Cars
The Speed Record Story 1 - 1899. Breaking the 100 km/h barrier
This article discusses the early history of speed records in the automotive industry. It highlights the competition between early automobile manufacturers, such as Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat and Camille Jenatzy.
It is by no means a surprise to hear that the one thing everyone wanted to know about the newly-invented car was how fast it could go. The debate about speed had already commenced with trains some fifty years earlier. Among the many themes that concerned them back then, the theory that speed could actually damage our health had already been disproven: already in 1848 a steam locomotive called the American Antelope, had reached 96.6 km per hour without any particular side effects.
Indeed, with the experimentation of flight with the “heavier-than-air machine” by the Wright brothers, man now had the desire to achieve goals that were simply unthinkable only a few years earlier. The first vehicles to attempt to break a seemingly impossible limit, the 100 km/h barrier, drew their battleground in Paris. At the end of the 1800s, among the various propulsion systems, electric prevailed sharply over steam, while internal combustion engines were still very underpowered compared to other more popular alternatives.
