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 empty-handed, 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.

The Bonneville Salt Flats have a haunting beauty, with the Newfoundland Mountains shimmering like a distant mirage 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 the LSR would stand, 6 mph short of 400, until well into the 1960s. It was reminiscent of Gunder Haegg’s 4-minute, 1.4-second mile, long thought unbeatable.

Meantime, a troupe of American hobbyists, young men dubbed hot rodders, had made arrangements with the local authorities to stage time trials at Bonneville. Beginning in 1949 they were scheduled for seven days in August, the annual event to be called “Speed Week.” To sociologists, these hot rodders were a “subculture.” For sure they were different from the lordly Brits (Campbell had even been knighted) with their seven-ton leviathans designed by engineers and powered by supercharged Rolls Royce and Napier Lion airplane engines. Typically they raced stripped-down prewar Ford roadsters with “flathead” (simple valve-in-block) V-8 engines of the sort that had been standard equipment with Fords since 1932. The best of these roadsters were capable of 150 mph. During the 1950s, a few hot rodders fashioned “streamliners” that mimicked the British pacesetters of yore, but at first the very fastest of these were not much faster than Campbell at Daytona in the early 1930s. Even with two or three automobile engines in a row, hopped up to the utmost, they could not command anywhere near the horsepower that had been available to Campbell, or Eyston or Cobb, as much as 2,600.

Before the war, aircraft engines had cost a fortune. By the early 1950s they became “war surplus,” worth only their scrap value, but none of the hot rodders seemed to notice. Or almost none. Enter the man in the photo, Arthur Eugene “Art” Arfons. With his mother Bessie (his Greek-immigrant father Tom, who had Americanized his name from Arfanos, died at age fifty-two in 1950) and his older half-brother Walt, Art Arfons operated a chicken feed mill on Pickle Road on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. Akron was known for its tire industry and also for its All-American Soap Box Derby, in which youngsters in homemade wooden speedsters would race downhill propelled only by the force of gravity. Ar t naturally had his innings with the derby before enlisting in the navy in 1943 at the age of “almost seventeen.” He ended up as a diesel mechanic in the Pacific theater and was discharged as a petty officer second class after a three-year hitch. At twenty, he was just at the start of a lifetime love affair (there is no other way to describe it) with speed and power. The photo was taken by me in 1991 when Art was sixty-five.

Art initially ventured into a new kind of automotive competition called drag racing, quarter-mile standing-start sprints. At first, most of drag racing’s energy and enthusiasm were concentrated in Southern California, as was most of its innovative spirit. With one big exception. While most Californians were still trying to wring more power out of old flathead Fords and other V-8s, Art Arfons and Walt were availing themselves of brand-new aircraft engines still in wooden crates: Rangers, Merlins, and especially Allisons, the 28-liter V-12s from General Motors that had powered the fabled Lockheed P-38 “Lightning” of World War II, and indeed the majority of all American pursuit planes. In 1953 they showed up at the local drag strip with an Allison-powered dragster, which was immediately dubbed a monster, indeed a Green Monster because Bessie had painted it John Deere tractor green. Ever afterward that name was given to Arfons machines, even when they were not green.

There had been 70,000 Allisons, variously rated between 1,500 and 2,000 horsepower, quadruple the power of even the hottest automobile engine. True, for drag racing there was a trade-off. Drag racing had two performance parameters, independent of one another, elapsed time (et) from start to finish and top speed (mph). Because an Allison engine had so much power, a Green Monster had to be nursed away from the starting line to avoid spinning the tires excessively. But when it came to mph at the finish, nothing else was even close. Concerned that competitors with ordinary V-8s (and Detroit’s Big Three) were miffed about getting upstaged, in 1959 the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA)—drag racing’s primary sanctioning body—instigated rules limiting competition to “automobile engines only.”

The last Arfons Allison-powered machine therefore got diverted to Bonneville Speed Week and clocked almost 314 mph before frying the clutch. Having had a falling-out with Walt, Art was on his own, and he put it up for sale. He did so because he knew (as did Walt) that something better was on the war surplus market: turbojet engines with even more power than an Allison. When Art tested his first jet-powered machine on a back road, the performance was mediocre. But after he added an afterburner, which injected raw fuel (kerosene) directly into the exhaust, it was spectacular. At “outlaw” drag strips not sanctioned by the NHRA, “brutal and brazen shards of fiery horsepower” (as Cole Coonce writes in his atmospheric Infinity Over Zero [2002]) would draw amazed crowds. For exhibition runs with a jet dragster, Arfons could command a thousand dollars or even more, and he began saving up for a return to the salt and for bragging rights that would be priceless.

