In Our Wake: The Madman’s Dream

Were you around in the early 1900’s, you would have likely known the name Garfield Wood. Born to a ferryboat operator in 1880, the entrepreneurial “Gar” made a tenuous early living as a skilled and intuitive repairman. Then one day in 1911, he watched a sweaty, swearing coal truck operator struggling to hand-crank the lift that emptied his coal bed. Wood and his wife Murlen poured their savings into designing a hydraulic bed lift—creating the first dump truck.

Wood and eight of his 12 siblings moved to Detroit and established the Wood Hoist Company. Wood was a multi-millionaire by age 40. Having come of age watching steamboat races, he became a fanatical speedboat racer after his first win in 1911 piloting Miss Detroit. “I was speed boat crazy from that moment,” he told a reporter. Wood bought Chris Smith & Sons boats (later re-christened Chris-Craft) and launched a line of renowned “Gar Wood” branded runabouts that included 33-foot-long 500 horsepower Liberty aircraft engine driven gentleman’s racers called Baby Gars. In 1925, the media-savvy Wood’s Baby Gar IVbested a passenger train racing from Albany to Manhattan. But “Gar” was best known for a series of ten flyers he christened the Miss Americas.

The years between World Wars saw a speed war between the U.S. and U.K. Wood’s fiercest rival was Irishman Kaye Don, whose Rolls-Royce powered beasts kept the pair trading records. Wood topped 100 mph in 1931 aboard Miss America IX. Then in 1932, Don hit a stunning 119 mph aboard Miss England III. Thus, Miss America X would become Wood’s icon. Dubbed “a madman’s dream,” her mahogany hull was 38 feet long, ten feet wide and powered by four supercharged 12-cylinder Packard airplane engines with 1,800 horsepower apiece. Wood wanted them connected, in tandem, by a single crankshaft, creating in effect, two 24 cylinder engines-—with 16 carburetors and 96 spark plugs.

“You may as well put a bomb in an egg crate, Mr. Wood,” Packard engineer M.J. Steele said. “The first trial might kill you.”

“I’ll take that chance,” Wood answered.

In August 1932, before a million Detroit River spectators, Wood and mechanic Orlin Johnson took their seats behind all that horsepower, blazing a world record that would stand for five years as the first boat to exceed two miles a minute—124.9 miles per hour. So crushing was her victory that Rolls-Royce reportedly exited boat racing.

“Speed boat racing is a mechanics game,” Wood said afterwards. “I guess that’s why I like it.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/in-our-wake-the-madmans-dream