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"The first automobile race ever held in this country took place in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895. What a day! What a race! What a time!"

So begins Pedro Salom Jr.'s 1949 account of the competition between early automobiles. The first car race in America wasn't just a battle between individuals, but technologies too. Two teams had picked electricity as a motive source, four had chosen gasoline. So the racers were playing for their tech in addition to themselves.

The race itself was a mess. Nearly all of 100 participants who initially signed up had to pull out of the race due to mechanical difficulties and the heavy snow that blanketed Chicago a couple days before the competition. Only six cars made it to the starting line and only two finished. All of the cars had trouble. Frank Duryea, whose gasoline-powered car was the fastest, had such trouble with his igniter that he stopped at a tinsmith's shop and forged a new one! And, as Salom Jr relates, "All of the contestants had been about equally delayed by frightened horses, small boys throwing snowballs, and the need for getting out and laboriously pushing their vehicles through snow."