Fastest Car In The World: The 1906 Stanley Steamer Rocket - A Canoe Bodied Record Smasher

On the flat sands of a Florida beach in 1906, a former bicycle mechanic turned auto plant foreman

drove a car built out of a canoe powered by a steam engine to a speed of 127.66 miles per

hour. He became the first man to travel more than 2 miles per minute in an automobile, instantly

became famous around the world, and the unique car he was piloting, the culmination of

a life's work of two brilliant twin brothers would try to kill him just one year later.

This is the story of the fastest car in the world, the 1906 Stanley Steamer Rocket.

So before we jump right into the big moment of triumph on the sands of Ormond Beach, Florida,

we have a bunch of stuff to get acquainted with in this story. Stuff like, who are the

Stanley brothers? What's a steam car? How does one work? Why they were racing in Florida?

And how the heck this thing shocked the world, held an automotive land speed record for four years,

and the steam speed record for 103 years. Yes, I said 103 years. Oh yeah, and how they made the

thing so fast. One more thing to add before we get truly going here, I want to call attention

to some of the primary reference materials I used in assembling this story. There's the book,

The Modern Steam Car and its background by Thomas S. Durr, the steam-powered automobile and answer to

pollution by Andrew Jamison, and a seminal work on this topic entitled Bravo Stanley by H. James

Merrick, as well as dozens of vintage newspaper clippings and stories from the likes of the

Boston Globe, New York Times, and so many others of the period. Okay, now we have all that out

of the way, it's time to get going. So the two guys at the root of our story are Francis

Edger or F.E. Stanley and his twin brother Freeland Oscar or F.O. Stanley. Born in 1849 in the small

burg of Kingsfield, Maine, they came from a really interesting family. Their father taught, farmed,

and stood up to the occasional angry mob. They had a mom that was very well read, and the boys

were gifted from birth with creativity and skills well beyond the norm. They had skills

in the arts. They made things like violins as a hobby. They were inveterate businessmen and

entrepreneurs since they were kids, and even back then they did side jobs to raise money for

advanced books and subjects like math, and they used this knowledge they gained as children to

their advantage. Between the two of them, there was brilliance in art, education, and a

variety of other fields, mechanical and otherwise. There was also the ability to find a way to

take their collective talents and make money with them. For instance, a passion and skill for

the burgeoning art and process of photography in the 1800s led the brothers to not only start a

successful photographic business, but to get in the business of making the plates used in cameras

in the 1800s. In fact, they created a machine and a process by which they could make them at

a speed 10 times faster than known at that time of existence. This set the brothers on a path

of a very comfortable life and the company along with its patented machines would eventually be sold

to the massive Eastman Kodak company who'd used them both on a grand scale. The Stanley brothers

had more than 40 patents to their name over the course of their respective lives, and they covered

all manner of machines, automotive technology, methods of building cars, and the list goes

on and on. After weathering some issues with their business in the early 1890s,

the brothers had their company rocking again and had gotten into different things like trotting

horses and other activities. In 1896, they ventured to the south of Boston to visit an event

called the Brockton Fair. Their main interest in attending the fair was to see horse racing,

but a sideshow appeared and got their attention. A guy showed up with an early

Deion automobile and was set to make some exhibition laps around the horse track for

people in the packed stands. This was a big attraction because cars were such a novelty

back then. Unfortunately, this thing didn't complete a single lap before breaking down and

being dragged off, presumably, by horses. Effie and F.O. Stanley talked about the broken,

horseless carriage the whole train ride home and by the end of it, Effie declared that they'd

be making one of their own which would be better. Not only that, it would perform more than just

a single lap, but many laps without issues in front of a crowd. In all my research,

there's no one real direct factor as to why their brothers chose steam over the admittedly

crude internal combustion engines of the day. Perhaps they understood its principles better,

or they found it to be more pleasurable and palatable than the gasoline engines of the

time, but I really don't have a solid answer as to why they pursued steam over internal

combustion. Nonetheless, they began an obsession with steam and that obsession

saw them closely inspecting some of the early steam carriages of the era to get ideas.

Their initial plan called for a steam carriage with a total weight of 500 pounds in full construction.

They contracted with a known boiler maker in the area and a motor-making firm in New England

and they received an engine that weighed 400 pounds and a boiler that weighed 200 pounds.

Yeah, they were actually 200 pounds in materials overweight before including a single

nut or bolt of the actual vehicle. Whoopsie doodle. One thing to consider, this was not some prototype

for them to test or sell. This was literally a fun project for the brothers. Building your own car

from scratch in 1903 was kind of a rich guy flex. Understanding this, you'll be happy to know

that they fired the boiler and cracked the throttle for their first drive in this too

heavy car in September of 1897. After scaring some horses and likely themselves,

they were highly entertained and their path forward was set. They had this idea and many

ideas that they wanted to improve upon and they wanted to build more cars for themselves.

