Building For The Future

Oldest Running Car On Earth

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I like old cars so this story caught my eye. The oldest running car on earth will be auctioned soon. It was one of the earliest steamers, made in France. People forget the leading role France played in the race to invent everything from movies to aeroplanes. This antique car is interesting to me because is is mostly made from horse carriage parts and distillery equipment. Also, I look at other cars made by this French company, De Dion-Bouton et Trepardoux. Which leads me to other off-hand topics about comic books and some people I have known.

From CNN:

A steam-powered car, billed as the oldest car in the world that still runs, will be sold in a Pebble Beach, Calif., auction in August.

The car was built in France in 1884, about a year before Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz of Germany built their first experimental gasoline-powered cars (The two were working independently of one another.) Henry Ford, the man many Americans mistakenly believe invented the automobile, built his first car 12 years after this one.

The four-wheeled De Dion-Bouton et Trepardoux, nicknamed "La Marquise," was originally buit for the French Count De Dion, one of the founders of the company. The car has had only two other owners since, according to auction house Gooding & Company, which is handling the sale.

In an 1887 demonstration drive, the car covered a 19 mile course at an average speed of 26 miles per hour. The following year, it won the world's first car race, according to Gooding, beating a three-wheeled steam-powered De Dion-Bouton.

I have lots of very old fashioned type stuff. Including a horse buggy. The earliest cars used many horse carriage parts, these being manufactured and available. This early specimen is very much a cross between a horse buggy, a tricycle and a still for making hard liquor. What a wonderful machine! If you click on the story, you can see the photo. I tried to draw off of it but it was hard telling things apart from the fuzzy photo. I am assuming it is like all steam engines with a release valve and lots of shut off valves, etc. The steering is that long rod with a cross piece at the top with two knobs. This is a common early steering device. You had to have your hand on it at all times while the free hand would manipulate all the brakes and valves.

The stirrups on the end of two poles there are the brakes and probably the gear shift. These funny looking things were used on the earliest tricycles...bicycles barely invented yet! the rider would yank on these to stop. Early cars were quite a challenge. The cycle tires were stressed by the weight of the vehicle and dealing with the energy of the engine took quite a bit of skill. And imagine being a horse and meeting a steamer huffing and puffing on a road!

Horses don't like cars. My oxen didn't like cars and if they wandered off into the village, they would always stand in the street and block traffic deliberately. Sparky hates cars and gets very huffy if one tries to pass him on the road. But a steamer!

It is more like a dragon than any car we know of today! Hissing and spitting, clanking along, I would suppose more than one horse flew off in a panic. Indeed, in England, a driver had to have his servant walk ahead with a flag to warn carriages and riders!

It would certainly be fun to see this machine in action.

Here is a later car built by the De Dion-Bouton people:

De Dion-Bouton was a French automobile manufacturer operating from 1883 to 1932. The company was founded by Comte Albert de Dion (1856-1946), Georges Bouton (1847-1938) and his brother in law Charles Trépardoux. Bouton and Trépardoux had been making small steam engines and toys when they met de Dion who offered to go into partnership with them forming De Dion, Bouton et Trépardoux in Paris in 1883.

The Great Depression killed off the company. Along with a host of other early automotive makers. We don't see Cords driving around, do we? Unless it is a museum piece. I've known more than one museum piece found in barns after sitting idle for 90 years or so. Once, I had to go to the Rolls Royce headquarters in the US which is in Manhattan.

While I was discussing something with the man in charge of sales (no, I wasn't buying anything, this had to do with artwork and dance) when my daughter pointed to the oldest car on display, a pretty number from around 1924, and said, 'Mommy, buy that car!' It was well over a million dollars.

I would be too nervous to go around in something that expensive, myself, not in Manhattan. The handles, etc, were solid silver, for example.

Here is a picture done by the cartoonist who did the Tintin comix, showing a very early version of the steam three wheeled Dion-Bouton.

