Marc Fennell
speaker
1,887 appearances
18 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 5d ago
Marc Fennell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 5.
Appearances
You gently place your coffee cup back on the saucer and pick up the paper with both hands.
Just trying to process what you're reading.
You see, it's an article about the automobile, which at this point in history, like, it's been around for a couple of decades, but this article shouts from the front page that the car, as we would call it today, it's not being taken seriously enough.
The article continues and it announces to the people of France, and indeed the people of the world, the race around the world will occur in an automobile.
You are excited.
You are fired up and you jump out of your chair and you dash home to apply for this unprecedented opportunity.
To be one of the drivers who will make history and be remembered forever.
My name is Mark Fennell.
And this is how a race around the world, with cars, not with video cameras, changed the way the world saw the automobile.
But maybe not quite in the way they expected.
From the instant they set off.
It's a total mess.
This race would go down in history as one of the worst road trips ever.
It would put lives, reputations on the line.
But it would also put the automobile on the map.
And no one saw it coming.
So today, around the world, uh we see cars on country roads, zipping across highways, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile was very much in its infancy.
It was seen as an unstable passing fad and not really that reliable.
Certainly not as reliable as the good old horse and carriage.
On january twenty ninth, eighteen eighty six, a German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz, applied for a patent for his vehicle powered by a gas engine,
Showing 821–840 of 1,887 · page 42 of 95
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