These would be family transportation and tinker toys. The first thing the brothers

did was to design their own light and very strong boilers. These would handle a maximum

of 600 psi of pressure and weigh 90 pounds and they were rock solid and safe. Friends and steam

engine masters J.W. Penney and son from Mechanics Falls, Maine were hired to build engines for their

three cars. They understood the assignment better than the other company because the guys at

J.W. Penney provided a two cylinder engine that came back at 35 pounds in total weight.

The brothers had planned to build three more cars along with their first two heavy automobile.

There would be a four passenger Surrey and two two passenger automobiles or horseless carriages.

And again, the intention here was to simply build this stuff for themselves and after they

had done that move on with their lives to the next hobby. As it turns out, they disliked the

four passenger Surrey so much they dismantled it soon after completion. And despite the plan

to keep the cars for themselves, F.O. Stanley was so roundly pestered by a rich guy that

he sold his car to him just to get the guy off his back. Next we come to 1898,

in a large automotive show that was happening in Boston. Some of the larger producers,

relatively speaking of course, of cars at that time were displaying. The day after the display,

there was going to be a public demonstration of the cars at a local track. Having heard of

the Stanley car, a writer for a Boston newspaper lobbied the event organizers to let them

into the demonstration, even though it was just meant for the cars that had been displaying at

the static show and the Stanleys of course had not done that. As they likely saw no harm in allowing

some local home-built steam car in contrast to the big money iron in the show, they let the boys

in. After watching all the cars make their speed trials around the reserved racetrack,

F.E. Stanley went out and the Stanley steamer made three laps, covering one mile in a time

of 2 minutes and 11 seconds. Doesn't sound like much, but frankly at this time, that was a new

world's record for covering a mile distance in an automobile. The previous record was 2 minutes

and 32 seconds set on a straightaway in France. Likely in shock silence, the crowd turned their

attention to the hill climb portion of the trial. The little Stanley with its insanely

torquey steam engine, lack of a transmission and associated slipping clutch dominated this

section of the exposition as well and within two weeks, the brothers had received 200 unsolicited

orders for cars at their business that frankly didn't exist yet. This was an indication that

their former hobby had all of a sudden turned into a business. Buying a former bicycle factory

near their existing dry photo plate factory, they packed it full of people, machines and materials

and the Stanley Motor Carriage Company was born. Just when it seemed like the

fellows are on their way and on their path, something crazy happened. Approached by a couple

of businessmen, they were ultimately offered $250,000 for their company. This was a company that

had barely produced a single car so far. The brothers had effectively $20,000 tied up in

the whole works and so they took the deal. They sold the factory, they sold their patents,

they sold everything. They weren't allowed to make their own steam cars for a period of

about a year and they were working for the new buyers who changed the name of the company to

Locomobile. And while they weren't making their own cars, they still did have involvement with

Locomobile. For instance, in 1899, Amsy Barber, one of the executives at Locomobile,

encouraged an idea F. O. Stanley had. He wanted to be the first guy to drive a car

up Mount Washington in New Hampshire. No one had ever done it before. With his wife Flora,

he left eastern Massachusetts and drove to the mountain in a car built at the Stanley factory

and branded Locomobile and then did what many thought was impossible. On August 31st of 1899,

he and his wife drove the treacherous Eight Mile Mountain Road in 2 hours and 10 minutes,

making multiple stops for water and allowing horses by and who knows what else. It was

another publicity bonanza for the company. The Locomobile sale had a bizarre ending.

By 1901, Locomobile had decided to ditch steam cars altogether and move all their manufacturing

to the state of Connecticut and this would leave the plant that the Stanley brothers had sold them

abandoned. In May of 1901, the brothers bought all their stuff back. The factory and the patents

included for $20,000. Remember, they had sold it for $250,000. In 1902, they sold usage rights

to their engine patent to the white car company for $15,000, meaning their total cost in recovering

their company was $5,000 off of the top of $250,000. That's incredible. Perhaps even better than that,

these guys had been biding their time and by 1901 had a load of new ideas they wanted to employ

on their new automobiles. When word got out that the Stanleys had their company back,

what their improved designs were and that they were being made, the company was flushed with orders

right off the bat. In the 1889 timeframe, Effie and F.O. Stanley hired a young man in his 20s named

Fred Marriott and little did any of them know that he'd be destined to create some of the most

amazing headlines the Stanley Motor Carriage Company would have ever dreamed to own.

