About Burman’s record there can be no doubt, for it was made in the presence of many witnesses, and it was duly timed with stop-watches by men skilled in the art.  The straightaway mile over the smooth, hard beach was covered from a running start in the almost incredibly short time of 25.40 seconds.

The next fastest mile ever traveled by human beings who lived to tell about it was made in an electric-car on the experimental track between Berlin and Zossen, in 1902.  As the engineers who achieved this record for the advancement of scientific knowledge of the railroad considered such speed dangerous, it is not at all likely to become standard practise.  The fastest time ever made by a steam locomotive of which there is any record, was the run of five miles from Fleming to Jacksonville, Florida, in two and a half minutes by a Plant system locomotive in March, 1901.  This was at the rate of 120 miles an hour.  As for steamships, the record of 30.53 miles per hour is held by the Mauretania.

These things, if borne in mind, will serve to throw into stronger relief the things that an automobile can do, and to supply a substantial basis for the premise that, at least in some respects, the automobile is the most marvelous machine the world has yet seen.  It can go anywhere at any time, floundering through two feet of snow, ford any stream that isn’t deep enough to drown out the magneto, triumph over mud axle deep, jump fences, and cavort over plowed ground at fifteen miles an hour.  It has been used with brilliant success in various kinds of hunting, including coyote coursing on the prairies of Colorado, where it can run all around the bronco, formerly in favor, since it never runs any risk of breaking a leg in a prairie-dog hole.  Educated automobiles have been trained to shell corn, saw wood, pump water, churn, plow, and, in short, do anything required of them except figure out where the consumer gets off under the new tariff law.

But to get back to the subject of speed, as automobile talk always does, the supremacy of the motor-car has been established by so many official records that any attempt to select the most striking only results in bewilderment.  The best that can be done is to recite a few representative ones.

That was a most interesting illustration, for instance, of the capacity for sustained high speed made by a Stearns car on the mile track at Brighton Beach in 1910.  In twenty-four hours the car covered the amazing distance of 1,253 miles, which was at the average speed of 52-1/5 miles per hour.  This record is all the more remarkable from the fact the car was not a racer, but a stock car which had been driven for some months by its owner before it was borrowed for the race, and did not have any special preparation.  The men who drove it were not notified that their services were wanted until the morning of the race.