The Early Days of the Road: 1900-1929
Neon light was first invented in 1902 when Georges Claude, a French engineer and chemist, applied an electrical discharge to sealed tube of neon gas, creating the first neon lamp (DeBack). It wouldn’t be shown to the public until eight years later, when Claude displayed his neon light to Paris for the first time in December of 1910. Upon exhibition, neon was seen as a symbol of technological advancement and ingenuity, and its practical business application for use in advertisement and signage was readily apparent. The first commercial neon sign would be sold to a Parisian barber in 1912, and the first neon signs in America were sold quite appropriately to the Packard Car dealership in Los Angeles (DeBack). Supposedly, the two $12,000 signs stopped traffic when they were first illuminated in 1923.
Highsmith, C. M. (2016 October 12). [A classic neon Packard advertising sign hangs on the corner of America’s Packard museum, an automotive museum located in the former Citizens Motorcar Company auto dealership where Packard’s were sold beginning in 1908 in Dayton, Ohio] [Photography]. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632566/.
Around the same time as neon’s public debut, Ford’s Model T hit the market in 1908. While previous versions of the automobile had been released as early as 1885, Ford’s Model T had a higher than normal road clearance, a design feature that “proved to be its major selling point, as the car could travel over deep ruts and muddy terrain” (Kaszynski). In this way, the Model T’s popularity can be attributed in part to the poor infrastructure of the United States’ road system in the early years of the 20th century, rather than in spite of it. This would soon be remedied with the Federal-Aid Highway Program of 1916. The program began with the intent to “[get] farmers out of the mud and [their] produce to market” (Capka). Achieved by creating a system of post roads connecting rural areas, the program improved the muddy trails traversed by travelers for decades. Despite the program’s noble objective, it lacked a national focus, meaning that there was still no system of paved road connecting individual states. Still, adventurous motorists would set out in caravans across the country, taking the shoddy dirt roads to remote destinations and cities alike.
Peter Blodgett, author of Time Magazine article “Travel History: How Americans Fell in Love with Taking Road Trips,” recognizes that in the early days of the nation’s highways, in the 1910s and ‘20s, “the trails of Kit Carson and Boone and Crockett, and the rest of the early frontiersmen [stretched] out before the adventurous automobilist.” Using the example of the pioneers who followed the call of Manifest Destiny westwards, Americans in the beginning of the twentieth century sought to both find and lose themselves in the landscape they roamed. “Upper-middle-class tourists motored through the countryside and then camped by the side of the road, finding the sentimentalized image of the gypsy or the tramp quite a compelling identity to assume” (Blodgett). Like it is today, the early road trip was a means of escape from the ordinary routine of everyday existence, a place to forget one's worries and live a different life for a short period of time.
Soon enough, as recreational automobile travel caught on, garages, gas stations, roadside cafes, and diners began to pop up along the roads that were most frequently traveled. Noticing the shortcomings of the 1916 Federal-Aid Highway Program, the United States government realized the growing importance of a system of national roads. The National Highway Commission found that America’s roads “served four different but interrelated components of American life, each of which contributed to the economic welfare of the nation” (Lewis), those components being agriculture, recreation, commerce, and defense. In 1921, the Federal-Aid Highway Act was passed, creating a system of nationally-connected two-lane highways, and setting the course for the cultural changes of the coming decades.