By Scott A. Grant
mail@floridanewsline.com
Over the years, many automotive innovations have come out of the sport of racing. Some of those, like seat belts and roll cages, were designed to make a dangerous activity more safe. This is the story of one such innovation.
In 1911, at the inaugural running of the Indianapolis 500, now billed as the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” Ray Harroun “invented” the rear view mirror. It is widely believed that his was the first ever installed on an automobile. Harroun added the rear view mirror not to make his car safer, but to make it faster. At that time, all race cars had two passengers — a driver and a mechanic. The onboard mechanic had several jobs, one of which was to look out for cars overtaking from behind.
Harroun showed up for that first Indianapolis race in a single seat Marmon Wasp. That car, which was innovative in many ways, featured a rear view mirror mounted onto the front dash. Harroun argued that his new mirror made the riding mechanic unnecessary. Track officials agreed and Harroun and the yellow number 32 Marmon Wasp gained a significant advantage in weight.
Harroun had gotten the idea for the mirror in 1904 in Chicago. Harroun was serving as the chauffeur for the president of Montgomery Ward, William Thorne. At that time, Montgomery Ward was a mail order retailer. Later they would add brick and mortar stores and, for a time, would be one of the largest department store chains in the country.
In 1944, FDR ordered the US troops to seize Montgomery Ward’s corporate offices to end a four-month strike that was considered debilitating to the war effort. After the war, the company fell on hard times due to mismanagement. Louis Wolfson, of Jacksonville, launched a proxy fight in 1955 to unseat the president. For a time, the company recovered, but ultimately sold its few remaining stores in 1985.
In any event, while he was chauffeuring Thorne around the busy streets of Chicago, Harroun noticed a horse drawn taxicab. The driver was sitting there in a top hat, and he had a long pole with a mirror attached in order to see what was behind him. Seven years later, Harroun put a similar device onto an automobile. Driving alone, Harroun averaged a speed of 74.6 miles per hour and finished the 500-mile race in seven hours and 37 minutes. He won the race and a first-place prize of $10,000, a little over a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money.
The race was fraught with peril. One mechanic was thrown from his car and killed instantly. Spectators rushed to the event and had to be driven off by National Guardsmen to make room for the doctors. Several other mechanics were injured and so were some spectators. Every time there was a crash, the crowd rushed across the track to get a better view.
Harroun had some other advantages. Known as the “Little Professor,” he ran a smart race and only had to change four tires, which saved considerable time in the pits. The car itself was called a “Wasp” because it had an aerodynamic tail that resembled a wasp’s stinger. Later engineers would argue that the rear view mirror mounted on the cowling had the unintended outcome of acting like a spoiler producing downforce. If so, that was the only advantage the mirror provided.
In 1911, the Indy 500 track was constructed entirely of bricks which made for a bumpy ride, making the mirror all but useless. “To tell the truth, on the brick surface, I couldn’t see a damn thing in it,” Harroun would later confess. “And no one knew it but me.”
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author. By day he is president of Standfast Asset Management. He grew up in Indianapolis and went to a number of races. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com
