(Roughly) Daily

As readers ready themselves for the Indy 500, a stroll down memory lane…

Auto racing was born in France in 1887; it came to the U.S. 1895.  These earliest contests were road races, from one town to another on public streets and highways.  Soon enough, safety concerns drove more and more racers onto enclosed tracks– often repurposed horse-racing tracks.

For reasons not altogether understood, Iowa was a leader in dirt-track auto racing.  The Hawkeye State boasts the oldest auto track in America, Knoxville Raceway in Knoxville, Iowa (a repurposed horse track where the first cars raced in 1901), and became sufficiently famous for its State Fair races, at the State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, to attract the National Geographic photographer who shot the photo above.

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As we rev our engines, we might recall that it was on this date in 1911, in New York City, that Caesar Cella (a burglary suspect) became the first person to be convicted of a crime in U.S. courts on the basis of fingerprint evidence. (The first known case solved by fingerprint matching was in Tokyo in 1880, though the uniqueness of an individual’s fingerprints has been acknowledged since ancient Roman times.)

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