ForTS de leur supériorité, DE DION-BOUTON et TREPARDOUX attendaient vainement depuis des années l'occasion de consacrer officiellement la puissante chaudière à vapeur mise au point par TREPARDOUX. Comme le temps passait, la, Maison D.B.T. (initiales des trois collaborateurs) décida d'améliorer encore le célèbre tricycle de 1883. Sorti en 1887, un nouveau véhicule se montra le digne successeur du précédent.

Plus léger, il roulait plus vite. La chaudière était de plus petite taille, dégageant parfaitement la visibilité vers l'avant et procurant davantage de C.V. La roue arrière (surmontée du réservoir d'eau) était motrice tandis que les roues avant étaient directrices. Sur ces entrefaites, un des membres influents de la " Société Vélocipédique Métropolitaine ", Paul Faussier, organisa la première course de " voitures sans chevaux " pour le 28 avril 1887.

Among other things, this notes, the car didn't protect you against rain. Or wind. Or slingshots from children hiding behind hedges. Or dog bites. This is probably why the cartoonist drew in the Tintin dog, Snowy. The model shown here was the earliest machine. It sat only one person and the engine was much smaller and probably couldn't go all too far, either. Though I bet it turned heads and created great wonder wherever it rolled!

And this takes me to Tintin, a classic comix book series from Europe.

When I was an obnoxious teenager, I had amusing friends and one of them, Hal Robins, introduced me to all sorts of great comix books and one of them was the Tintin series. And the Asterix stories. I met him when he and John Damon put an ad in the newspaper advertising the beginning of a poetry/fantasy club. My friend, Anne and I decided to answer the ad and we ended up very good friends for a number of years until we got scattered to the four winds.

Here is some of his work that is online.

From SF Weekly:

It's Wednesday night, which means it's time for the "Ask Dr. Hal Show" at the Odeon, a dive bar in the Mission with walls that are painted black. The place is packed with people mostly in their late 20s and 30s; three men sit onstage, a beer pitcher full of questions at the ready.

The show's concept is simple: Write down a question, slip a tip in the envelope, and the resident sage of the Odeon, Dr. Hal Robins, will answer. The 52-year-old Robins looks a bit like Benjamin Franklin: He's rotund; he dresses in a frock coat, brocade vest, bow tie, and watch chain; and a few long, stringy strands of gray hair fall from his otherwise bald pate. But from the brain of this unlikely headliner come astonishing answers. No question is too big or small, ridiculous or academic, personal or crude for his wit and intellect to tackle.

He has spent his life entertaining people. I spent mine irritating people. Both of us are comix book characters or in other things due to our rambling lives. This car business reminds me of Hal because he adored Victorian things and probably still does. We would dress up, all of us in this fashion and run around the city at night and get people to react. Sometimes, they would attack us and this was my fun part: fighting them off while dressed to the nines. Umbrellas are great weapons. He was Dr. Hal and I was Auntie Hattie. My ancient hat took quite a battering during those years.

In 1966, the Dean of Girls used to stand at the front enterance to the school with a yardstick to measure the length of dresses and then she would punish anyone whose skirt was too short. So one day, she stopped me because I was decked out in my full Victorian gear. 'You can't wear that in school,' she scolded me. I paused and then began to fan myself and put my hand to my forehead. 'Oh, my, I'm going to faint! Not only are you showing your ankles, you are revealing your KNEES!' Needless to say, I was not punished.

So it is really nice to see from afar, old friends are still chugging along like these ancient steamers, doing their thing.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Chinese leadership is so endearing. Whenever they jump some financial hurdle, they have Xinhua News tell us all about it.  This is good for me because it brings to attention all sorts of things we Americans would like to ignore.  This week, the Chinese have been talking about Outbound Investment and International Investment Positions.  These are the underpinnings of our Free Trade universe.

From Xinhua:

's direct outbound investment will exceed 60 billion U.S. dollars by 2010, said Assistant Minister of Commerce Chen Jian here on Monday.

