Research Never Ends

I thought I had done a good job of researching firsts for my book, and for the most part I did. But every now and then I discover I didn’t go far enough.

A case in point is the first car-vs-bike accident. I found several references to it happening in New York City on May 30, 1896. I even found a newspaper article from the day describing it. A contemporary account is one of the best sources of information.

The article described a “horseless wagon” race that took place on Western Boulevard. The driver of the car was Henry Wells from Springfield, Massachusetts. He lost control of his vehicle and ran into a cyclist, Ebeling Thomas, who was biking in the opposite direction. The cyclist broke his leg.

I wondered why a Massachusetts man was participating in this race. Did he come to New York specifically for the race? Or did he just happen to be visiting and, hearing about the race, decided to join the fun?

I wanted to know exactly where the collision occurred. It was somewhere on Western Boulevard, a street I had never heard of. I spent a lot of time checking other sources for the cross-street, yet I neglected to identify the location of Western Boulevard. I figured the accident occurred somewhere from Central Park north, however, because the driver was arrested and taken to the 125th Street police station.

Recently, while preparing a webinar on firsts that occurred on the Upper West Side, I delved deeper into the first car-vs-bike accident, to see if it belonged in the webinar. This time I searched for the location of Western Boulevard and learned that at the time of the incident, Broadway north of 59th Street through Morningside Heights was sometimes called Western Boulevard. I couldn’t pin down the exact location of the accident, but I felt confident talking about it in the webinar.

The additional research caused me to question another assumption I had made. Two articles I hadn’t seen before called the biker Evelyn or Evylyn Thomas. All my previous sources (including the contemporary newspaper account) said that that the cyclist’s first name was Ebeling. One of the new-to-me stories referred to the cyclist as “she.” I must admit, I was initially uncertain about the biker’s gender. But I became convinced that it was a man, because the convention of the day was to put “Miss” or “Mrs.” in front of a woman’s name; indeed the newspaper article does that when describing another accident. Furthermore, if the paper got it wrong and the cyclist was named Evelyn, that could still have been a man. Think of the British author Evelyn Waugh.

I needed a picture for the webinar, and I wanted it to be historically accurate. One of the new articles said that Mr. Wells was driving a Duryea Motor Wagon.

I found a picture of a Duryea from six months before the New York accident. This photo was taken at the start of a race in Chicago. One of the two gentleman in the vehicle was an out-of-towner.

Doesn’t this photo help understand why it was called a horseless wagon race?

The new information about the car suggests that races may have been fairly common in those early automobile days. Maybe Henry Wells made a special trip to New York to participate in one. I’ll probably never know.

I think I’ve researched this as much as I can. On the other hand, research never really ends.