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John Devey goes driving Miss Devey -- daughter Alice -- in his buggylike contraption. This is the only photo of Utah's first gasoline-powered car.
By Christopher Smith
from the Deseret News
LEHI -- Utah's first automobile has disappeared, but motorists still battle the same nemesis John Devey faced when he drove his horseless carriage to Salt Lake City in the spring of 1900.
Potholes.
The Lehi pioneer began building the state's first gasoline-powered car in 1899 at his farm. A feature designed to defeat the gaping craters in the road: 4-foot-tall wheels.
"Roads in those days were not like they are now," Mr. Devey wrote in an April 19, 1921, letter to the Deseret News. "Farmers would dig irrigation ditches across the wagon roads, some 2 or 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep and if I had used small wheels I might have gotten into a ditch and never gotten out again."
A leather license plate carrying registration No. 66 is all that remains of his buggylike contraption. It is on display at the John Hutchings Museum of Natural History in Lehi.
Leather License Plate on John Devey's Car
"I don't know what ever became of that car," says Harold Hutchings, museum director and cousin of Mr. Devey.
Mr. Hutchings uncle, Sam Hutchings married John Devey's daughter, Alice, who is beside her father in the only existing photograph of the Devey-mobile.
"We used to play in that car when we were kids," says Mr. Hutchings, pulling the photograph from the museum wall. "It was pretty old by then. We would steer the lever and turn the crank, but it wouldn't fire up."
In its heyday, Mr. Devey's contraption was the talk of the Beehive State.
Henry Ford completed his first automobile in 1896 in Detroit in Detroit. Three years later, Mr. Devey coupled a crude gas engine to a horse-drawn carriage so he could drive to LDS conference in Salt Lake.
"I was not able to complete it in time, but did so later," he wrote.
The early auto looked like a buggy. But instead of a yoke for the team, it had a single-cylinder gasoline engine mounted in front of the seat beneath a wire-mesh hood. At first, Mr. Devey used a belt from the motor to a drive shaft, which connected to the wheels with a chain.
Later, he tinkered with a clutch and did away with the belt.
"The machine was speeded up so I could make 20 mph on good roads," he wrote in 1921.
Mr. Devey piloted the 750-pound car up and down the Wasatch Front for 11 years.
"As a kid, I remember somebody saying it was the first car in Utah, but it never occurred to anyone to preserve it," says Mr. Hutchings. "It sure would be nice to go for a ride in it today."
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Another article appears in Deseret News, May 11, 2000 which gives more information about old cars and, in particular, John Devey's car:
Putting the pedal to the metal of everybody's favorite pastime
By Carma Wadley
Deseret News senior writer
Where does it come from, this passion for wheels and engines, this attachment to the open road? Is it in the genes? Or, is it nurtured into being as we drive the highways of time?
This much we know: For Utahns, the love affair with the automobile pretty much began 100 years ago this month. That's when the first of the new-fangled "horseless carriages" appeared on Salt Lake streets ù and life would never be the same.
Steam-powered riding machines had been around since the 1700s, but the contraption most historians consider the first true automobile rolled out of Carl Benz's garage in Mannheim, Germany, in 1885. Interest in the motor age was further sparked by the World Exposition in France in 1889, featuring Benz's motor car and a four-cycle engine developed by German engineer Gottlieb Daimler.
For these machines to arrive in Salt Lake City just a few short years later says something about how quickly the automobile became accepted and how forward thinking the citizens were, even in the hinterlands.
"The reign of the spanking buggy team in Zion bids fair to be seriously menaced, and the day is apparently dawning when Augustus will ask fair Angelene to take an automobile spin around the drive," wrote the Salt Lake Herald on May 7, 1900.
"Yesterday the forerunner of the new epoch in locomotion was registered when Joseph A. Silver and his brother, Hyrum A. Silver, received from the East a couple of the latest up-to-date automobiles of light and elegant design and calculated to travel at the rate of from one to forty miles an hour."
These two automobiles were apparently not the first in the city; the article goes on to say they "are now the only ones in town, owing to the fact that George E. Airis recently shipped his automobile back to the factory, as he concluded to get a lighter and more compact vehicle upon the lines of those purchased by the Silver Brothers."
There's also a claim that Bill Rishel, then sporting editor of the Salt Lake Herald, drove the first car in Utah. In a book called "Wheels to Adventure," written by his daughter, Virginia, in 1983, it tells of a car being shipped in a crate to a bicycle dealer named Charles S. Wilkes some time in 1900. "Since anything pertaining to the automobile was classed as 'sport' in those days, the arrival of the car came under Rishel's responsibility."
Pushes and shoves
Rishel and Wilkes uncrated the car, read the book of instructions and "ran it down six blocks of West Temple. . . . The trip was downhill all the way, and that helped," said Rishel. "But when we turned to come back, it was another story. We moved a few feet and then stopped. Some of the spectators pushed us and we got a new start and then, in half-a-block we stopped again. By a series of pushes and shoves, we finally got back to our starting point. Along the way I heard someone shout, 'Get a horse!' "
Whether that ride came before or after the Silvers got their cars is hard to say, but to the Silvers certainly belongs the credit for generating a lot of interest in the new machines.
