Tenacious tin can tourists

QUESTION Who built the first camper van?

In the U.S., camper vans are known as recreational vehicles or RVs. these combine transportation and living quarters for travel, recreation and camping. the first vehicle to fit this description was PierceArrow’s 1910 touring landau.

this automobile manufacturer in Buffalo, new York, between 1901 and 1938 was best known for its luxury cars, but also built trucks, fire engines, trailers, motorcycles and bicycles.

the touring landau debuted at Madison Square Garden in 1910 and featured a back seat that folded into a bed, a sink that folded down from the back of the driver’s seat and a chamber pot.

In the same year, the Los Angeles trailer Works and Auto-Kamp trailers of Michigan began manufacturing camping trailers that fixed to the back of a vehicle.

they featured a fully equipped sleeping tent with two beds, kitchen, fridge and food store. these auto-campers were far more popular than early RVs. their fans became known as tin can tourists because they heated canned food on gasoline stoves by the side of the road.

By the 1940s, the tin Can tourist Club had more than 150,000 members. they even had an initiation ceremony, secret handshake and official song, the More We Get together.

the British motorhome market took off in the 1950s with classic vehicles such as the Volkswagen camper van and the Bedford Dormobile.

today, there are more than half a million camper vans and touring caravans in Britain. the first was a one-off.

Former naval captain Francis Scrivens Dunn, of Bexhill-on-Sea, east Sussex, contracted polio and was left paralysed.

he ordered a four-litre, six-cylinder Pontiac from the U.S. in 1935 and commissioned local coach-builders Russell to construct a new body on the chassis and fit a mahogany interior.

the kitchen had a gas oven, stove and two-litre water filter, there was a sofa bed and lavatory. Due to a lack of plumbing, waste simply dropped from the vehicle.

Dunn and his wife toured southern

Trendsetter: Pierce Arrow’s touring landau was the first camper van england in their bespoke camper van. After his death in 1940, his widow turned over the engine every two months.

the camper was sold at auction in 2016 for £34,500.

Eric Collins, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks.

QUESTION Did passengers on a runaway train unknowingly become holders of a new speed record?

SoMethInG like this did happen between York and northallerton in 2020 — though ‘runaway’ is not really the word for what happened. the speed was not being properly regulated for a while, but the transPennine express driver could have slowed it at any time.

no great harm was done as this is a fine, straight and level four-track racing ground, but nevertheless the class 802 train reached a reported 145mph where the speed limit is 125 mph.

this is a record for a British timetabled passenger train, excluding the hS1 (eurostar) line from London to Ashford and France, designed for this type of thing.

the driver apparently thought his controls were set for the computer to limit and control speeds, but they were set up for manual control.

So the train thought the human was watching the top speed and the human thought the train was watching it.

the driver could have been sitting back and watching the train eat up the miles with green signals all the way, at some point glancing at the speedo and saying ‘Yikes!’ (or something else).

of course, if it was heading for some curves where serious speed limits are needed, such as Morpeth further down this line, the driver would have been watching the speedo like a hawk.

no one was in danger, no damage done and all credit to the driver for reporting the error. But you should not have a system where human error can produce this type of misunderstanding. A spokesman for transPennine express said: ‘In november 2020, one of our services exceeded the appropriate line speed on this stretch of track. our driver correctly followed the proper incident reporting arrangements so that we were made aware of the event quickly. ‘this meant we were able to introduce revised operating instructions immediately to address this scenario. ‘An alteration to this class of train has been developed, will be tested imminently and then deployed to ensure this situation cannot arise again. At no point were passengers at risk.’ Benedict le Vay, author of Britain From The Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide, Emsworth, Hants.

QUESTION Is Loe de Jong’s 14-volume history of the Netherlands the longest history book?

GALen, a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman empire, wrote more than any other author in antiquity.

In her prologue to the Prince of Medicine: Galen In the Roman empire, Susan Mattern states: ‘the most modern edition of his corpus runs to 22 volumes, including about 150 titles, making up one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives.’

Galen’s history of medicine also includes case studies of patients and pharmaceutical concoctions.

Loe de Jong was commissioned to write the Kingdom of the netherlands During World War II by the Ministry of education. he wrote the first 13 volumes, which were published between 1969 and 1988. the 14th volume, released in 1991, features the opinions of other historians.

Samuel eliot Morison’s 15-volume history of United States naval operations In World War II took him 16 years — not the predicted four — to complete.

though not a history, Church Dogmatics, a Protestant theological study by Karl Barth, is more than six million words. It is available on CD-Rom but a paper version would stretch to 14 long volumes.

T. E. A. Samuel, Kidderminster, Worcs.