twenty minutes, and push hard on the steering
wheel. The fact that the car will overlook such treatment and go ahead
is a source of never-failing wonder. Indeed, when it comes to
hill-climbing the automobile is so far ahead of the locomotive that it
seems like wanton cruelty to drag the latter into the discussion at
all.

The steepest grade on a railroad doing a miscellaneous transportation
business climbed by a locomotive relying on adhesion only is on the
Leopoldina system in Brazil between Bocca do Monte and Theodoso, where
there is a stretch of 8-1/3 per cent. grade with curves of 130 feet
radius. There are some logging roads in the United States with grades
of 16 per cent. How trifling this seems when compared with the feat of
a Thomas car which climbed Fillmore Street, San Francisco, which is
alleged to have a gradient of 34 per cent., with twenty-three persons
on board. As 25 per cent. is regarded as the maximum safe gradient for
an Abt rack railway, since the cog-wheel is liable to climb out of the
rack on any steeper grade, it will be seen that the strain upon the
credulity of the hearer of this story is almost as great as that upon
the car must have been.

Enthusiasm may be expected to run high in the presence of such
astounding triumphs, and it should, therefore, not be deemed surprising
that accounts of hill-climbing contests are generally lacking in
definiteness. The name of the car and the driver are always given with
scrupulous care, but such incidental details as length of ascent,
minimum, maximum, and average gradient, maximum curvature, and so on,
are generally left to the imagination.

Among the few exceptions to this rule was the hill-climbing contest at
Port Jefferson, Long Island, in which Ralph de Palma went up an ascent
of two thousand feet with an average gradient of 10 per cent. and a
maximum of 15 per cent. in 20.48 seconds in his 190-horse-power Fiat. A
little Hupmobile, one of the lightest cars built, reached the top in 1
minute 10 seconds. De Palma climbed the "Giant's Despair" near
Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, an ascent six thousand feet long, with
grades varying from 10 to 22 per cent., in his big machine in 1 minute
28-2/5 seconds. A Marmon stock car reached the top in 1 minute 50-1/5
seconds. Pike's Peak, Mount Washington, Ensign Mountain, in Utah, and
lesser mountains elsewhere have also been climbed repeatedly by
automobiles. As the mere announcement of the fact vividly exhibits the