Читать книгу 60 Years Behind the Wheel - Bill Sherk - Страница 19

Instant Grandstand, Weston, 1910

WHAT WERE THESE PEOPLE WATCHING from their car parked in a farmer’s field in Weston, Ontario, in July 1910? It was the first airplane flight over Toronto. The pilot was French Count Jacques de Lesseps. Grounded by bad weather, Jacques’s monoplane, La Scarabee, finally lifted off into clearing skies from the rain-soaked field around 8:00 p.m. and flew at 2500 feet over the Exhibition grounds, then over downtown Toronto, at a speed of 70 miles per hour. Mike Filey of the Toronto Sun describes the city’s reaction: “Bewildered citizens filled the streets and sidewalks, lined porches and roof tops as they gazed skyward for a glimpse of the first airplane to fly over their city. Torontonians were thunderstruck.”

And what about the car itself, serving as a mobile grandstand? It was right-hand drive, and judging by the cap on the head of the driver, it was chauffeur-driven. Chauffeurs back then had to know how to repair cars as well as drive them, since flat tires and mechanical breakdowns were an everyday occurrence. The tool box on the running board was an absolute necessity. The number on the licence plate also appears on the cowl lamps, as required by law — probably to aid the police when the licence plate was too muddy to read. Introduced in 1908 with a price tag of $4,500, this car is a very luxurious Canadian-built Russell Model K “seven-seated” tourer with a fifty-horsepower, four-cylinder engine.