Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile Part 12

At Herkimer, eighteen and one-half miles from Utica and thirty-eight from Oneida, we had luncheon, then inquired for gasoline. Most astonis.h.i.+ng! in the entire village no gasoline to be had. A town of most respectable size, hotel quite up to date, large brick blocks of stores, enterprise apparent--but no gasoline. Only one man handled it regularly, an old man who drove about the country with his tank-wagon distributing kerosene and gasoline; he had no place of business but his house, and he happened to be entirely out of gasoline. In two weeks the endurance run of the Automobile Club of America would be through there; at Herkimer those in the contest were to stop for the night,--and no gasoline.

In the entire pilgrimage of over two thousand miles through nine States and the province of Ontario, we did not find a town or village of any size where gasoline could not be obtained, and frequently we found it at cross-road stores,--but not at Herkimer.

Happily there was sufficient gasoline in the tank to carry us on; besides, we always had a gallon in reserve. At the next village we found all we needed.

When we returned through Herkimer some weeks later nearly every store had gasoline.

If hotels, stables, and drug stores, wherever automobiles are apt to come, would keep a five-gallon can of gasoline on hand, time and trouble would be saved, and drivers of automobiles would be only too glad to pay an extra price for the convenience.

The grades of gasoline sold in this country vary from the common so-called "stove gasoline," or sixty-eight, to seventy-four.

The country dealers are becoming wise in their generation, and all now insist they keep only seventy-four. As a matter of fact nearly all that is sold in both cities and country is the "stove gasoline," because it is kept on hand princ.i.p.ally for stoves and torches, and they do not require higher than sixty-eight. In fact, one is fortunate if the gasoline tests so high as that.

American machines, as a rule, get along very well with the low grades, but many of the foreign machines require the better grades. If a machine will not use commercial stove gasoline, the only safe thing is to carry a supply of higher grade along, and that is a nuisance.

It is difficult to find a genuine seventy-four even in the cities, since it is commonly sold only in barrels. If the exhaust of a gasoline stationary engine is heard anywhere along the road-side, stop, for there will generally be found a barrel or two of the high-grade, and a supply may be laid in.

The best plan, however, is to have a carburetor and motor that will use the ordinary "stove-grade;" as a matter of fact, it contains more carbon and more explosive energy if thoroughly ignited, but it does not make gas so readily in cold weather and requires a good hot spark.

All day we rode on through the valley, now far up on the hill-sides, now down by the meadows; past Palatine Church, Palatine Bridge; through Fonda and Amsterdam to Schenectady.

It was a glorious ride. The road winds along the side of the valley, following the graceful curves and swellings of the hills.

The little towns are so lost in the recesses that one comes upon them quite unexpectedly, and, whirling through their one long main street, catches glimpses of quaint churches and buildings which fairly overhang the highway, and narrow vistas of lawns, trees, shrubbery, and flowers; then all is hidden by the next bend in the road.

During the long summer afternoon we sped onward through this beautiful valley. Far down on the tracks below trains would go scurrying by; now and then a slow freight would challenge our compet.i.tion; trainmen would look up curiously; occasionally an engineer would sound a note of defiance or a blast of victory with his whistle.

The distant river followed lazily along, winding hither and thither through the lowland, now skirting the base of the hills, now bending far to the other side as if resentful of such rude obstructions to its once impetuous will.

Far across on the distant slopes we could see the cattle grazing, and farther still tiny specks that were human beings like ourselves moving upon the landscape. Nature's slightest effort dwarfs man's mightiest achievements. That great railroad with its many tracks and rus.h.i.+ng trains seemed a child's plaything,--a noisy, whirring, mechanical toy beside the lazy river; for did not that placid, murmuring, meandering stream in days gone by hollow out this valley? did not nature in moments of play rear those hills and carve out those distant mountains? Compared with these traces of giant handiwork, what are the works of man? just little putterings for our own convenience, just little utilizations of waste energies for our own purposes.

One should view nature with the setting sun. It may gratify a bustling curiosity to see nature at her toilet, but that is the part of a "Peeping Tom."

The hour of sunrise is the hour for work, it is the hour when every living thing feels the impulse to do something. The birds do not fly to the tree-tops to view the morning sun, the animals do not rush forth from their lairs to watch the landscape lighten with the morning's glow; no, all nature is refreshed and eager to be doing, not seeing; acting, not thinking. Man is no exception to this all-embracing rule; his innate being protests against idleness; the most secret cells of his organization are charged to overflowing with energy and demand relief in work.

Morning is not the hour for contemplation; but when evening comes, as the sun sinks towards the west, and lengthening shadows make it seem as if all nature were stretching herself in repose, then do we love to rest and contemplate the rich loveliness of the earth and the infinite tenderness of the heavens. Every harsh line, every glare of light, every crude tone has disappeared. We stroke nature and she purrs. We sink at our ease in a bed of moss and nature nestles at our side; we linger beside the silvery brook and it sings to us; we listen attentively to the murmuring trees and they whisper to us; we gaze upon the frowning hills and they smile upon us. And by and by as the shadows deepen all outlines are lost, and we see vaguely the great ma.s.ses of tone and color; nature becomes heroic; the petty is dissolved; the insignificant is lost; hills and trees and streams are blended in one mighty composition, in the presence of which all but the impalpable soul of man is as nothing.

We left Schenectady at nine o'clock, taking the Troy road as far as Latham's Corners, then to the right into Albany.

We reached the city at half-past ten. Albany is not a convenient place for automobiles. There are no special stations for the storing of machines, and the stables are most inaccessible on account of the hills and steep approaches.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE VALLEY OF LEBANON THE SICK TURKEY

It was four o'clock, next day, when we left Albany, going down Green Street and crossing the long bridge, taking the straight road over the ridges for Pittsfield.

Immediately on leaving the eastern end of the bridge the ascent of a long steep grade is begun. This is the first ridge, and from this on for fifteen miles is a succession of ridges, steep rocky hills, and precipitous declines. These continue until Brainerd is reached, where the valley of Lebanon begins.

These ridges can be partially avoided by turning down the Hudson to the right after crossing the bridge and making a detour to Brainerd; the road is about five miles longer, but is very commonly taken by farmers going to the city with heavy loads, and may well be taken by all who wish to avoid a series of stiff grades.

Many farmers were amazed to hear we had come over the hills instead of going around, and wondered how the machine managed to do it.

Popular notions concerning the capabilities of a machine are interesting; people estimate its strength and resources by those of a horse. In speaking of roads, farmers seem to a.s.sume the machine--like the horse--will not mind one or two hills, no matter how steep, but that it will mind a series of grades, even though none are very stiff.

Steam and electric automobiles do tire,--that is, long pulls through heavy roads or up grades tell on them,--the former has trouble in keeping up steam, the latter rapidly consumes its store of electricity. The gasoline machine does not tire. Within its limitations it can keep going indefinitely, and it is immaterial whether it is up or down grade--save in the time made; it will go all day through deep mud, or up steep hills, quite as smoothly, though by no means so fast, as on the level; but let it come to one hole, spot, or hill that is just beyond the limit of its power, and it is stuck; it has no reserve force to draw upon. The steam machine can stop a moment, acc.u.mulate two or three hundred pounds of steam, open the throttle and, for a few moments, exert twice its normal energy to get out of the difficulty.

It is not a series of hills that deters the gasoline operator, but the one hill, the one grade, the one bad place, which is just beyond the power he has available. The road the farmer calls good may have that one bad place or hill in it, and must therefore be avoided. The road that is p.r.o.nounced bad may be, every foot of it, well within the power of the machine, and is therefore the road to take.

In actual road work the term "horse-power" is very misleading.