He was a young mechanic who had apprenticed at the Petty Machine Works and then got

on to be a lead mechanic at the Union Cycle Company factory. Known as a phenom in solving complex

mechanical issues in a jiffy, he quickly impressed at Stanley. Fred Marriott was also a racer of

bicycles and had enough talent to be the town champion of Needham, Massachusetts, which

laugh at it now, but was really no small shakes in those days.

Placed in the role of Foreman in the factory repair department, Fred Marriott had hit the

gearhead jackpot. That department with the boring name, design parts, fixed cars, did

special projects and as he'd soon learn, built race cars. There were plenty of places to go racing

in 1902, typically they were horse tracks, but there were exceptions. But if there's one thing

you could be assured of if you were racing in America at this time, you'd either be

turning left on a circle or perhaps on some form of closed public road, but what if there

was a third option? As it turns out there was, Ormond Beach, Florida. Slowly but surely,

the Ormond Beach area had started to become a bit of a resort destination after some New

Englanders moved south and began operating hotels on Florida's eastern shore. After

getting improved access to the area through better rail service, places like Hotel Ormond

opened up. This is where a man named James Hathaway stayed in 1902. Not only did he

stay there, he had shipped a Stanley steamer down to enjoy the area as well.

Hathaway had raced his car around the Narragansett Park track in Cranston,

Rhode Island, running against the mile standards of the day to see how fast he was.

Once Hathaway laid eyes on the 30 plus miles of straight away on Ormond Beach with its width of

hundreds of feet, sand as hard as concrete and occasionally strong tailwind, he knew exactly

what he had to do. He measured out a mile and then he ran his car down it. It ended up being 15

seconds faster than he had ever run at Rhode Island and immediately he knew that this was as

good a racetrack as nature could ever produce. Hathaway went on a wild letter writing campaign

to promote the area and get the attention of the automotive world and one of the guys who

got a letter and decided to investigate was a journalist named William Morgan of the

automobile magazine. A former bicycle racer and well-known automotive writer,

Morgan went down in 1903 and was immediately blown away by what he saw. Getting with the area

hotels for promotion, he decided that the automobile magazine should try and have a race

on the beach by the end of 1903. This was a short time window but they pulled it off.

The hotels jumped on the idea and well it didn't draw a massive crowd of cars for the

first time the right cars showed up. We're talking guys like Ransome Olds and Alexander

Wynton just to name a couple of the luminaries. In fact, during the festivities in 1903, James

Hathaway who had started the ball rolling on all this stuff set a new steam mile record in his

Stanley at one minute 28 and two-fifths of a second. The premiere event though was held

on the last day. This was a one mile standing start drag race. Of course,

it didn't call it a drag race but that's exactly what it was between Alexander Wynton

and his bullet and Horace Thomas driving the Ransome Olds own machine known as the pirate.

This was a squeaker with a bullet winning by one-fifth of a second for a total time of one

minute fifteen to run a mile from a standing start. But how about that? A legitimate side

by side one mile long standing start drag race in 1903. Something else happened in 1903

far north of Ormond Beach. The Stanley's built a race car. Some called it the torpedo and some

called it the turtle but it was sleek for its day and it started to incorporate basic ideas that

would be present in the rocket in the coming years. That car was raced locally in the 1903 to

1904 timeframe. The body of the machine which started out as kind of blunt nose flat and wide

would be modified over time and look eerily similar to what the rocket would end up looking

like in 1906. On May 30th 1903 the Stanley racer smashed the one mile steam world record

to the tune of one minute two and four-fifths of a second and this was done on a circle track in

Massachusetts. The 1904 Ormond Beach races were setting themselves up to be pretty amazing.

As it turns out the Stanley's wouldn't be there. This was the time frame when the

Eastman Kodak company came to make an offer to buy their photo plate business and as such

the brothers stayed home to finish that transaction rather than going to Florida. The good news for

them is that they didn't miss out on the headlines. Fifteen cars came to Ormond in 1904. Among them

a Packard, a Stevens-Durier, a local mobile, a 90 horsepower Mercedes, a wild Christie Frontwheel

Driver, a 70 horsepower Peerless and the 120 horsepower Winton Bullet II driven by Barney

Oldfield, the craziest car, the Baker Electric Torpedo Kid. It was fully electric and it was shaped

like nothing anybody had ever seen. There was also a stock Stanley steamer driven by a man named Louis

