff like that. Not really any other cars, probably. But they would it was what you would think they were constantly getting stuck, constantly blowing tires. They I think the record was 18 times in a day. They had to use that block and tackle to pull themselves out of a ditch or a river or a mud hole. That must have been the suckiest day ever. Yeah. And then the maps were an issue too, right? Yeah, they would have to rely on locals for directions. When they could find locals, a lot

of times they just had to guess. I saw, again, that Packard team, sorry to keep bringing them up. I know they're not what the story's about, but they learned to avoid the nicest roads because out west that usually meant that it just dead ended in some rich person's house. And when you could find locals, they would sometimes just literally misguide you. There was one that Horatio and Sewell ran across, a woman on horseback who told them to get to the next town they should go down this road. And it dead ended in her family's farm. It was her driveway, basically. They came back the way they went and ran across her again. They're like, why did you do that? And she's like, oh, my dad and mom and husband would have wanted to see a car.

They'd never seen a car before. So she purposefully sent them the wrong way down a dead end, miles down a dead end, apparently, too. And I did not hear that they had gotten angry with her or cross even. I think they probably just said, good day to you, madam, and kept on. They should have said, you don't know this yet, but one day giving directions will be very important and this will not be cool. This is not going to reflect good on your family, Tina Manson. Tina. I just love Tina. It was so not a name back then. I love it. Great choice. The brakes were kind of what you would imagine. They weren't great. So it was quite thrilling when they would get on these downhill runs and there wasn't a lot you

could do about it. The clutch went out a lot. I mean, we talked about our various van journeys out west. We were in a Volkswagen van for mine and the mountains killed it. We had to get a rental Jeep Cherokee in Nevada for the whole second and a half of the trip because going through the mountains literally killed his and it wasn't like a brand new VW van. It wasn't one of the old ones, but it was like the van again. But it drove us from Atlanta to the mountains just fine and the mountains killed it. So imagine what the mountains did to the clutch system on this, you know, lawn mower basically. Yeah. I have to admit until today, I did not know what a clutch did. I knew that the clutch was the thing you push into shift gears. Never understood why.

The reason why you push in is because you actually want to stop the clutch from working temporarily. What the clutch does is it transmits the motor power or the motor's torque to the transmission, which in turn turns the axle to the tires, the wheels, right? That's my understanding of it. And when you're pressing in the clutch, what you're really doing is keeping that transfer from taking place so that you can go into another gear and then you let the clutch out and that transfer begins again. So yes, the clutch is an extremely important instrument. The car does not go without it. And apparently, Sewell Crocker had to fix that thing almost as many times as they used the block and tackle to pull themselves out of mud. Boy, he was worth his

weight, wasn't he? Oh boy, yeah, he was. They did have one modification they made on the way there as they added a headlamp, an acetylene headlamp so they could drive at night because they wanted to make up time, you know, because there were times when they had to go to a town and wait for, I think one of them was like three or four days where they're waiting ironically for a stage coach to show up with parts that they had ordered. There were times when a stage coach or a guy on a horse would pull them out ironically again. Yeah, and I didn't get the impression that Horatio was trying to prove that horses were obsolete. No, I don't think so at all. I think he still saw it as pretty ironic that he'd still relied on horses in this horseless carriage. Yeah, I don't think he threw

shade. Even when Blacksmiths would make repairs, they pointed out in the documentary that I think it was in one of his letters. He said it like the irony wasn't lost on him, but I don't think he was like, you're not going to have a job in a few years, sucker. Right, right. That's what Segway makers said to people on foot. Didn't the inventor of the Segway drive off a cliff on a Segway? That sounds like an urban legend, but maybe one that's just crazy enough to be true. I have to look that up. Should we take a break? Yes, we'll take a break and look that up. All right, we'll be back here with the truth right after this. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist

and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or, can we create new senses for humans? Or, what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic,

a cult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth? Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the more. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the body's joint. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of iHeart radio, Longhouse television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain

in Manowar County, the thicker the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two-thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60, and now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it. With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal.

Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim, the list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. And Chuck, it's true. BBC News says it. Yeah. Wow. Jimmy Heslidan was 62 when he rode off a cliff on his company's segues. They killed him, obviously? Yes, in West Yorkshire. That's sad. Yeah, it is sad for sure, but my God, that's quite a legend. It's like Fabio getting hit in the face with a duck on a roller coaster. What? No, you know that. No? Fabio on a roller coaster, a duck flew across his path and hit him

in the face. And killed him? No, no, no. Okay. But it's one of these pictures on the internet where you're like, oh, that's got to be fake. And it really happened. Poor Fabio. I know, I feel bad for the guy, but it was also like of all the people for this to happen to, it was just, it was pretty rich. Yeah, I can imagine. Wait, is he a jerk? No, no, no. Okay. But he's Fabio and like, you know, that kind of stuff doesn't happen to Fabio. That stuff happens to me. For sure. And me too, totally with you on that. Did you look up that picture? I'm watching the video right now. I can't not, Chuck. Maybe we'll have an episode someday where we just tell each other internet memes and the other one

will look it up and then react on Mike. And that's how we'll do it. Okay? Yeah, stuff you shouldn't, couldn't care less about will be the name of that new show. Stuff you really probably shouldn't bother listening to. All right, so let's pick up with the trip. It sounds like we're painting in Ed, I'm glad he pointed this out. It sounds like we're painting a picture of an awful time because of all of the delays and all of the things that happened. They knew what they were in for with this. They didn't think it was going to be a pleasure cruise. It was also a great fun adventure. Like these guys are having a great time. They were seeing things that few people had ever even seen in person before, even by horse at times. And they had no schedule. I mean,

they were trying to beat this 90 day thing. But like, I get the feeling he really just wanted to finish the trip. So, you know, he had money. They were staying in hotels. They were staying with people along the way who opened their homes to them. They were driving about two hours at a time. And it seemed like they were, they were having fun at the same time. I have that same impression too, for sure. And plus, don't forget, Sewell Crocker was making some pretty good money too. Yeah. I didn't find that. What was he getting paid? I didn't see either. But we can go ahead and say at the end, they tallied up how much Horatio Jackson spent on the trip. And this included Crocker's pay. It was about eight grand back in 1903, which is a 267 grand today.

So, if you think about it, hotels, food, supplies, gas, repairs, car parts, repairs, that still leaves a pretty decent amount for Sewell Crocker. And I hope he got a big chunk of that. I hope so too. Chuck, I cannot for the love of life find this stupid picture of Fabio getting hit in the face. I found some ABC report and it just shows him going into the roller coaster station after the ride. His face is all bloody and he looks really upset, but nothing about the actual hit. You know, I wonder if what I saw was a fake recreation of that, and there is only a before and an after. That would make sense that it looked photoshopped in. I'm sorry, I just had to circle back on that because my disappointment was palpable. Oh boy. So, they're making their way

out west, or I'm sorry, back east. And it's funny they say back east, out west, up north, down south. So, they're heading back east and they come to Idaho when I mentioned a third party in that photograph. We were holding out for this big surprise and Caldwell, Idaho, they left without Jackson's coat, turned back to go get it, and this guy said, here, I have this pit bull named Bud, and he wants to go with you and be your mascot. And they said, hop aboard, Bud. And all of a sudden, they have this beautiful white pit bull in between the two of them. Yeah, he's routinely described as a bulldog, but he's pretty clearly a pit bull for sure. He's a pity, and he's beautiful, and like, if this story couldn't get any better, now you have a pit bull in between you, and they made him

doggles to protect his little eyes, and there's a wonderful photo of it in the documentary. Yeah, so they were, you know, like you said, they were getting pressed as they went from town to town, and they were like, oh my God, a car. There's people actually trying to use it to cross the United States in that car. When Bud joined, people just went berserk over this whole thing, in part because he was wearing these goggles, but also he very quickly learned how to ride in the car. He would look ahead to look for ruts or bumps or whatever, and would like brace himself, like he just took to it very easily and became like this great mascot. So everybody started to really find out about this when Bud joined, and I don't get the impression that Sewell or

