Airplane or Automobile? (1909)

The first airplane came along about 17 years after the first automobile, so in some ways the two forms of mechanized transportation have grown up together. One of the big challenges of adapting the automobile to everyday life was that the infrastructure of roads and highways - especially in America - were simply not designed for them.
 
In many cases these passageways were merely trails that wove through terrain as farmers marched cattle to market literally through the paths of least resistance. The response was a "good roads" movement as leaders of the new age of transport rallied forces public and private to modernize highways that had supported animal-drawn carts but were unfit for automobiles.
 

In the face of this massive re-make of infrastructure there were those who even suggested that with the advent of the airplane the solution might be to simply take to the air and circumvent such massive, time-consuming investment. While the feasibility of flying to the grocery store is preposterous, there are remote corners of the shrinking frontier more accessible by aircraft.
 
The reality, of course, is that such a proposition for everyday travel was a desperate attempt to justify a nascent technology that was fascinating but with no readily apparent application other than entertainment, or, like gas balloons and zeppelins, to survey a potential battlefield or unexplored topography.
 
This article is relevant to the main theme of First Super Speedway because it paints a more complete picture of the national conversation concerning the automobile. Fragile, primitive aircraft were being refined in parallel with the evolution of the automobile which relied heavily on auto racing to improve the breed.
 
Check out this article that describes tests performed by the Wright Brothers who worked hard to meet contractural requirements of a $25,000 agreement with the U.S. Signal Corps Aeronautical Division - the forerunner to the U.S. Air Force. Here's an interesting fact - up to the time of the publish date of the article you will find at the link here (June 1909), the Wrights had never flown aircraft higher than 364 feet. A year later one of their planes set a world altitude record of nearly 5,000 feet above the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
 
These were heady times. Did you know?