A Race to the Heavens

Page 2 of 6 -- In the 1860s, an ingenious Roxbury man named Sylvester Roper began experimenting with steam-driven vehicles. He mounted steam engines on bicycles, tricycles, even "quadricycles," anything that could carry people and had wheels. One of his first creations was a two-passenger motorized carriage comprising basically a bench attached to four massive spoked wheels, with a 2-horsepower engine hanging underneath like a steel belly. According to an 1863 report in Scientific American, the car topped out at 25 miles per hour. During the next 30 years, Roper built 10 steam-driven vehicles.

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A few decades later, the internal-combustion engine changed the rules, mostly because of advancements made by the German engineers Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler. Springfield-based brothers Frank and Charles Duryea were two of the first Americans to take notice. In 1893, they premiered their "motor wagon," often regarded as the first viable internal-combustion car built in the United States. Three years later, the Duryea Motor Wagon Co. sold 13 nearly identical vehicles, ostensibly making it the nation's first car manufacturing company. In 1904, Frank Duryea cofounded the Stevens-Duryea Co., which manufactured upward of 14,000 cars in Chicopee and East Springfield before closing its doors in 1915.

Other New England entrepreneurs threw their wrenches into the ring, too. Hartford's Pope Manufacturing Co. produced the world-famous Columbia bicycle, which was developed by Colonel Albert Pope in his High Street shop in Boston. The company began to sell the Columbia Electric car in 1897 and later manufactured the Pope-Robinson car in Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood. Albert Pope was also active in the turn-of-the-century Good Roads Movement, which paved the way for the American highway system.

But it was the steam car, again, that took the lead in late 1890s. And the events of a summer afternoon in 1899, high on the slippery slopes of Mount Washington, helped steer the auto industry into the 20th century.

YOU CAN GET TO THE TOP of Mount Washington any number of ways: feet, bicycle, train, horseback, unicycle, snowshoe, cross-country skis, dog sled, or even pushing a wheelbarrow laden with 100 pounds of sugar (as one particularly wacky guy named Alton Weagle did in the 1950s).

But only going up in a car earns one of those catchy, if kitschy, bumper stickers.

That's only partly because of the fact that bumper stickers won't adhere to a horse's rump. More so, it's because Mount Washington has spent the past century as one of the ultimate proving grounds for man and car alike. It was there, on August 31, 1899, that an inventor from Newton named F. O. Stanley made automotive history when he drove his wife, Flora, to the summit in a $650 steam-powered Locomobile, which had been manufactured in Watertown and driven up to New Hampshire from the Stanleys' home in Newton. Their ascent took 2 hours, 10 minutes, or about half the time required for a horse-drawn wagon.   Continued...