Читать книгу 60 Years Behind the Wheel - Bill Sherk - Страница 13

Cadillac Truck, Toronto, circa 1906

IF YOU WANTED SOME FRESH fruit or game delivered to your house in Toronto around 1906, you picked up your phone (if you had one) and asked the operator for Main 7497 or 7498. The driver at Gallagher & Co. Ltd. crank-started the Cadillac delivery truck from the side and drove off to your address, powered by the ten-horsepower, single-cylinder engine mounted under the front seat. This particular vehicle was perhaps a car converted into a truck, a common practice back then.

Note the folded top behind the driver. This truck no doubt made deliveries in all kinds of weather, and a top would be deemed a necessity. The Cadillac nameplate is visible below the phone numbers, and the hole for the crank is below that. When these noisy engines fired up, nearby horses often reared up in fright.

The Cadillac was named after the French explorer who founded Detroit in 1701, and the car quickly earned a reputation for precision engineering, beginning with its very first model completed in October of 1902. Six years later, eight single-cylinder Cadillacs were shipped to England. Three were selected at random, driven twenty-three miles to the new Brooklands Motordrome, and then completely disassembled. The 721 parts of each were scrambled with the others, and 89 parts were replaced with off-the-shelf substitutes. Cadillac mechanics reassembled the three cars from the 2,163 parts, then drove them at top speed for 500 miles, earning for Cadillac the highly coveted Dewar Trophy for excellence in standardized interchangeable parts.