Carl Graham Fisher

Carl Graham Fisher (January 12, 1874 – July 15, 1939) was an American entrepreneur. Despite severe astigmatism, he became actively involved in auto racing. He was a seemingly tireless pioneer and promoter of the automotive industry and highway construction, and of real estate development in Florida. He is widely regarded as a promotional genius.[1]

Despite family financial strains and a disability, in the late 19th century he became a bicycle enthusiast and opened a modest bicycle shop with a brother. He became involved in bicycle racing, as well as many activities related to the emerging American auto industry. In 1904, Carl Fisher and his friend James A. Allison bought an interest in the U.S. patent to manufacture acetylene headlights, a precursor to electric models which became common about ten years later. Soon Fisher's firm supplied nearly every headlamp used on automobiles in the United States as manufacturing plants were built all over the country to supply the demand. The headlight patent made him rich as an automotive parts supplier when he and Allison sold their company, Prest-O-Lite, to Union Carbide in 1913 for $9 million (equivalent of approximately $230 million in 2018).[2]

Fisher operated in Indianapolis what is believed to be the first automobile dealership in the United States, and also worked at developing an automobile racetrack locally. After being injured in stunts himself, and following a safety debacle at the new Indianapolis Motor Speedway, of which he was a principal, he helped develop paved racetracks and public roadways. Improvements he implemented at the speedway led to its nickname, "The Brickyard."

In 1912, Fisher conceived and helped develop the Lincoln Highway, the first road for the automobile across the entire United States of America. A convoy trip a few years later by the U.S. Army along Fisher's Lincoln Highway was a major influence upon then Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower years later in championing the Interstate Highway System during his presidency in the 1950s.

Carl Fisher followed the east-west Lincoln Highway in 1914 with the conception of the north-south Dixie Highway, which led from Michigan to Miami. Under his leadership, the initial portion was completed within a single year, and he led an automobile caravan to Florida from Indiana.

At the south end of the Dixie Highway in Miami, Florida, Fisher, with the assistance of his partners John Graham McKay and Thomas Walkling, became involved in the successful real estate development of the new resort city of Miami Beach, built on a largely unpopulated barrier island and reached by the new Collins Bridge across Biscayne Bay directly at the terminus of the Dixie Highway. Fisher was one of the best known and active promoters of the Florida land boom of the 1920s. By 1926, he was worth an estimated $100 million, and redirected his promotional efforts when the Florida real estate market bubble burst after 1925. His final major project, cut short by the Great Depression, was a "Miami Beach of the north" at Montauk, located at the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. His fortune was lost in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression in the United States which followed shortly thereafter. He found himself living in a small cottage in Miami Beach, doing minor work for old friends. Nevertheless, years after his fortune had been lost, at the end of his career, he took on one more project, albeit more modest than many of his past ventures, and built the famous Caribbean Club on Key Largo, intended as a "poor man's retreat."

Although he had lost his fortune and late in life considered himself a failure, Fisher is widely regarded as a decidedly successful man in the long view of his life. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1971.[1] In a 1998 study judged by a panel of 56 historians, writers, and others, Carl G. Fisher was named one of the Fifty Most Influential People in the history of the State of Florida by The Ledger newspaper. PBS labeled him "Mr. Miami Beach." Just south of Miami Beach, Fisher Island (which he once owned, and is named for him), became one of the wealthiest and most exclusive residential areas in the United States.

Carl Fisher was born in Greensburg, Indiana, nine years after the end of the American Civil War, the son of Albert H. and Ida Graham Fisher. Apparently suffering from alcoholism, a problem which would also plague Carl later in life, his father left the family when Fisher was a child. Suffering from severe astigmatism, it was difficult for Carl to pay attention in school, as uncorrected astigmatism can cause headaches or eyestrain, and blur vision at all distances. He quit school when he was twelve years old to help support his family.

For the next five years, Fisher held a number of jobs. He worked in a grocery and a bookstore, then later he sold newspapers, books, tobacco, candy, and other items on trains departing Indianapolis, a major railroad center not far from Greensburg. He opened a bicycle repair shop in 1891 with his two brothers. A successful entrepreneur, he expanded his business and became involved in bicycle racing and later, automobile racing. During his many promotional stunts, he was frequently injured on the dirt and gravel roadways, leading him to become one of the early developers of automotive safety features. A highly publicized stunt involved dropping a bicycle from the roof of the tallest building in Indianapolis, which brought on a confrontation with the police.

In 1909 Fisher married a young woman while he was engaged to another. Fisher's previous fiancée sued him for a breach of promise. Meanwhile, he and his new wife Jane went on a business trip for their honeymoon. The couple had one child in 1921, that died at one month old from Pyloric Stenosis.[3] The couple were divorced in 1926.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_G._Fisher

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Hemmings Classic Car Carl Graham Fisher America's wackiest promoter with a vision By Jim Donnelly from the November 2016 issue of Hemmings Classic Car

He had to be crazy. No sane person would float an automobile over the skyline of a major city, suspended from a hot-air balloon. Nor would anyone sketch a massive test track out of a farm field intended to appeal to an auto industry that barely existed yet. And surely, nobody rational would imagine seeing a shining city where only swamps of mangrove trees then grew wild. This, however, was no ordinary dreamer. Carl Graham Fisher, one of the wackiest promoters in American history, dreamed in three dimensions. He brought his visions to reality and usually, monumental success. This past May, an estimated 400,000 people witnessed the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. Where would they have been if Fisher had been persuaded that his track was a nutty idea?

