OLD NEWS: Lumbering steam belcher of ’03 was actually No. 2

In the March 10, 1919, Arkansas Gazette, E.D. Battle shared a 1903 photo of him driving his steam-powered horseless carriage. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
In the March 10, 1919, Arkansas Gazette, E.D. Battle shared a 1903 photo of him driving his steam-powered horseless carriage. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Little Rock's first Automobile Show was such a success in 1918 that the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat packed their pages with car news for the second big show, March 5-8, 1919.

In February and March, readers saw interviews with dealers and entrepreneurs, ads with expert line drawings of the national and regional makes' new models, and also much ado (some of it skeptical) about a local startup, Climber Motor Co. and its new factory being erected on East 17th Street.

In other local developments, one of the state's autoing pioneers, William L. Tedford, had developed a do-it-yourself tube-repair kit, the Super-Service Patch. It came in a can. Or, as his patent filing would phrase it a year down the road: "W.L. Tedford's Super-Service Patch, Keep a Kan in your Kar" — with the K's in large caps.

(I know what you're wondering, and I have no idea.)

The March 2, 1919, Arkansas Gazette reported that William L. Tedford was selling a tube patch he created himself, the Super-Service Patch.
The March 2, 1919, Arkansas Gazette reported that William L. Tedford was selling a tube patch he created himself, the Super-Service Patch.

But back to 1919. One of the neater items in the Gazette was its March 10 interview with one of its former linotype operators, E.D. Battle. "Built First Car Operating Locally," the headline proclaimed.

Joy-riding around the city with 200 pounds of steam under the seat may have been all right in 1903, but not in 1919. But that's what created a sensation in Little Rock in ye olden days when E.D. Battle, now living at 209 Spring street, built the first horseless carriage seen in the city and nearly ran the poor draft animals crazy.

He'd built it while a member of the Fire Department. Some newspaper wrote it up in 1903, and that clipping had secured Battle a job at the Ford factory in Detroit in 1907.

The Gazette's story included a 2-column vintage photo of a very upright Battle, wearing a snazzy driving cap and perched atop his large-wheeled contraption. It had a hood on the front to cover the gasoline tank that held the fuel used to stoke the fire in its belly; this was unusual, he said, in an age when most autos set a mere dashboard between people and machine.

The car had a 20-gallon water tank, a solid copper boiler reinforced with piano wire and covered with asbestos to keep the seat from getting too warm for the passengers. ... When the steam pressure reached 223 pounds the safety valve "popped." The mechanism was designed much in the same way as a railroad locomotive, and in case of emergency Battle reversed his engine.

He ran it eight years, crashing once, harmlessly; but then the car was disassembled. Its wheels could be seen about town, on an express wagon.

Cool, huh? But here's the thing. He didn't build the city's first locally built car.

Three years after the Gazette immortalized Battle, one William R. Kirby retired from his career on the high seas with the U.S. Shipping Board and returned to Little Rock. Something must have transpired to bring his claim of an earlier homemade auto to the fore, because he told the tale in the April 16, 1922, Democrat.

I've transcribed that article so you can read the whole thing here.

Long story short, in 1893, in the summer of his 16th year, Kirby spent a month patching together a lumbering "steamer" using scraps from the junkyard of the James Brodie machine shop at Second and Rock streets. Kirby worked there during summer vacation.

His auto had big wheels behind and little wheels in the front.

The passengers sat on a seat over the front wheels in high state while the grimy, sweating driver toiled at his post in the rear. Just over the heads of the passengers, and a few inches behind, a smoke stack belched forth black smoke as the strange vehicle lurched down the street.

But not just any street. Very few streets, in fact. It could not navigate Main Street's cobblestones. His top speed was 10 mph.

He rattled so many windows and spooked so many horses, the chief of police made him park the thing forever.

THE AGE OF -LESS

The automotive age rolled into Arkansas at the head of a parade of lame jokes.

Ad, Oct. 27, 1898:

To horseless carriages and smokeless powder add chimneyless factories as the newest in nomenclature. Heretofore it has been necessary in order to secure plenty of draft for a furnace to build an immensely tall chimney. Now it is found that instead of pulling the draft by the chimney you can push it from below with a fan.

Item, Aug. 9, 1903:

We have the horseless carriage and the wireless telegraph and the smokeless chimney and are even promised the featherless chicken. Now if some one will invent the noiseless piano these hot summer nights (when the piano banger leaves the doors and windows open while she practices) will be rendered more endurable.

Item in the Oct. 9, 1904, What Goeth On column, remarking upon white collar crimes in Missouri, where seven ex-members of the St. Louis city assembly were in the pen for accepting bribes; all had named the same briber, but his trial ended with his acquittal:

We have therefore the remarkable legal condition that a man may be bribed without there being a briber; also that there may be a briber who bribes no one. Perhaps the bribeless briber and the unbribed bribed may simply be a latter-day development in keeping with the horseless carriage and the wireless telegraph.

Item, April 2, 1905. Mr. Steinhart, hotelier, was displaying seedless apples at Park Place in New York. To get them, he had rushed to St. Louis from California, where he had been on the road in search of seedless grapefruit:

He announced upon arrival here that the apples were not only coreless and seedless, but priceless. Mr. Steinhart says that the seedless apple is going to do more for the world than the horseless carriage or the wireless telegraph.

Ad, Nov. 25, 1908, Gazette:

Horseless carriages, wireless telegraphy, and now lardless cookery!

Item, Jan. 27, 1909:

"In this age of antilogy we have grown used to the horseless carriage, the wireless telegraph, the fireless cooker and other contradictions of fundamental principle, but the noiseless gun comes with a shock, belying its action, upsetting as it does the traditions of a thousand years or more, destroying to a large degree the roar of the cannon, the crack of small arms, the malicious purr of the machine gun ...

Item, July 27, 1910:

We have horseless carriages and fireless cookers, but the latest innovation is "flourless bread."

1917 ads (galore):

What will human ingenuity do next? Smokeless powder, wireless telegraphy, horseless carriages, colorless iodine, tasteless quinine — now comes nausealess calomel.

We do not make this stuff up.

[RELATED: Local man says he drove the first horseless carriage here in 1893]

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Style on 03/11/2019

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