Horatio were the least bit jealous. No, he paid him $15, which is $500 today for this dog, and Crocker said, hey, adopt, don't shop. And Jackson said, what does that mean? Right. And he said, no, don't worry about it. That comes later. Right. So they're getting all this press, thanks to Bud. They make their way through sort of that toughest stretch of terrain. They're running out of food. They finally sort of cross out of the mountains, and they're like, all right, that was sort of it. We think this is not literally, but this is sort of downhill from here, and in his letters, he was saying, I've never felt more confident now that we're going to make it to New York. And this is when they're in Wyoming. Yeah. And then once they got to Omaha, it really

got easier. And then after Omaha, Chicago, and then after Chicago, probably Cleveland or something like that, maybe Indianapolis in between, like the city after city just started to pop up and they were getting closer and closer. And there were much better roads. The railroad right-of-ways were just beautiful, sitting there for the picking. It's flat. They started to really, yeah, they started to really make some pretty good time. Yeah. I think how many miles did they top out at the day? I feel like it was like 70-something, which is not too bad. I don't remember, actually. I think of the documentary said 70-something miles in a single day, like when they were kind of cruising, which that's awesome. That's good time for that car. Yeah, that's not bad at

all, especially considering it maxed out at 30 miles an hour. Yeah. So that was just like a two and a half hour day for them, I guess. Yeah, sure. But that really does go to point out, like just how slow they were going because of things like breaking down and waiting for parts and just the roads being terrible. And I mentioned Cleveland too. They actually, when they showed up in Cleveland, that's where the Winton Motor Carriage Company was located. And we didn't say, I don't think, that Winton had by this time heard about the whole trip and that they were actually making pretty good headway, right? Yeah. So he got, he sort of officially offered to kind of sponsor them from that point on. And Jackson turned him down. He was like, no, I've got Packard

and Oldsmobile behind me. And I don't want this to become like a corporate sponsored thing. Like we've made it this far. We can make it the rest of the way. And they did go by the factory and they got some fanfare. And I think they helped them out with fixing this car up and stuff. But they got free beer koozies. Exactly. Refrigerator magnets and they were on their way. Yeah. I'm sure they probably fixed the car up a little bit, but Winton was talking like, we'll have gas like every 100 miles for you kind of thing. We'll send a technician to ride along with you. I'm sure the idea of adding a third stranger or a stranger to this mix by this time would is just unthinkable. So yeah, they turned them down, but they made it through Cleveland.

They made it all the way to Buffalo. It wasn't until Buffalo, New York that they had their the worst wreck that they had where all three of them, Sewell, Horatio and Bud were ejected from the car because they hit something. But Horatio only mentions it as a hidden obstruction. So I'm not sure if you ever knew what it was, but none of them were injured and the car was okay. So they just kept on keeping on. So take us home. When did they they pulled into Manhattan? Didn't they finally on July 26th at 4.30 a.m. 63 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes after they set out from San Francisco, they made it to Manhattan, New York and Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet, which by the way, he never collected on. Oh, I was curious about that. He didn't. Nope.

What a standup guy. Yeah, or he's like, I'm never going out West again. It's too long of a ride. And there to greet him where it was a throngs of press and journalists, people from the Winton Car Company and Swipes, the old girl herself right there. Yeah, that's so cool. I love that they had like a great relationship and he had a great relationship with Sewell and everybody loved Bud. And if you're wondering what happened to Bud, Bud lived out the rest of his days on the Jackson farm in Vermont in Burlington. And that's not a euphemism for like, right. He really got lost and died. Right. No, he really did live out his days there. That's great. Jackson went on to live a very interesting life after this even. He had a

number of businesses that he ran. He joined the military in World War One in his 40s and apparently became a decorated veteran. Probably collected tobacco baseball cards. Right. Probably so. So I think he ran for governor and lost governor of Vermont at one time and lost. I don't know how he lost. I don't know who in the world would vote for someone else other than this guy. Right. And donated that car, the Vermont to the Smithsonian, which and those doggles, Ed is seeing this in person. I don't think I have, even though I've been there. So or maybe I didn't. I just didn't know the story at the time. Maybe it seems like you'd be able to recall a car like that. I don't know. I've been to a lot of museums.

