From: Michael T. Jones (mtj++at++intrinsic.com)
Date: 09/08/2000 07:13:10
Ray Harroun
b. 1879 in Pennsylvaina. d. 1968.
Co-founder of Harroun Motor Co. in Fort Wayne, Michigan.
Race Car Driver - Winner of the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911.
His average speed was 74.59 mph (120.4kph), driving a Marmon.
He was the first to publicly use an automotive rear-view mirror
and so was rumored to be the inventor of the idea. However
Harroun readily acknowledged that he'd first spotted the rear-view
mirror years earlier on horse-drawn taxis in Chicago.
Interview with Dick Harroun, son of Ray:
Even over the phone, you can hear the pride in Dick Harroun's voice as he talks about his father's victory in the first Indy 500.
"He won the year before -- in 1910 -- but it didn't mean much because the track hadn't been paved with bricks yet. They ran on dirt.
"In those days, each car had two men in the cockpit -- a driver and a mechanic. The mechanic's main job was to look back and see who was coming up on them. My father wanted to go it alone, and they banned him from the race when he showed up on race day without a mechanic.
"It was 15 minutes before the start, and he went back into his garage and mounted a rearview mirror just over the dashboard."
It was a wide rectangular box with a mirror inside it. The officials saw what he had done and let him run.
"What really won the race for him, though, was that he went to the Firestone tire company and asked them how fast he could run without blowing any tires," Dick Harroun said. "He had noticed that the other cars were going into the pits all the time to have their tires changed. Firestone told him if he kept it under 75 mph, he'd be OK.
"He had to change only a couple of tires and a couple of them lasted all the way."
So, Ray Harroun created history in his Marmon Wasp by lasting more than six hours on the bumpy track and finishing nearly a lap ahead of his nearest competitor.
Ray Harroun never raced at Indy again but managed several teams. He hung around racing for the rest of his life, passing away in 1968.
"Obviously, I wasn't there when he won, but he spoke about it many times," Dick Harroun said. "He got credit for the rearview mirror, but what many people don't know is that he also was the man who developed bumpers on our cars."
He started laughing over the phone.
"That business of the mirror was something of a joke," he said. "My father said the mirror jiggled so much during the race that he could never use it. But I guess they thought it looked good, so they let him race."
So, even though this is a rediculously inappropriate question for info-performer, there are
still valuable lessons to learn from it:
1. Invention is often an incremental process (horse-drawn taxi mirror -> automobile mirror)
2. The leading edge/first instance/latest thing can be more about portent than utility (uselss jiggly mirror)
Michael "The early bird" Jones
P.S. The oldest US patent I found was #1365247, to Kennedy issued in Jan 1921. Don't know about the
10 year interval batween Harroun and Kennedy.
_____
Michael T. Jones
mtj++at++intrinsic.com <mailto:mtj++at++intrinsic.com> - http://www.intrinsic.com/ <http://www.intrinsic.com/>
Intrinsic Graphics / 707 California Street / Mountain View, CA 94041 / Phone (650) 210-9933x13 / FAX (650) 210-9340
A frog in a well says "The sky is as big as the mouth of my well"
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Allan Schaffer [mailto:allan++at++sgi.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 6:57 PM
> To: Pauline Thornton; info-performer++at++sgi.com
> Subject: Re: rear view mirror
>
>
> On Sep 7, 3:00pm, Pauline Thornton wrote:
> >
> > Please advise who was the inventor of the first rear view mirror.
> > Thankyou e-mail paulinethornton ++at++home.com
>
> I'm happy that "Performer mailing list" is the first thing that comes
> to mind for people looking for answers, but really, this is a bit much...
>
> "RTFEncyclopedia" Allan
>
> --
> Allan Schaffer allan++at++sgi.com
> Silicon Graphics http://reality.sgi.com/allan
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> List Archives, FAQ, FTP: http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/
> Submissions: info-performer++at++sgi.com
> Admin. requests: info-performer-request++at++sgi.com
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 08 2000 - 07:12:10 PDT