Viable fuel sources have been in a constant state of flux since the first issue of CCJ appeared 100 years ago this month. But the magazine never has stopped helping its readers get a handle on new ideas and make them profitable.
America is a land of progress. And we are taught that progress is an inexorable march forward. The Wright Brothers flew. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon.
But that’s not the sense one gets when flipping through dusty old copies of CCJ. Turn to any page in any issue from the first decade of its existence, and you get a sense that truck innovators, producers and users at the time – not to mention truck editors – didn’t have a firm grasp on what they were doing and where this new transportation technology was going.
The inescapable truth was it was all brand new, and there were many, many questions – some of which strike us as profoundly elemental today. How old should a driver be? What was the best way to drive a truck? Power a truck? Stop a truck? Could you run them at night? How many headlamps should they have? Should the headlamps be fixed in position, or was a searchlight on a swivel mount better? How much weight could they carry? How did one set up a pickup-and-delivery route? Were buses a good idea? How far apart should bus stops be placed?
What could you call these machines? Marketing was in its infancy, as evidenced by some of the truck manufacturers of the day: the B.O.E. (Best on Earth) Dreadnaught, the Grabowsky Power Wagon Company, The Four Wheel Drive Battleship, Old Reliable Trucks and the Locomobile, to name a few of the odder ones.
And, of course, there was the one big question that loomed over all the others: Could you actually make any money running these new machines?
Through it all, CCJ and its editors were converts. And as the old saying goes, there is no greater zealot than a convert. In the September 1911 issue of CCJ, editor-in-chief James Artman wrote, “In conversing with commercial car prospectives, it is quite common to find opinions expressed, showing a belief that machines are not yet thoroughly practical. As a result of this feeling, some who might otherwise be users (of commercial cars) are holding aloof with an evident intention of waiting for further improvements or developments.”
The rest of Artman’s column went on to argue that, for the good of this new-born industry, salesmen ought not to “knock” competitors’ cars and trucks to prospective clients, but instead work to build confidence in the machines and their usefulness in the public mind by praising the virtues of all makes and models of motorized vehicles.
So, it’s fair to say that even if our trucking forefathers didn’t know what they were doing, they did understand that they were pioneers. Through all those baby steps that seem so quaint to us today, there was one dominant theme that has followed since: efficiency.
Efficiency shows up in many forms in the annals of CCJ. But most often over the past century, its primary focus has been fuel – squeezing every last penny possible out of a gallon of gasoline or diesel.
Going electric
In the beginning, fuel efficiency as a topic was far more basic than simply boosting vehicle mileage. The struggle was to determine exactly what power source was the most efficient for powering motor trucks. And there were a surprising number of choices at the time.