Ross from Massachusetts. By the end of the week in 1904 every major speed record had been reset

including the stock steam car mile record which was set by Louis Ross at 55 two-fifths of a

second to cover a mile. While the factory stock and street driven Stanley was not a pound for pound

match against the truly hairy chested race cars of the day it was more than capable of hanging with

those guys and close enough to make the rich guy sweat. This alone caused many to give the

steam cars a lot of respect. Outside of Ormond steam cars have been dominating events like

hill climbs from the late 1800s into the early 1900s but by 1904 the gas cars with ever

larger and more powerful engines had begun to catch up. At Mount Washington in 1903 a gas car

finally broke the standing record set in 1899 by Stanley but then a week later a New Yorker named

Austin Hoy took his Stanley up to the top of the mountain in one hour and 39 minutes to steal

the record back from the gas cars by some seven minutes. At the 1904 Commonwealth Abhill climb

in Boston we see Fred Marriott entered as a factory works driver for the first time. The operator of

the second entry from Stanley was Louis Ross who had been at Ormond in the winter months.

Marriott won the steam class but came in third again overall showing just how the gas cars

had narrowed the performance gap between the steamers. At the 1904 Mount Washington hill climb

Effie Stanley took the tiller and whizzed up the mountain in 28 minutes and 16 seconds

by far the fastest time in history. He even drove it up to the top of the railway platform at the

summit and an apparent dare from photographers. Ultimately though the quickest time of the day

would go to the 60 horsepower Mercedes driven by Harry Harkness who managed a time of just over

24 minutes in an $18,000 car which scared him so badly he took the cog railway down from

the top and made somebody else bring the car back to the bottom. Now Stanley as for the

rules of the event sold his car for list price which is $650 to a spectator that wanted to buy it.

Apparently this was done as a claimer rules are done in stock car racing in the modern world

as to not over invest in your equipment knowing that it could be sold for retail price.

1904 though had a whole lot more in store for the Stanley boys. In fact it would be a car

which they didn't even built that would keep them in the international racing headlines during

the early months of 1905. Louis Ross who had run his stock Stanley at Ormond in 1904 went all in for

1905. He had Frank Wooster of the Watch City automobile company at Waltham, Massachusetts

custom built a chassis of his own design. He consulted with Effie Stanley for a boiler of

16 inches diameter which could handle 800 psi of pressure and a pair of 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch

boring stroke twin cylinder Stanley steam engines for power. He built his own unique aerodynamic body

out of sheets of aluminum and the car was dubbed the airship by some newspapers and the tea cattle

by some others. It rode on semi elliptical springs and because it had two piston engines

driving the rear tires which were not 100% synced it had the propensity to wobble about

and move around as it was accelerating and so the most commonly known name for this car is

the wobble bug. Finished in mid 1904 the car was immediately set to the racetracks of New England

and after a couple of opening outings that went kind of rough it was sorted out and started to work

very well. The car set records with consistency throughout the back half of 1904, won races

and by the time it was sent to Ormond Beach it was fully sorted out. Weighing 1,250 pounds with

full water tanks the only major alteration that was made was the addition of aluminum discs

over the wire wheels for aerodynamic purposes. The car was shipped by train from Massachusetts to

Florida with very high hopes. Interestingly the media had begun to believe that this was actually

a Stanley car because of the fact that their components were used and the apparent influence

they had had on Ross. But once again in 1905 the Stanley brothers decided to stay home

rather than travel to Ormond Beach. However their nephew Newton Stanley who worked in the

photographic plate business with them traveled to the event with tragic consequences.

On January 21st 1905 while riding a motorcycle down the beach at the waterline a 75 horsepower

Smith and Mably Simplex driven by Frank Crocker came rocketing down the sand in

near the same position. Swerving to the left to avoid a breaking wave that put him directly

in the path of Crocker. Newton Stanley then caused a disaster. Crocker swerved to miss him,

losing control of the car and crashing in horrific fashion. Crocker's riding mechanic

Alexander Raoul was killed instantly. Crocker was transported from the scene,

dying the next day in medical care. Stanley's leg was broken so badly it was partially

amputated. Colker and Raoul were the first two people killed on Ormond Beach in an automobile.

But as they so often did in the time, the events went on.

In a sea of the world s most expensive and high technology race cars,

Louis Ross s oddly shaped machine stood out. The lack of a banging internal combustion engine,

the large stack out the back and mostly enclosed driving positions were not the only

startling looks. They raised eyebrows amongst those that knew race cars in the crowd

and this thing was nothing that they had ever seen before. Oh, it ran like it too.

