Death at Speed - 1910

May 1910 - by the time the 24-Hour "grinder" at Brighton Beach was completed, everyone wanted to just put it aside. Forget it. This was no more true than with the Indianapolis-based Marion team who returned to the Hoosier capitol city mourning the loss of one of their own - riding mechanic William Bradley.
 
Bradley perished when the Marion racecar driven by Hubert Anderson rolled over on him. This was a classic example of the reasoning of the age with respect to seat belts. It's not that no one had thought of the idea of strapping a person to a car seat. The problem was that with the high center of gravity of these tall, hickory wood-wheeled cars the machines tended to tip over. The newspapermen of the age called it "turning turtle."
 

Despite conventional thinking today there was wisdom in the notion that being flung from your seat was safer than remaining trapped in it as a 1,000-pound machine tumbled over on you. What's more that while the speeds of the day were astounding to a society that still looked at 20 miles as a day's worth of travel, cars rarely exceeded 30 miles per hour in everyday transportation.
 
Even in racing on road courses or short ovals speeds were rarely more than the revered mile-a-minute pace. While the prospect of being flung from a car at such velocity was terrifying a person's chances were truthfully more promising than staying strapped to a seat to be pulverized.
 
An older generation shook their collective heads at such news. What was happening in this speed-crazed world? Why do these young people need to rush around in these noisy, new-fangled machines? It's bad enough they are endangering their own fool lives, but their crazy accidents sometimes hurt bystanders as well. Somebody ought to do something!
 
The forces of progress were, of course, unrelenting. Testimony to that is the steady evolution of not just transportation solutions but also an array of productivity technologies over subsequent decades to the present.
 
Still, consequences are inevitable and that includes tragedy. Hubert Anderson's co-driver in that fateful Brighton Beach was highly regarded Lewis Strang, the Marion team's leader at the time. Little more than a year later Strang lost his life as well - when in the slow pace of a reliability run his Case automobile rolled over on him when a muddy road gave way and his machine "turned turtle" into a ditch.
 
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