"Automobiles Owned the Town For Two Hours Last Night," declared a headline in the Herald on May 8. The Silvers drove their car to the hot springs "amid a halo of dust and an assorted bodyguard comprising the entire canine population for blocks around, aided and abetted by a horde of bicyclists and every small boy endowed with a cast-iron pair of lungs in the neighborhood."
"Speaking of automobiles, there are two of them in Salt Lake, owned by Messrs. Hyrum and John Silver," said the Deseret News on May 19. "They are beauties, and their introduction here will certainly bring the machines into general use when their excellence becomes known."
These first cars, of course, compare only loosely with the sleek modern machines that roam our highways today.
They were built by the Locomobile Co. in Detroit, notes Kate Carter in "Heart Throbs of the West, Vol. 9." The boiler of the car was 14 inches in diameter, 13 inches high and had 296 half-inch copper tubes. The boiler had four layers of high tension piano wire wrapped around it to strengthen and protect it.
"To start the car they lighted a match and held it under the boiler until 250 pounds of steam were in the boiler. It took two minutes to get that much steam," wrote Carter. "The boiler carried 1,200 pounds of steam and went 12 miles per hour. The car went 30 miles on 3 gallons of fuel (coal oil or gasoline) and 17 gallons of water."
The auto age was off and running. And one of the next to climb on board was LDS Church President Lorenzo Snow. " 'Oh, my, it is as wonderful as it is glorious,' was the verdict of President Lorenzo Snow, as he stepped from Hyrum Silver's automobile yesterday afternoon at the president's office and shook the dust from his clothes, having finished with a jerk his maiden spin in the carriage that is giving Salt Lake horses blind staggers," reported the Salt Lake Herald on May 16.
Noting that "a white beard fluttering in the breeze was no impediment whatever," President Snow went on to praise the new machine. "It is glorious to ride in. We went all down Main street and around Liberty park and back up State street and around here, and oh, I cannot begin to tell you what a ride we had. I didn't know what minute we might upset a streetcar, but the first fear soon passed away.
"I was thinking of getting a bicycle," he added, jocularly, "but I guess the automobile is what I want, after all. It is quite different from driving an ox-cart. That is the way I saw Salt Lake City first. But fifty years makes a great difference in most everything."
Four cents a gallon
And shorter travel time was one of the biggest differences. When one of the Silvers took a trip to Provo ù leaving at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, spending two hours in Provo and returning at 8 p.m. Sunday night ù folks could hardly believe a car could go that fast.
Even more exciting was a trip to Logan. "He left Salt Lake Friday at 6 p.m.," notes Carter, "and arrived at Logan Monday at 10:30 p.m. Before they left they expressed two five-gallon cans of gasoline in crates to towns along the way, as there were no service stations. The trip took 65 gallons of gas and cost four cents a gallon."
The Silvers paid $900 each for their automobiles. John Devey, an engineer for the Utah-Idaho Sugar Factory in Lehi, figured he could make his own for less than that. His car had a one-cylinder, chain drive, gasoline engine and a steering lever. He began work in 1899 but found it slow going. When he heard about the Silvers' cars, he decided to go take a look.
"As I had never seen one I thought it might help me to look at theirs," he wrote in a letter to the Deseret News in 1921. "Mr. Silver then gave me my first ride. . . . My horseless carriage was the first one made in Utah and I believe I am safe in saying in the West."
Devey's car also featured very large wheels because "roads in those days were not like they are now. The farmers then would dig irrigation ditches across the wagon roads some two or three feet wide and two feet deep and if I had used small wheels I might have gotten into a ditch and never get out again."
But all these troubles aside, automobiles were here to stay. And soon, they had even more places to go.
"Tourists seeking to cross the country by car began writing me about 1900," Bill Rishel wrote, "and I sent to them what I am convinced was the first cross-country road map ever drawn."
Rishel also established a "bureau of road information" and began printing highway maps and simple strip maps for routes up and down the state.
He established the Salt Lake Auto Club, which in 1903 became affiliated with the new American Automobile Association. "To my knowledge, we had the first tourist bureau of information in the country here in Salt Lake."
By 1903, Salt Lake City had enough cars on the road that it deemed regulations to be in order ù establishing speed limits and requiring car owners to register their vehicles.
By 1907 when the city published one of its first "Automobile Directories," some 305 cars were registered ù Maxwells, Steamers, Oldsmobiles, Packards, Ramblers, Cadillacs and more, belonging to a who's who list of prominent citizens.
Life would change again in 1908, when Henry Ford introduced his Model T, and when his innovative methods of production reduced prices ù $360 in 1916 ù to within reach of the common folk.
Cranks and boilers gave way to internal combustion engines. Sleek, aerodynamic designs replaced the clunky carriage look. Paved superhighways replaced wagon trails. And social and economic change followed at a rapid pace; inevitable, if not always welcome.
But through it all, the deep-seated passion for being on the road has remained.
One of these classic old cars, restored and spiffed up, still has the power to turn our heads in parades or on city streets. Utah fell in love with the automobile 100 years ago, and the two are sweethearts still.
Page Modified May 12, 2000