Ross kicked off the week crushing the competition in the 5 mile race for cars valued at $651 to $1,100

winning by more than one minute. The most anticipated race of the week was the Sir

Thomas Dewar Trophy Run. Dewar, the man who took his family's Scottish distillery to

international fame and it s a product that people still consume today, was a sportsman

and a lover of all things mechanical and fast and so he tied his name to the Ormond

Beach races creating this particular reward making this an international affair with some glory

attached. The format was simple. It was a rolling start one mile sprint. The driver in the inside

position, the one closest to the ocean, controlled the speed of the roll at their discretion

and then at the starting line it was full throttle for a mile and amazingly,

Louis Ross had that inside position as well as a plan.

Keeping his speed down so that the gas cars would have to stay in low gear,

his direct drive steamer was primed for launch when they got to the starting line

and launch it did. He won the first heat with an elapsed time of 41 and 3 fifths of a second

and the final round he had to take on a big Napier car with about 100 horsepower and he won

again this time by a single fifth of a second. It was stunning. A home built

free kid taken on and won over the world's best. In fact, over the course of the week,

the little steamer dominated. Entering eight different races over the course of the event,

Ross recorded seven first place finishes, one second, set two steam world records,

one competition record and frankly stole all the headlines. No one saw he or his little car

coming. As you can imagine in the early 1900s, a speed crazed America with plenty of people

to throw money around became obsessed with owning Ross's car. The highest bidder was a New Yorker named

Charles Heinemann. Heinemann didn't drive the car himself, instead hiring Joe Nelson to drive it for

him and on May 6, 1905, Joe Nelson crashed the car at the Bright New York track, completely

destroying it. The last the world ever saw of the wobble bug. Ross claimed to not want to

pursue a career in racing and that's why he sold the car, although we're going to question

that shortly. Now clearly Ross's performance powered by Stanley parts inspired something in

F.E. Stanley. Shortly after Ross got back and the headlines subsided, Stanley committed to building

a racer that would not just duplicate Ross's performance but blow his and every other race

car in the world straight into the weeds. Ross may have started something, but F.E. Stanley

was going to finish it. Before we get into the 1906 Stanley rocket specifically,

we have to understand how steam powered cars work and why they were a great fit for this type of

competition at Ormond Beach. As compared to traditional internal combustion cars, they're

insanely simple, have prodigious amounts of a particular amount of force that even huge gas

engines couldn't touch at that time and that of course is called torque. A steam powered car

works in virtually the identical way as a steam powered locomotive. There's a tank of water,

there's a boiler, there's a burner and there's a set of pistons that turn a crankshaft which in

turn moves the wheels. In the case of the Stanley's they had developed their own boiler and it was a

scalable design which was very very safe. In the case of Stanley's rocket, they had developed

a boiler that was 30 inches in diameter and 18 inches tall. The inside of the boiler was

filled with 1475 tubes in which water flowed. Combining the surface area of all these

tubes, the boiler had 285 square feet of heating area. The boiler was usually run at about 1000 psi

of pressure but could be pressed harder when needed. Now if you're worried about explosions,

let's stop there a second. This boiler couldn't explode in the way you're thinking.

Yes, internal tubes could rupture, burners could crack, but the actual integrity of the boiler

was protected with a tight and voluminous wrap of steel wire. Now this was a technique used

for the better part of 50 years on cannon, naval guns and other applications. The tensile strength

of the wire, especially when wrapped in volume, was amazingly strong, making the boiler itself

virtually impossible to rupture. There are no recorded cases of a Stanley steamer ever blowing

up a boiler that I could find. So, if we're making 1000 psi of superheated steam, what

happens next? That's the stuff that will be released from the boiler and piped to our

pistons. Now steam engines can't stall, and they make their peak torque at basically 1 rpm.

You simply just keep feeding pressure into it until the pistons start to move, no matter what.

In the case of the Stanley engines, they're also double acting. This means that the steam is shot

in the top of the bore, forcing the piston down, and then via slide valve, steam is then shot in

the bottom of the piston to send the piston up, or in the case of these lay down engines back

and forth. The pistons use rope style piston rings to seal themselves inside the bore, rudimentary, yes,

but also functional. Occasional issues with braking cylinder heads and pistons were part

of the racing program and would be a resultant in the amounts of high pressure that they were

entering into the cylinders. With a 4.5 inch bore and a 6.5 inch stroke, the 1000 psi of

pressure being applied to the pistons was top and bottom both. Effie Stanley figured that

this combo would make two times the power Ross had with his far smaller displacement dual engines.

