From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
THE GLIDDEN WORLD TOUR: When the Gordon Bennett Race was under way in Ireland in July 1903, among the thousands of enthusiastic spectators was one Charles Jasper Glidden. Like many others, he had come with his car to view the race but there the similarity ended.
Glidden and his party - wife Lucy and trusty mechanic - had come not from Britain, France or even Germany like the vast majority of the visitors, but from the US. His visit was just a small part of his world tour between 1902 and 1907.
Glidden was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, in August 1857. A branch manager at the age of 20 for the Atlantic- Pacific Telegraph Company, he developed an interest in Alexander Bell's work.
He met Bell, then a professor at Boston University, and the two became firm friends. Glidden collaborated on testing telephone transmissions along the Boston to Manchester telegraph line. It was apparently Glidden's idea to use women operators whose voices he believed transmitted more clearly than men's.
By 1880 Glidden had built a telephone empire which eventually controlled as much as one sixth of the Bell telephone system. In 1902 he sold this out to Bell for a considerable profit.
Having secured a vast personal fortune, Glidden could now pursue several other interests. One such was ballooning - he founded the Aerial Navigation Company to operate airships between Boston and New York. Perhaps wisely, he soon turned his attention to the new automobile, buying three cars in 1899 for use in New York and Boston.
Never daunted by any task he had set himself, Glidden then decided to tour the world in a car, ideally visiting every country along the way. He decided a British Napier was the perfect vehicle for the job and bought one by cable from S F Edge in November 1900.
In June 1901 Glidden collected his suitably prepared Napier in London and set out on his epic journey. Between 1902 and 1907 he travelled 46,528 miles in 35 countries.
For those countries where the roads were not good enough for a car, Glidden had an ingenious solution. He took to the railway tracks by fitting special flanged wheels which he carried with him. In total he travelled 6,825 miles on rails including a run between Chicago and San Francisco.
In all he motored for "377 driving days, twice encircling the globe; he crossed the Arctic Circle in Sweden and travelled to the most southerly point of New Zeland, the most southern country in the world." In all he claimed that he had deviated from his schedule only one half hour in the entire journey and had "taken no less than 2,000 photographs and written no less than 200,000 words for the Boston Globe." Glidden's reports in the newspaper were widely syndicated and did much to make the public aware of the potential of the motor car.
Charles Jasper Glidden, first to encircle the world by car, died in September 1927 and was buried in Lowell, Massachusetts.