Seen a lot of old cars. Right. Sadly, Sewell Crocker, he died young. He contracted an illness and died in 1913. So he was about 40, no, 30 something, early 30s. I think he was 31. He had been sent to Mexico, I think, to protect some land during the revolution there. And he, the stress of it killed him, essentially, is how I saw it. Jeez, that's really sad. I know it is. So that's really the only big sad thing that happened, aside from bud getting ejected from the car in Buffalo, New York. A nice little cherry on top here that Ed found, too, was six years after this trip, a woman named Alice Ramsey and three of her friends became the first woman and women to

accomplish this same thing. They were sponsored by Maxwell Briscoe, an automaker, and they did the trip in 59 days in basically the same or maybe just barely slightly better conditions than Jackson and Crocker did it in. So they pulled it off and they kind of encountered the same issues and they got a lot of press at the time and obviously did a lot to advance, you know, the shine of light on what women were capable of doing, which was driving a car through terrible circumstances for 59 days. Right, exactly. Also, despite being described as pretty in every single article that was written about them at the time. So one other thing that was kind of a note about this is that 30 years after Horatio and Sewell and Bud made their trip, the record

was set that stood for decades, 54 hours. So two and a half days, a guy named Erwin Cannonball Baker made a famous run from New York to LA and I think about 40 years after that in the early 70s, Car and Driver Magazine editor said, this Cannonball Baker guy, he deserves his own place in history. So we're going to commemorate him with a recreation of his run. We're going to call it the Cannonball run. That's right. And if you want to learn more about that, was that a two-parter? It was just a one-parter. I think it was probably one of our 15-minute episodes. No, that was a good one. It was a good one. I'm just saying we used to do them real short back then. I can't believe I just didn't talk that much back then that we could actually record an episode that was 15

minutes long. I think we probably talked for 15 minutes about Bert Reynolds. Probably. But that was probably the episode too. Yeah, you're right. You got anything else? Uh, no. I don't either, which means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this a short but sweet Amazon Factoid. Okay. Hey guys, about a quarter of the way in through the episode of the moment. The episode reminded me of our trip up the Amazon to, I don't know, is it Minneas or Manaus, M-A-N-A-U-S? I think Manaus. Manaus? And back on a Viking ocean cruise. He said, surprisingly, ocean cruise ships can go that far about a thousand miles. Who knew? On the cruise our Amazon guy told us that what I think is the greatest bit of trivia I've ever heard. The volume

of water leaving the mouth of the Amazon is equal to the volume of water going over Niagara Falls, Victoria Falls. Uh, I'm going to do my best with my pronunciation on this falls in South America. Iguazu, perhaps? Very nice. A South American listener should write in and let us know. Right. So it is the volume of water leaving the mouth of the Amazon is equal to those three giant falls. Wow. Times 12. Wow. I was not expecting that extra little bit of math right there. I think that's what makes it amazing. That's from Rich Pope. Thanks, Rich Pope. Great name, too. Really gets it across. Rich Pope. Yeah. Good to meet you. You know? Yeah, I agree. Well, it's good to meet you too, Rich Pope. And if you want to be like Rich Pope, you can email us as

well. Send it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Dave Diegelman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with Dave Diegelman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast

called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell. On iHeart, mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Manowar Caves. I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Gathagy from Twilight. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thick of the fog gets. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned.

This is the exact spot where we found the potty's jewelry. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.