Now this car did not run a transmission of any sort. You may think that's impossible,

but consider the fact that a steam locomotive capable of pulling millions of pounds didn't

use a transmission either. In the case of the Stanley, speed was to be achieved by gearing,

and to say that it is steep would be an understatement. The engine was geared 0.5 to

1 to the axle. This means that for every one revolution of the steam engine,

two revolutions of the rear tires would occur. It's backwards math to most gear heads, and you

have to think about it for a second to really understand it. For instance, in a regular car,

a 411 gear in a hot rod means that the engine turns four times for every revolution of the rear

tires. This is the complete opposite of that and makes us appreciate the prodigious torque

output of the steam engines. In the Stanley rocket, the engine made 300 revolutions per mile or 10.5

revolutions per second as far as the pistons went, and 21 revolutions per second as far as the tires

went. So again, it is completely opposite. For every one revolution of the engine,

you get two revolutions of the tires. In the car you drive down the street,

the engine has to make multiple revolutions to get one revolution of the tires. And of course,

not all steam cars carry this massive gear ratio, which was one of the reasons this one

had such a high top-end speed. So before we move along, the more efficient the boiler,

the more scalding hot the burner, the more pressure that could be made, and the more

pressure that could be applied when the throttle was open, full steam ahead,

the faster the car would go. All that make sense? Okay, next up is the most radical part

of the whole program, which is of course the body and frame. It was a canoe, literally.

Stanley knew that Ross was on the right track with the shape of his car and its approach,

but he knew he could do better. Canoing was a national pastime at this moment in history,

and canoes carved through the water easier than most other boats. There were plenty of people

making them and plenty of designs to choose from, so how did he pick? Believe it or not,

he did it with testing. Effie Stanley built a rig where he could tow various designs of canoes

behind his car, and with a spring gauge he could measure how much effort it took to pull them

along at speed. Now perhaps this is the most early and certainly the most odd aerodynamic

testing for a car in racing history, but it's still pretty amazing that he had this idea

and used it. Was it at all accurate? Who really knows? Or at this point, who really cares?

I just think it's kind of awesome. Light, long and streamlined, lacking in frontal area to push,

it was a smart move to use the canoe shape, and the JR Robertson Canoe Company of

Auburn Dale, Massachusetts got the call to make a slightly modified version of their riverside

model canoe. Robertson not only made the canoe body, but also the top to fit. Now there's

some question if the riverside was chosen because the boiler naturally fit, or if the

design was altered to fit the boiler, but either way, we now know who and what in terms of the body

and who made it for the Stanley rocket. When the car was constructed, Stanley made sure to put

everything in the body, including the leaf springs, so that means only the tires and the

nose of the car and the little spindly axles were exposed, giving a frontal area of 9 square

feet, which is an astonishing number not only for then, but for now when we talk about

speed cars. F.E. Stanley, Fred Marriott and the other engineers at the factory completed the car

in time for some light testing in 1905 before preparing to send itself for the 1906 Orman

Beach races. Stanley estimated the car was capable of 120 miles an hour. That was a speed

no human had ever achieved in an automobile. The 1906 Orman Beach races were comprised of a

menagerie of 27 different events. Some were open to all, some were restricted on price in the weight

of cars, some by power plant, there were straight sprints, distance races with turns and more.

The Durer Cup, awarded for the 1 mile international championship, was still the peak draw event

and a new 2 miles per minute trophy would be awarded as part of a flying 2 mile contest

and that would go to the racer who went furthest over 120 miles per hour.

There were races of 5, 10 and 30 mile distance,

some starting from a standstill, some from a roll and some from flying starts.

There was also the greatest collection of high powered cars the world had ever seen.

110 horsepower Christie's, 200 horsepower to rock, 100 horsepower Napier,

a 90 horsepower Thomas, 110 horsepower Mercedes, 110 horsepower Fiat and on and on and on.

There were also 15 to 20 horsepower Stanley's, the 50 horsepower rocket and a 250 horsepower

Vanderbilt Spooner which unfortunately or maybe fortunately for the other racers did not compete.

The driver lineup at this event was also legendary. Louis Chevrolet, Paul Sertori,

Christie, Kulak, Lancia and yes, Fred Marriott. A story learnt to itself,

Louis Ross was supposedly going to be the driver of the rocket before heading down to Florida,

so much for not wanting a racing career, right? This was until he had a falling

out of some sort with Stanley. Having raced for the company since 2004, Marriott was tapped to

drive. Also, as the car was supposedly built specifically to his dimensions,

one wonders if he was going to be the guy all along and Ross just got the memo late.