From the Federal Treasury, International Investment Position Statistics:
With direct investment at current cost: 
1997------1998------1999------2000------2001------2002------2003-----2004
-820.......-895......-766.....-1,381...-1,919.....-2,107....-2,156..-2,484

  China

With direct investment at market value:
-822.....-1,070....-1,037....-1,581....-2,339....-2,455....-2,372...-2,542

 From the Office of Industries US International Trade Commission: Trends in US Inbound and Outbound Direct Investment:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Business Week, June 20, 2005:

Back in February, when he first addressed the issue of stubbornly low bond yields, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called it a "conundrum." The mystery revolved around a simple question: Why were long-term interest rates falling even as the central bank was jacking up short-term rates? Back then, Greenspan ventured that the anomaly could be a temporary aberration and that in no time, bond yields might start acting in more traditional ways.

More than three months -- and two more rate hikes -- later, bond yields have once again been falling, surprising not only Greenspan but many market pros as well. Indeed, in early June, yields on 10-year Treasury securities fell sharply, to below 4%. Greenspan doesn't think the falling yields are a sign of slower growth ahead, as many in the market believe. But even with the economy powering ahead, he seems increasingly convinced low bond yields may be an enduring phenomenon, driven by a complex of international forces the Fed has yet to fully understand.

That shift has some at the Fed entertaining hitherto heretical thoughts. Maybe, they posit, ultralow interest rates aren't inflationary in a global economy awash with savings and dominated by cutthroat competition from China, India, and other developing nations. After all, it's bond-market investors who have traditionally been most sensitive to any whiff of inflation. If they're willing to accept low yields, that suggests the U.S. and the global economy may be far more inflation-resistant than once thought.

*snip*

Now, it's a multifaceted set of global capital and trade flows that the Fed is trying to decipher. Part of the puzzle is that the U.S. isn't the only place where bond yields are low; they're down throughout much of the world. Indeed, in many countries, including Germany and Japan, they're even lower than in the U.S. In part, of course, that reflects the tepid outlook for growth in many foreign economies compared with the U.S. But everyone at the Fed seems to agree that something else is at work as well.

In struggling to figure out what's going on, Greenspan has focused on the increased integration of global financial markets and the stepped-up flow of capital worldwide. That has meant more of the world's savings can be invested across borders rather than being locked up in individual countries, as was the case with the former Soviet Union. As Greenspan tells it, investors' "home bias" -- their proclivity to keep their money in their own countries -- is diminishing, making a bigger pool of savings available internationally for investment in more profitable and productive ventures.

SAVINGS GLUT
Some of Greenspan's colleagues at the Fed's board, including Vice-Chairman Roger W. Ferguson Jr. and outgoing Governor Ben S. Bernanke, have gone further. They argue that the world is awash with savings because of slumping demand for capital in the slow-growing economies of Europe and Japan and a buildup of currency reserves by China and other emerging Asian nations. Moreover, that global glut of savings is pushing down rates around the world.

Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan, Central Bank panel discussion, To the International Monetary Conference, Beijing, People’s Republic of China--June 6, 2005

The unusual behavior of long-term rates first became apparent almost a year ago. In May and June of last year, market participants were behaving as expected. With a firming of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve widely expected, they built large short positions in long-term debt instruments in anticipation of the increase in bond yields that has been historically associated with a rising federal funds rate. But by summer, pressures emerged in the marketplace that drove long-term rates back down. In March of this year, market participants once again bid up long-term rates, but as occurred last year, forces came into play to make those increases short lived.

But what are those forces? Clearly, they are not operating solely in the United States. Long-term rates have moved lower virtually everywhere. Except in Japan, rates among the other foreign Group of Seven countries have declined notably more than have rates in the United States. Even in emerging economies, whose history has been too often marked by inflationary imbalances and unstable exchange rates, access to longer-term finance has improved. For many years, emerging-market long-term debt denominated in domestic currencies had generally been unsalable. But in 2003, Mexico, for example, was able to issue a twenty-year maturity, peso-denominated bond, the first such instrument ever. In recent months, Colombia issued domestic-currency-denominated global bonds. As rates came down worldwide, dollar-denominated EMBI+ spreads over U.S. Treasuries receded to historically low levels, before widening modestly of late.