* * *
The potential for jets at Bonneville had attracted the attention of several other men. First there was brother Walt, who was already experienced with jet dragsters. The jet set also included Nathan Ostich, a Los Angeles physician, who went 331 in his “Flying Caduceus” in 1961; Glenn Leasher, a fearless and fatally impetuous drag racer, who died in the crash of a machine called “Infinity” in 1962; and Craig Breedlove, who became the first to break John Cobb’s record, topping 400 in his “Spirit of America” in 1963. Breedlove, a young Californian (twenty-six in 1963) was a lot of things Art Arfons was not. In terms of mechanical savvy the two were not even close, but Breedlove had the sort of brio to attract the corporate sponsorship needed to enlist a team of experts, even an aeronautical engineer. Together, they came up with a three-wheeled machine that looked exactly like an airplane minus wings. It was powered by a General Electric J-47 engine with 5,200 pounds of thrust, originally designed for an air force F-86 Sabrejet. In “Spirit of America” the Beach Boys sang:

The Bonneville salt flats had seen some strange things

But the strangest thing yet was a jet without wings

Once as a jet it played in the stars

But now on the ground it’s the king of our cars

While there were no songs about Green Monsters, Art Arfons found sponsorship too, from the STP division of Studebaker and from Firestone Tire and Rubber—tires were more critical than anything else to an LSR effort. But it was not so generous as Breedlove’s from Goodyear and Shell Oil. Always Art Arfons was the “junkyard genius,” the handsome but roughhewn pragmatist whose machinery might lack for finesse but never for sheer horsepower. In 1961 he had located a slightly damaged General Electric J-79 engine from an F-104 Starfighter, the aircraft that held records for speed, altitude, and rate of climb. It had cost the air force $250,000; he bought it for a few thousand dollars (or maybe only a few hundred— accounts varied over the years). With its four-stage afterburner, a J-79 had triple the thrust of a J-47, though not everything was sorted out when Art went to Bonneville in 1962 (he had rebuilt his J-79 without the aid of the printed manual, which was classified) and he clocked only 342.

But from 1963 to 1966 he would engage in a dramatic duel that saw the LSR change hands over and over: A recent article in Air and Space called it “The Bonneville Jet Wars.” A car designed by Walt Arfons held the record briefly, but the main event was Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove. Breedlove went 407 in August 1963, Art went 434 in October 1964. Breedlove went 468 a week later, then 526 in October 1965 with a new machine, totally redesigned. Then Art went 536, Breedlove 555, Art 576, and Breedlove 600. That was on 15 November 1965. A year later, on 17 November 1966, Art was just topping 600 when a bearing froze and he veered off the course and went end over end, and then the Green Monster tumbled and slid and disintegrated for miles and miles. A Sports Illustrated photographer in a helicopter overhead reported that “one of the wheels bounced high into the air toward us and almost went through one of the rotors.” Somehow, Art’s injuries were minor. After hearing from the official timer that “he coulda had the record,” he vowed to be back. But it would take a long time. His baby daughter Dusty (middle name Allison) would be twenty-three years old.

* * *

In that interim, men went to the moon, a war was lost, a president resigned, feminism gained, and interest in the land speed record waned, though not completely. A rocket-powered machine clocked 622 at Bonneville in 1970 and a Scotsman named Richard Noble took a jet to 633 in 1983, thereby returning the LSR to Great Britain, where it has remained ever since. (A ten-ton twin-jet machine designed by Noble attained Mach 1.015 in 1997.) As for Art Arfons, his darkest day came in 1971 as three people died when he lost control of a jet dragster in Texas. After a long, desperate struggle to pull himself together, he turned his competitive instincts to a slower, if no quieter, spectacle, tractor-pulling, which would become immensely popular in Ohio and the Midwest. But he continued to feel the lure of the salt. It was much more than a lure, actually; David Finn, the director of a documentary film about Arfons, called it “a Shakespearean obsession.”

In July 1989 Art’s nephew Craig, Walt’s son, was killed while attempting to set a speed record on Jackson Lake near Sebring, Florida. Two months later, Art and his own son Tim showed up at Bonneville with Green Monster No. 27, a 22-foot two-wheeler that was as dainty as some of his earlier machines had been ponderous, the GE Learjet engine weighing only 800 pounds and the entire vehicle only 1,800. Art drove, sixty-three years of age, triple bypass and all. At 350 mph it lifted the front end and rolled over. Damage was not extensive, and Art returned to Akron to rebuild it in a slightly more conventional configuration. He was back on the salt in 1990, this time with Finn’s film crew on hand to record every moment. Among the large crowd of spectators were Craig Breedlove and Richard Noble, who later expressed his amazement that “Art was allowed to run such a lightweight car.”