Either way, Marriott was an absolute dominator. In the Durer Cup in the first heat,

he set a new world record for the mile at 32.15 seconds and in the second and final heat,

he ran in even 32 seconds, another record and destroyed the competition. In the one mile

steam competition, he lowered his own world record to 31.45 seconds and won again. In the

five mile race, heat won, he set a new record of 2 minutes 47.15 seconds and finished minutes

ahead of the competition. During the final though, a cracked burner saw him shutting the car off after

three miles and using the residual steam in the boiler to finish the race. Unfortunately,

that caused him to slow and he was passed. He still came in third and his time was still

a world record for steam powered cars at that distance. Thankfully, by 6pm that evening,

the car was repaired for the next day. On January 26, 1906, Fred Marriott covered the flying kilometer

in 18 and two-fifths of a second after a two-mile run-up and became the first person in the world

to travel over 120 miles per hour in a car. His speed was 121.6. The Kelo competition being

an open race meant that anybody could enter and they did and he wiped the floor with the gas

cars. For the flying mile, the same approach was taken, a two-mile run-up and then wide open across

the starting line. The mile was covered in 28 and a fifth seconds for a speed of 127.66 miles per hour.

Fred Marriott was the fastest man on wheels in the world and it was an accomplishment

considered verging on the impossible at this time in history. No one had an answer

for the Stanley steamer rocket. During the two-mile-a-minute race, the engine blew a cylinder head

out. The car suffered some body damage and went off for repairs. Weather pushed it back a couple of

days and then on his first attempt, Marriott went one minute and three seconds over the two-mile

distance. The car bouncing and skittering seemed to almost hover the front tires at times.

In fact, passing the one-mile marker on his next attempt, the front of the car was off the

ground and people thought that it may actually blow over backward. Undaunted, Marriott stopped

the clocks in 59 and three-fifths of a second, another 120-mile-an-hour run. Marriott did not

want to run again and said as much and claimed he'd only go back out if his number was lowered

and unfortunately for him, it was. The 200 horsepower Durrock did the job in 58 and

four-fifths seconds and then race officials hastily closed the event before Marriott was

given his last chance. Apparently, they had one enough and the race officials had something else

to worry about with regard to the rocket and so giving them another accolade was not something

they wanted to do. The beating the rocket had laid down was so thorough, so complete,

that the complaint started before the race was over. Cars that were specifically built

to go racing and couldn't actually be driven anywhere at this time in history were called

freaks. A movement to ban them from further competition had started. The organizers were

faced with a classic racing promotional dilemma. The fastest car, the one that drew people from

all over the nation to watch, was their biggest issue. The question is, what would they do about

it for 1907? The answer, as it turns out, was nothing. But the racer sure did something.

They used back channels to cause what was effectively a silent boycott of the event.

The number of cars attending shrunk drastically. No European cars were entered in competition

and it was all tied to the Stanley and the fact that these guys all knew that they simply couldn't

run with it. For their part, F.E. Stanley and Fred Marriott made some changes to the car to

help the incredible vibration that would pass through it at speed. There was one issue

that was on the back burner and although practically invisible, nagged at F.E. Stanley

and Marriott. It was the car's propensity to get light in the front end at speed.

They had done some rudimentary things on Orman beats to try to help keep the nose down,

like adding sandbags and rocks to the front end of the car. But Marriott still said the

front end felt like it was floating at times and witnesses watched the speed in the 127-mile-an-hour

run and saw the front end off the ground multiple times. But no real solution was ever

encountered or deeply explored. It almost seems like F.E. Stanley didn't want to

mess with the clearly good thing. All that said though, having weight in the car, meaning

all of the weight in the car behind the driver, including the engine, the boiler and everything

else was having some negative consequences on the high-speed manners and handling of the automobile,

that much it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out.

The 1907 Orman Beach event was a shadow of 1905 and 1906. Five Stanley cars were shipped

down to various power levels, but the bad news was that the rocket was beat up pretty badly in

the shipping process. Its body was dented, dinged and damaged in various areas, and it seems that

the cars were rolling into each other in their train cars as they rumbled down the tracks.

Adding to the already somewhat downer nature of the whole thing was a horrible-looking beach.

A lack of rain had caused the sand to be choppy, rutted and in some case kind of troughed

out. After days of waiting and running into the wind, Fred Marriott kicked off the week with a 38

and three-fifth second mile time, a long way off his 1906 pace. Ray Haroon, who would go on to fame

as the winner of the first Indianapolis 500 mile race in 1911, was there with his Beasley V8 race

car. Unfortunately, that car spit a crankshaft out of it before it had a chance to race heads

up. With no other capable cars in the category, the 1907 Dewar Trophy would be uncontested

and it would stay with Marriott from his 1906 performance. In the five mile open championship,

the Flying Star race was a complete walk over for Fred Marriott. Finishing in three minutes,

44 and four-fifth seconds, the reporter from the Boston Globe described the car as bobbing

like the clapper of a bell across the sand. Not great. In the 10 mile open race, disaster

struck. The roughness of the course caused the rear of the body to break, allowing the

engines to fall down and effectively expire. And this caused everything to break internally as well.

