Mary Ward, the the first person to be killed by a car when thrown from her brother’s experimental vehicle, was a sad loss to Irish science, science in general and indeed art. A naturalist and microscopist, she produced some beautifully detailed drawings of insects and other life. She also sketched the construction of the world’s first 6-foot reflecting telescope, built be her cousin. Quite a family all round.
It’s just a little weird that the next fatality - and first by a ‘mainstream’ car - also seems to have been an Irishwoman.You don’t get a much more Irish name than Bridget Driscoll.
I suspect that the drivers were fully exposed to the elements, bugs, dust, and stuff thrown up by their tires might’ve had something to do with it, too, though there would be an identification advantage–I mean, DISadvantage, since no good citizen would wish to hide his identity from the law! ;)–people in similar hats, dusters, goggles, and scarfs around their faces would have.
Well, sure, because cars travel a large portion of their distance on expressways where traffic flows relatively smoothly and there are no pedestrians.
Powers &8^]
This doesn’t work for the time period. Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, by Clay McShane, covers the evolution of vehicle traffic in cities exhaustively. He documents that the evolution of better vehicles is both cause and effect of the evolution of better roads. All those good roads were within cities in the 19th century, though.
Steam-powered vehicles were too heavy (as well as too dangerous) for the early roads and so they never took off even though they were technologically feasible by the post Civil War era. Tracked vehicles like streetcars, trolleys, and cable cars proved that faster vehicles could co-exist with the fantastic densities of city downtowns. They led to to a wider dispersal of populations. Suburbanization was well under way 150 years ago, although central cities have mostly annexed these locations and we’ve forgotten that they were once suburbs.
All vehicles caused enormous numbers of injuries and deaths, and that certainly included horse-drawn traffic, as Gfactor noted. Early cars were subject to speed limitations so that they couldn’t move faster than horses. (The famous red-flag rule was adopted in Britain and said that a car had to be proceeded by someone on foot waving a red flag of warning. Similar laws were adopted in several U.S. states.)
As people became accustomed to the faster speeds of streetcars, internal combustion engines (and light steam engines and electric engines) became more accepted. The roads were still mostly too bad for them to drive quickly or from city to city. They mostly showed themselves off in the parkways built around major cities, supplanting the sulky trotting horses that rich men drove in speed contests. The parkways were banned to commercial traffic so they were comparatively empty. Expressways didn’t appear until decades later.
Cars were extreme status symbols until at least 1908 when the Model T first appeared. Many people objected to them because they were toys of the wealthy and powerful. As such they had no incentive to hide their faces for any reason except dust and bugs. They wanted to tell the world they could afford one of these toys. They also didn’t drive themselves. Cars broke down so frequently that many people had professional chauffeurs who were also mechanics to work on the cars full time. (McShane estimates that cars averaged a flat tire every 100 miles, among other problems.)
It’s hard to judge per 100,000 population whether cars were more dangerous at first because records are not available. However, any automobile fatality garnered press attention at first, just as every plane crash does today. It doesn’t seem likely that cars were especially dangerous pre-WWI.
Indeed. To the point where it’s almost unremarkable that one of the passengers in the (steam-powered) car at the time of the accident was the young Charles Parsons, who went on to be the famous pioneer of the (steam-powered) marine turbine.
I’m disappointed, distressed and disturbed. After relying on the Straight Dope as the font of all knowledge and wisdom, a reliable haven in the sea of confusion that passes for factual understanding on the internet, for as long as I can remember, I have found an error.
Worse than that, it is an error that undermines the very foundation of everything that the Straight Dope stands for, including reason, rationality and fact-based argument.
With this week’s oncoming Friday the 13th in mind, a friend of mine threw into our conversation the “fact” that the first death in a motor accident took place on that very date in New York in September 1899. Superstitious nonsense, I thought, and confirmed as much on the Straight Dope, where your report lists earlier deaths and says that the one to which my friend referred took place on (Saturday) 14 September, not Friday the 13th.
Imagine my horror, and the collapse of my rational universe, when a check on original sources revealed that you were wrong and my friend was right. Here in the New York Times, no less, is a report dated 14 September 1899, referring to the deceased being “run over last night” (my emphasis).
Your mistake has opened the door to all sorts of superstitions, irrational beliefs and occult practices, which I will no longer be able to counter by reference to fact-based evidence from the Straight Dope. “Aha!” my friend will say. “But they were wrong about Friday the 13th! How do you know they are not wrong about other things as well?”
You are correct that the accident happened on September 13, 1899. However, your friend is in error believing September 13, 1899, was a Friday. It was a Wednesday.
Steady, lad. If you’ll read carefully, you’ll notice this unfortunate error appeared not in the Straight Dope (which is written by Cecil) but in a Staff Report (in this case written by Gfactor). Staff Reports are edited by the likes of me. 'Nuff said. Except for: fixed, and thanks.
Been hanging out with Cecil a lot? You’re picking up his lingo.
“You’re thinking: That rat bastard fungus, I want to piss on its sorry ass. Steady, lad. Athlete’s foot can be hard to cure, so the best thing is to not get it in the first place.”
“Doug immediately began salivating about triple Zs and speculated about what you would do if you ran out of letters. (His suggestion: use the names of U.S. presidents. “Get a load of the Buchanans on her!” Steady, lad.)”