When steam-engines in early days began to take the place of horses, they were rated as so many horse-power according to the number of horses they displaced. It then became important to find out what was the power of the horse. Observing the strong dray horses used by the London breweries, Watt found that a horse could go two and one-half miles per hour and at the same time raise a weight of one hundred and fifty pounds suspended by a rope over a pulley; this is equivalent to thirty-three thousand pounds raised one foot in one minute, which is said to be one horse-power.

No horse, of course, could raise thirty-three thousand pounds a foot or any portion of a foot in a minute or an hour, but the horse can travel at the rate of two and one-half miles an hour raising a weight of one hundred and fifty pounds, and the horse can do more; while it cannot move so heavy a weight as thirty-three thousand pounds, it can in an emergency and by sudden strain move much more than one hundred and fifty pounds; with good foothold it can pull more than its own weight along a road, out of a hole, or up a hill. It could not lift or pull so great a weight very far; in fact, no farther than the equivalent of approximately thirty-three thousand pounds raised one foot in one minute; but for the few seconds necessary a very great amount of energy is at the command of the driver of the horse. Hence eight horses, or even four, or two can do things on the road that an eight horse-power gasoline machine cannot do; for the gasoline machine cannot concentrate all its power into the exertion of a few moments. If it is capable of lifting a given load up a given grade at a certain speed on its lowest gear, it cannot lift twice the load up the same grade, or the same load up a steeper grade in double the time, for its resources are exhausted when the limit of the power developed through the lowest gear is reached. The grade may be only a mud hole, out of which the rear wheels have to rise only two feet to be free, but it is as fatal to progress as a hill a mile long.

Of course it is always possible to race the engine, throw in the clutch, and gain some power from the momentum of the fly-wheel, and many a bad place may be surmounted step by step in this way; but this process has its limitations also, and the fact remains that with a gasoline machine it is possible to carry a given load only so fast, but if the machine moves it all, it will continue to move on until the load is increased, or the road changes for the worse.

When the farmer hears of an eight horse-power machine he thinks of the wonderful things eight good horses can do on the road, and is surprised when the machine fails to go up hills that teams travel every day; he does not understand it, and wonders where the power comes in. He is not enough of a mechanic to reflect that the eight horse-power is demonstrated in the carrying of a ton over average roads one hundred and fifty miles in ten hours, something eight horses could not possibly do.

Just as we were entering the valley of Lebanon, beyond the village of Brainerd, while going down a slight descent, my Companion exclaimed,--

"The wheel is coming off." I threw out the clutch, applied the brake, looked, and saw the left front wheel roll gracefully and quite deliberately out from under the big metal mud guard; the carriage settled down at that corner, and the end of the axle ploughed a furrow in the road for a few feet, when we came to a stop.

The steering-head had broken short off at the inside of the hub.

We were not going very fast at the time, and the heavy metal mud guard which caught the wheel, acting as a huge brake, saved us from a bad smash.

On examination, the shank of the steering-head was found to contain two large flaws, which reduced its strength more than one-half, and the surprising thing was that it had not parted long before, when subjected to much severer strains.

This was a break that no man could repair on the road. Under pressure of circ.u.mstances the steering-head could have been taken to the nearest blacksmith shop and a weld made, but that would require time, and the results would be more than doubtful. By far the easier thing to do was to wire the factory for a new head and patiently wait its coming.

Happily, we landed in the hands of a retired farmer, whose generous hospitality embraced our tired selves as well as the machine.

Before supper a telegram was sent from Brainerd to the factory for a new steering-head.

While waiting inside for the operator to finish selling tickets for the one evening train about to arrive, a curious crowd gathered outside about my host, and the questions asked were plainly audible; the names are fict.i.tious.

"What'r ye down t' the stashun fur this hur o' day, Joe?"

"Broke my new aut'mobile," carelessly replied my host, flicking a fly off the nigh side of his horse.

"Shu!"

"What'r given us?"

"Git out--"

"You ain't got no aut'mobile," chorused the crowd.

"Mebbe I haven't; but if you fellows know an aut'mobile from a hay rake, you might take a look in my big barn an' let me know what you see."