Repairs were made hastily over the course of a day or so, repairing the body and reattaching it in some

sort of a way, as well as stealing parts off the other racing standleys, brought the car back

onto the sand where it ran at 31 seconds or 31 and four-fifths of a second over the course

of a mile, showing that it was working, but still not as fast as it was the year previous.

One thing that was pretty great was F.E. Stanley himself. He set the world record

mile for steam passenger cars at 45 and two-fifths of a second,

but the big numbers were still not coming from the team's big car. Finally, on 125 of 1907,

after days of weather and conditional delay, it was announced that the final day for time trials

on the Flying Mile had arrived, and for Fred Marriott, he knew it was now or never.

With 1,300 PSI in the boiler, 200 PSI of fuel pressure, and four burners keeping it all

lit and steaming, Marriott opened the throttle for the two-mile run-up to the starting line.

As he approached, the crowd stood in stunned silence. The rocket was surely traveling faster

than anything they had seen before, and as it shot past the starting line about 200 yards

into the time mile, it went into a dip in the sand, and as it came out, the front end

caught the air and the car traveled about 100 yards on its rear tires only,

floating like a leaf in the wind before it landed on rough sand, pitch sideways,

and wrecked in such fashion that it was described as being, quote,

smashed to atoms. The car was broken into a million pieces and incredibly,

while unconscious and bleeding, Marriott was still breathing. He was bleeding everywhere,

had broken ribs, but he was intact. All the heavy parts had been torn out of the car's

wooden body and frame. A spectator and a Rolls Royce sped to the scene and transported

Marriott to a clubhouse where doctors attended to him. Amazingly, by evening, he was recounting

the crash and showing no signs of serious head injury. It was astonishing that he was not killed.

Marriott was quoted as saying at the time, quote,

it was as if the car seemed to take wings and fly up like a bird into the air, end quote.

Glenn Curtis witnessed the whole situation and said the car's flat bottom acted like a wing,

adding that the car seemed to glide with its rear wheels on the beach for an amazing amount of time.

As Marriott was being taken off, so were the remains of his car.

Souvenir hunters and spectators picked the remains of the rocket clean like a

Thanksgiving turkey. It's estimated that Marriott was traveling somewhere in the

neighborhood of 140 to 150 miles per hour when the calamity happened.

If this is the case, he would have reset the land speed record of the world by an indescribably

huge margin. But we'll never know for sure. One man who did make his mark unofficially that week

in 1907 was Glenn Curtis. He rode his 40 horsepower V8 motorcycle to an unofficial,

meaning stopwatch, not electrically timed, run of 136.3 miles per hour before a universal

joint failed and the machine didn't run again. On February 22, Fred Marriott was back at the

beach officiating a race. He was back to work at a Stanley plant by March 6th and back to racing

locally and regionally at about the same time. While he never hit the sands of Orman Beach again,

he did race Stanley cars and other machines for years around the New England region.

The Stanley company never competed on the sands of Orman Beach again either as the

rules were exclusionary to steam cars from 1907 on. It would take until 1910 during the final

Orman Beach race for Fred Marriott's 127.66 mile per hour automobile land speed record

to be broken. Barney Oldfield did it in the lightning bends with a speed of 131.72 miles per

hour. It took four years for that one record to be broken, but incredibly it would be 103

years for the steam powered speed record to fall, finally being eclipsed in 2009 by a streamliner

named Inspiration driven by Charles Burnett to a speed of 139.8 miles per hour.

Now that is debatably slower than Marriott was traveling before he crashed in 1906

and if you let that sink in for a minute, it makes this whole story that much more incredible.

The Stanley company would create and build steam cars into the 1920s,

one of the longest lasting and most successful manufacturers of that style of automobile.

They produced about 650 cars a year and kept the business that made the brothers comfortable,

certainly kept them entertained and kept people driving in some of the nicest most refined cars

of the era. That's the story of the Stanley steamer rocket, a machine of incredible performance,

incredible technology in its era and one that took 103 years to be beaten at its own game.

And if you didn't already know, now you do. I'm Brian Loans, thanks for watching.

Like and subscribe for more high-speed history, in-depth explorations,

and downright unbelievable accomplishments. See you next time.

Fastest Car In The World: The 1906 Stanley Steamer Rocket - A Canoe Bodied Record Smasher

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