Beset with vibrations that made it impossible for him to see his instrument panel or even the course markers, Art only managed 328, and he announced that he was heading home. Did the car require “too much reworking?” asked Tim. “No,” said his dad. “It’s more me. I’m just sorta going to hang it up. Got to stop somewhere.”

And yet, there would be one last hurrah, Speed Week 1991, which was when I took the photo. Art was set up to run a course a mile or so off to the side of where the regular timed runs were taking place. There was no film crew, no fanfare, just a handful of onlookers, most of whom had found out by accident. Among a smaller handful of helpers was son Tim and Jim Deist, who had manufactured Art’s firesuit and the parachute used to slow down. Art had always insisted that he felt no fear before a high-speed run, and I may have been wrong in thinking that he seemed apprehensive. He finished suiting up and squeezed down into the cockpit. Tim helped him with his helmet, cinched up his belts, and fitted the Lexan canopy. Then he took a close look at the wheels (LSR people had long-since decided it was better not to have tires at all), and fired the engine with a small auxiliary power unit. A wave of the hand, and Art moved off toward the horizon at a measured pace.

About a half-mile downcourse he lit the afterburner, which ordinarily would have brought his speed near 400 in short order. But after a moment, only silence; he was coasting. Tim chased after him in the truck they had driven out from Akron. Everything was too far away for me to see what was happening, and I walked away. When I returned to where Art had been set up, later in the day, there was nobody there.

Art had once said, “I can’t wait to get here to race. When I get here I can’t wait to leave, and, after I’ve left I can’t wait to come back.” Usually he couldn’t wait to leave because he envisioned some improvement to make at his shop in Ohio. But this time he never came back, although rumors of the possibility circulated for several years. A lifetime quest for mastery had ended not with a bang but a whimper.

* * *

This was also the last attempt at an LSR ever made at Bonneville, by anyone. Noble’s British team, which had clocked 633 and would later break the sound barrier, did so at a remote place called the Black Rock Desert, an alkali playa in northwestern Nevada with a surface better able to bear their machine’s weight. Several different courses could be laid out that were longer than anything possible at Bonneville because mining operations had so degraded the salt. (For the time being, Bonneville still sees record runs on a shorter course by [relatively] slower machines powered through their wheels, not by thrust—records that are separately certified by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile—and several have topped 400 since 1991.)

Art Arfons lived sixteen years longer, competing in tractor pulls along with Tim and Dusty, fussing around his shop, reliving old times with old friends, and accumulating many honors, including induction into no less than five different halls of fame. He died at eighty-one on the third of December 2007, survived by his long-suffering but loving wife of sixty years, June; by Dusty and Tim; and by Walt. As it happened, Art died only seventy-two hours after Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel, whose name had more popular resonance (Google yields him fifty times as many hits). Both men got substantial obituaries in the New York Times. But last words about Evel Kneivel were only a quote about him saying he “could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.” Small glory compared to the finale for Art Arfons, memorialized as a man “whose Green Monster machines were a triumph of mechanical engineering.” And there was something else. In David Finn’s film, Art comes across as an immensely likable man, self-effacing, thoughtful, even serene. In 1990, when he decided to go home to Akron without even getting close to the record, he realized that he might be depriving Finn’s costly production of a climactic scene. “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

Why would a man care so much about what Art Arfons cared about? It’s a good question, and part of the answer might be found in The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe, 1979) or even in Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (1999). But no answer can detract from the touching coda in the Times : “Arfons was buried with wrenches in his hands, accompanied by a jar of Bonneville salt and the manual, now declassified, to the General Electric J79 jet engine.”

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Bob Post thanks Dusty Spraggins and Tim Arfons for answering his many questions, and Craig Breedlove for a memorable conversation on a California beach many years ago. Post’s previous writings about Bonneville include “The Machines of Nowhere,” Invention and Technology, spring 1992, and “Strip, Salt, and Other Straightaway Dreams” in Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America, ed. John Wright (1992). He tells the story of drag racing in High Performance (2001). In The Business of Speed (2008), hot rodding has found its storyteller in David Lucsko. There is no more enchanting evocation of technological enthusiasm than David Finn’s The Green Monster, which originally aired on PBS in 1999 but is now much harder to find than Hollywood’s Landspeed (2002), a perfectly awful movie. Confirmation that LSR dreams live on in the hearts of old men may be found at www.landspeed.com.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology