The Land Speed Record and the Last Green Monster

One sees a man and a machine that is hard to identify: It might just be a big toy—there’s something on the right that resembles a key to wind it up, and a wheel about the size of a tricycle’s—but with a row of flush rivets and a tailfin it looks more like a vehicle designed to go very fast. Of course it could be both. The man is standing on a blanket in booties and zipping up a color-coordinated outfit. All around is what looks like hard sand or ice, or maybe salt, and there are low mountains. Not so immediately evident are long shadows of the sort cast at sunup, the shadows of a handful of people standing off to the left and watching the man and his curious machine. Just a handful, which is in itself curious, as one senses that something dramatic might be about to happen.

The white expanse is indeed salt, the deposit left when what we know as Great Salt Lake receded to its present size in the late Pleistocene. Though diminished now, these salt flats covered a hundred thousand acres in 1835 when they were named for a West Point officer who had led a party of explorers and trappers westward from Saint Louis in quest of beaver pelts, which were considered immensely valuable. But the once-teeming beaver streams of the Mountain West had already been decimated, and the men returned emptyhanded, much to the chagrin of their financier, John Jacob Astor. They left behind only a few names on the land, most notably that of their Paris-born leader, Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville.

Art Arfons, Green Monster No. 27, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, August 1991. (Author’s photo.)

The Bonneville Salt Flats have a haunting beauty, with the Newfound-land Mountains shimmering like a distantmirage and sunrises like no place else on earth. They are blazing hot and devoid of wildlife. Salt-mining operations began around the turn of the twentieth century, but the flats were not surveyed until 1926 and never made much news until a hundred years after they were named for the captain. In 1935 they were visited by Malcolm Campbell, an English diamond merchant and veteran of the Royal Flying Corps who had long pursued the so-called land speed record (LSR), first on the Pendine Sands on the coast of Wales and most recently at Daytona Beach in Florida. Bonneville was a far better venue for this sort of thing. It was right on the Lincoln Highway and the Western Pacific Railroad, the salt was like concrete, and there was room to measure off a course thirteen miles long: six miles to accelerate, then electronic timing beams a mile apart and six miles to slow down. A machine racing for the LSR seemed to disappear below the curvature of the earth.

As far back as 1902 there had been American enthusiasts for the LSR, and no less than Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet each held the record briefly at 91 and 117 mph, respectively. In 1906, one Fred Marriott went 127 in the “Rocket,” a Stanley Steamer. But in the 1920s and 1930s the LSR had become a peculiarly British passion. In his “Bluebird,” Campbell clocked 301 at Bonneville in 1935. Two years later his countryman George E. T. Eyston went 10 miles an hour faster, then on 27 August 1938 he raised his own record to 345. For the next year, Eyston traded the record twice with John Cobb, a Surrey fur broker, until it stood at 367 on 23 August 1939. A week later Hitler invaded Poland, and the LSR boys put away their toys.

During the war Cobb flew for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, but two years after the war ended he was back on “the salt,” boosting his record to 394 miles per hour in September 1947. Afterward Cobb turned his enthusiasm to waterborne speed (he lost his life on Loch Ness in 1952), so there...