Newspapers / The New Bern Mirror … / Feb. 11, 1972, edition 1 / Page 1
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When visitors stroli through the State Museum in Ralei^, they aiways pause to smile at a horseless carriage, complete with a wax dummy dressM in an old-time white duster. it’s fmny to them, but New Bern's Gilbert S. Waters was deadly serious about the con traption when he built it years ago. He was still deadly serious about it, right up to the day of his passing. Like many another inventor. Waters was ahead of his time— at ieast as far as New Bern was concerned. Rightly or wrongly, he felt in his heart that the town might have been another Detroit if his invention had been enthusiastically accepted here. Skeptics derided him at the very outset, when he took to local streets with his pioneer auto. Thoy allowed as bow he ought to stick to buggies, since there were an awful lot of horses around, and no jackasses crazy enough to buy a sput tering machine like this. Seeing the hardwriting on the wall. Waters stuck to his bugfides, and became a forlorn and frustrated figure in bis dusty, cobwebbed shop on uppper Broad street. The world passed him by, and ironically it passed in automobiles. In due time a measure of fame came to his door. He was invited to New York City toe a coast-to-coast radio broadcast. They asked him to bring his horseless carriage, and he drove Phil Baker, the comedian, along Fifth Avenue in grand style. Mding friends in the cleverly contrived two-seater was always a pleasure to the New Bern inventor. Children in particular got a great thrill out of such an experience. We can see him now, beaming proudly, with a wide-eyed moppet seated beside him. TUs was his belated hour of triumph, such as it was. His vindication, bestowed upon him by a new generation that admired his ingenuity. Had ' his own generation supported him, instead of scoffing and calling him nuts. Waters still might not have been another Henry Ford. It always seemed to us that he lacked Ford’s progressive spark, despite the fact that his irioneering in thi field of motor vehicles was progressiveness itself. Even with local acceptance. Waters in large measure would have been governed by the industrial possibilities of New Bern and its immediate area. What those possibilities were, compared with Detroit’s resources when Ford started out, is a subject that could be argued at great length. Actually, Ford and Waters too were following in the footsteps of others when they designki their horseless carriages. Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, a French army engineer, built a three-wheeled steam tractor in 1769, while Oliver Evans patented a steam carriage in Maryland way back in 1787. Siegfried Marcus, an Austrian, is credited with (Continued on page 8) NEW BERN CRAVEN COUNTY P'JBLIC LIBRARY The NEW BERN miim PUBLISHID WIIKLV IN THI HIART OP IA8TIRN NORTH CAROLINA 5^ Per Cppy NEW BERN, N. C., FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1972 NUMBER 47 ' l t J AS MAN EXPLORES—Will future astronauts, reaching ever further into outer space, discover strange formations like these on some distant planet, or can we dismiss the pictures seen here as simply a wild concoction dreamed up by an imaginative writer of science fiction? Guess either way, and you’ll be completely wrong. What you see is strictly for real. New Bern’s Theodore Baxter, an expert with a camera, took these remarkable photographs during the recent cold, along the Neuse in back of his home. Dame Nature was the artist who fashioned these designs in glistening ice. Baxter knew the moment he saw them that they were well worth recording on film. Capitalizing on light from a bright sun, he clicked his camera from the best vantage point, and here we have the result. Winter despite its unpleasant aspects is a many splendored thing.
The New Bern Mirror (New Bern, N.C.)
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Feb. 11, 1972, edition 1
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