The time record from ocean to ocean was held by L.L.  Whitman, who left New York in a Reo four-thirty at 12.01 A.M. on Monday, August 8, 1910, and arrived in San Francisco on the 18th, covering the 3,557 miles in 10 days 15 hours and 13 minutes.  This achievement may be more fully appreciated by comparing it with the transcontinental relay race in which a courier carried a message from President Taft to President Chilberg, of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, in September-October, 1909, in 10 days 5 hours, by using thirty-two cars and as many different drivers who knew the roads over which they ran.

Those who are fortunate enough to have friends who own cars know that automobiles can climb hills; and that the accepted way to do it is to throw in the extra special high gear, tear the throttle out by the roots, advance the spark twenty minutes, and push hard on the steering wheel.  The fact that the car will overlook such treatment and go ahead is a source of never-failing wonder.  Indeed, when it comes to hill-climbing the automobile is so far ahead of the locomotive that it seems like wanton cruelty to drag the latter into the discussion at all.

The steepest grade on a railroad doing a miscellaneous transportation business climbed by a locomotive relying on adhesion only is on the Leopoldina system in Brazil between Bocca do Monte and Theodoso, where there is a stretch of 8-1/3 per cent. grade with curves of 130 feet radius.  There are some logging roads in the United States with grades of 16 per cent.  How trifling this seems when compared with the feat of a Thomas car which climbed Fillmore Street, San Francisco, which is alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons on board.  As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon the car must have been.

Enthusiasm may be expected to run high in the presence of such astounding triumphs, and it should, therefore, not be deemed surprising that accounts of hill-climbing contests are generally lacking in definiteness.  The name of the car and the driver are always given with scrupulous care, but such incidental details as length of ascent, minimum, maximum, and average gradient, maximum curvature, and so on, are generally left to the imagination.

Among the few exceptions to this rule was the hill-climbing contest at Port Jefferson, Long Island, in which Ralph de Palma went up an ascent of two thousand feet with an average gradient of 10 per cent. and a maximum of 15 per cent. in 20.48 seconds in his 190-horse-power Fiat.  A little Hupmobile, one of the lightest cars built, reached the top in 1 minute 10 seconds.  De Palma climbed the “Giant’s Despair” near Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, an ascent six thousand feet long, with grades varying from 10 to 22 per cent., in his big machine in 1 minute 28-2/5 seconds.  A Marmon stock car reached the top in 1 minute 50-1/5 seconds.  Pike’s Peak, Mount Washington, Ensign Mountain, in Utah, and lesser mountains elsewhere have also been climbed repeatedly by automobiles.  As the mere announcement of the fact vividly exhibits the staying powers of the auto in a long, stiff climb, the engineering details may be disregarded.