Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!):
My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which seems to be indirectly named for Ayn Rand, ironically famous for not having learned to drive despite living for a time in Los Angeles. (The connection seems to be that Tim Cerny, a real estate developer, liked Rand’s novel The Fountainhead and named his company after her and then the museum is named for the company.)
Despite the founder’s apparent free market orientation, the museum has an Elizabeth Warren section:
My favorite car was the Owen Magnetic, spiritual heir to the Chevrolet Volt, in which the internal combustion engine is a generator. It even had regen braking:
Here’s a 1932 Cadillac…
After 90 years of evolution, the ugly duckling 1932 Cadillac was transformed into the beautiful Escalade:
Americans 110 years ago hadn’t discovered the joys of helicopter parenting and, therefore, brothers aged 10 and 6 were able to ride on horses from Oklahoma to the East Coast, buy a car and learn to drive in NYC, and then drive back to Oklahoma (the horses went home by train). They met two presidents and both Wright brothers:
State-sponsored PBS did a show about them (I recently learned about this from a Facebook friend; it aired in April 2020, just as coronapanic was in full swing, but it is tough to imagine a lockdown strict enough that I would have the patience to watch PBS).
The museum covers the challenge of building a practical snowmobile, which didn’t happen until airplanes were into their second generation (most of the invention seems to have occurred first in Russia; Wokipedia).
I knew that Carl Fisher, the creator of Miami Beach and the Indy 500, had developed a gas-based “Prest-O-Lite” headlight, but didn’t realize that it involved a tank of acetylene right next to the driver!
For fans of the old Bell 47 and Hiller helicopters… the Franklin company that made their engines was produced cars with air-cooled engines back in 1905:
After the museum, we went downtown to Soba for Moldovan food.