Stunning increase in cars at start of 20th century
Friday, 26 March 2010 00:00
One hundred years ago, clippings from the newspapers of March 26, 1910.
Montreal Star. “The motor car industry,” says the Star, “has travelled faster than any other line of trade, not even excepting the bicycle trade of the early ‘90s.” The stunning progress of motor vehicles in the first decade of the 20th century is noted on the eve of the city’s first “Auto Show.”
The city’s first horseless carriage, a steam-powered car, arrived in 1889; by 1900 there were still no more than two, but in 1910 they are so common that there are said to be dozens of even lady drivers. In the past 10 years, the “road race record” increased from 26 to an average 77 miles per hour; the number of U.S. automobile makers increased from 27 to 263, with “several in Canada; the number of cars in the United States increased from “not more than 2,300” to 200,000.
Montreal sales of the Canada Cycle and Motor Company’s cars so far in 1910 are double those of the comparable 1909 period. In Toronto, the CCM factory is operating 24 hours a day to keep up with the demand.
According to Historical Statistics of Canada there were just 178 motor vehicles registered in Canada in 1903; by 1910 there were 9,158 by 1910; more than 400,000 by 1920, and some 26 million today. By 1918, the only vehicles still being produced by CCM were bicycles. The company was bankrupt in 1983 but the CCM brand remains on hockey equipment (produced by Reebok-CCM Hockey Inc) and on bicycles (made by Pro Cycle Group Inc. of Saint-George, Quebec).
The race track evil
Toronto Christian Guardian(published in Lindsay Post, March 25). In House of Commons debate on a bill to ban race track gambling, W.E. Raney estimated that “the total amount of bets on six Canadian race tracks in 1909 reached the enormous sum of $22,500,000, out of the greater part of which the gambling public was fleeced.” People “will cease to marvel that moral reformers are fighting the evil so strenuously.” The Guardian found it hard to believe that the jockey clubs are concerned only with “improving the breed of our horses… Gamblers may be philanthropists, but the odds are against it.” The bill was defeated by a vote of 78 to 77.
Money Switch
Toronto Globe. Twenty-three-year-old Chauncey W. Hammond, formerly of Oakville, Ontario, is on trial in Detroit, charged with theft of $17,000 cash from the E.M.F. Automobile Company and the First National Bank. Acting as assistant to E.M.F.’s paymaster, he is alleged to have “‘switched’ two satchels containing the cash, and substituting for them two bags similar in appearance but filled with paper and bricks. The job was done in the vaults of the bank, right under the noses of the bank officials, and its very boldness was responsible for its successful execution.”
Bald priest
Associated Press. New York. “The Rev. R.A. Hafa of St. Triniutis Evangelical Lutheran Church, Jersey City, has written his congregation that baldness forces him to retire from the ministry. He cannot wear his hat in church and he cannot preach bare-headed without catching a cold. He will preach his farewell sermon next Sunday.”