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
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,
To many, that patent, it's the birth certificate of the automobile.
The vehicle had three wheels, and it was called the Benz Patent Motor Car.
But as good as Carl was, it was actually his wife, Bertha, that went on the first long-distance journey in automotive history.
By the way, uh this is Cassia Sinclair, uh writer, historian, and And a very good friend of the show.
Correct.
And today she is taking us through the incredible story of a race in 1907 with a car, which was daring for a bunch of reasons.
One, pretty new technology, but also really expensive technology.
So it's considered expensive and a bit of a novelty.
I assume that means the public don't view it as like the way we see it now, which is that they're sort of like the dominant force.
I believe The Economist, which is still uh in existence today, once wrote Long Live the Horse in response to the automobiles.
But then, on the thirty first of January nineteen oh seven, a French newspaper decides to test that perception.
Showing 961–980 of 1,887 · page 49 of 95
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