Bragging about the speed of his new Model 10 car, automaker William "Billy" Durant explained in 1908 that his car was for "men with real red blood who don't like to eat dust."

Old-time vaudevillians Gus Edwards and Vincent Bryan captured the nation's mood with their hit 1905 song "In My Merry Oldsmobile "— "It Glides! It Romps!! It Gallops!!!"

Ford's racing cars, the Arrow and 999, with their eightyhorsepower engines, went so fast that they had a tendency to take to the air. Inventor Henry Ford described the experience in October 1902: "Going over Niagara Falls would have been but a pastime after a ride in one of them."

Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator who created the Gibson Girl, continued to be surprised by the notoriety of his heroine. "If I hadn't seen it in the papers," he said in 1906, "I should never have known that there...