The great entrepreneurs, they say, can not only envision the future but also have an unfailingly good sense of timing. The latter quality was what set Fisher apart. He saw opportunity where others saw nothing at all. It was a trait that would transform Fisher into a rollicking legend of early American transportation. Just for instance, it was doubtful that officialdom could have foreseen the coming of Interstate highways without Fisher’s early work promoting the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway. When you zip across the United States today on the great concrete network, you can thank Fisher for having the idea first.

Fisher’s path in life started with a bang, which later became several bangs. Born in 1874 in Greenfield, Indiana, he didn’t learn until adulthood that he was partially blind. Like thousands of other young guys at the turn of the century, Fisher was consumed with bicycles, having opened his own shop in Indianapolis. He built a two-story-tall boneshaker that he climbed aboard and tottered around town on, seeking publicity. He later rode a bike on a tightrope stretched between two tall downtown buildings while spectators gawked in amazement. As if that wasn’t enough, Fisher had the habit of throwing his bicycles off the roof of a building. The lucky person who recovered the bent velocipede could exchange it at his shop for a new bike, free of charge.

It was around this time that Fisher became aware of the automobile in a very big way. He and local cycling pals, including Barney Oldfield, Arthur Newby, James Allison and Frank Wheeler, became huge automobile racing fans, and had the audacity to present themselves at racing events as “champion drivers” for an appearance fee. They pocketed thousands. Fisher briefly dabbled in driving race cars until he crashed in 1903 at an event in Zanesville, Ohio, where several spectators died. He refocused his efforts on expanding the possibilities of what motor vehicles could do and where they could go, a strategy that underpins his legacy today.

Fisher opened a garage on North Illinois Street in Indianapolis that may have been the first shop in America to offer 24-hour service. He expanded into larger quarters on North Capitol Boulevard not long thereafter. The infamous balloon flight involved a borrowed Stoddard-Dayton that he’d stripped of its engine and transmission to lighten the contraption. The media attention that accompanied the flight was incredible, with newspapers from coast to coast carrying the story. In 1903, however, Fisher visited Europe and experienced some of its few remaining open-road races, most of which had been canceled after spectator and driver deaths. That led him to believe that American auto racing needed a specialized course that was enclosed for safety, but also longer than the fairgrounds horse ovals where most cars raced stateside.

By this time, Fisher was a wealthy man, having recognized that cars needed to be operable at night. He teamed up with Allison to create Prest-O-Lite, after finding a safe way to compress acetylene gas in a cylinder (several factories blew up until he learned how) that could be ignited for headlamp illumination. Just that quickly, night driving became practical. A few years later, Fisher and Allison sold Prest-O-Lite to Union Carbide for $9 million, a jaw-dropping transaction at that time. By then, Fisher was firmly established in the galaxy of Indiana automotive giants, and he had noticed a corn and bean field across the street from the Prest-O-Lite plant, which city planners decreed had to be at the edge of town. That field would be the source of Fisher’s greatest lasting accomplishment.

We spoke to longtime motorsports journalist, historian and sculptor Carl Hungness of Madison, Indiana, whose biography of Fisher, I Love to Make the Dirt Fly, (www.carlhungness.com) is the recipient of several prestigious writing awards. He told us that when Fisher first started looking for a track site, he settled on the resort town of French Lick, Indiana, but couldn’t find a suitable land parcel. With Newby, Wheeler and Allison, he chose an alternative site on the far west side of Indianapolis. Early races were marred by deadly breakups in the track’s crushed-stone surface, but when he bricked the track in late 1909, Indy’s future was set. By the time Fisher cashed out of Prest-O-Lite, the 500-mile race–another impossibility, as some detractors said–was already ranked among the world’s most prestigious automotive events.

As Carl Hungness explained to us, Carl Fisher understood innately some of the same truths that propelled Henry Ford: Make cars affordable and practical, and people would buy them. Part of that practicality meant creating a road network that would support automobiles, as opposed to horses and tractors dragging farm equipment through the mud. That reality was forcefully demonstrated by Horatio Nelson Jackson, whose cross-continent trip aboard a Winton in 1903 consumed more than 63 days. In 1912, Fisher held a summit of would-be investors whom he hoped to persuade to fund research, at the minimum, to support a true transcontinental highway. One of them was Packard president Henry Joy, who wanted the federal government to direct funds away from the planned Lincoln Memorial to the road. Another key support was Frank Sieberling, who ran both the Goodyear and Sieberling rubber companies. Ultimately, Washington agreed to appropriate a then-enormous $75 million to build the Lincoln Highway, as it came to be known.

Many parts of the Lincoln Highway’s original alignment still exist today. Fisher figured that lightning could strike twice, so after a visit to South Florida in 1910, he reckoned that executives from Michigan and Indiana might like to vacation there in the winter–assuming, of course, that proper access and accommodations existed. The access already was there in the form of oil magnate Henry Flagler and his railroad that reached today’s Miami. Fisher decided to build another road, this one called the Dixie Highway, running from Michigan to Florida. He also completed a wooden causeway started by an ex-New Jerseyan named John Collins, which gave today’s Miami Beach access to the Florida mainland. By 1914, Fisher was involved in the commercial development of Miami proper, as crews of laborers hacked away at the jungle to drive the new city farther inland. Rightly, Fisher is today considered one of the founders of modern South Florida.

Fisher was by now worth an easy $100 million and riding high, for the moment. His entrepreneurial daring helped usher in the Florida land boom of the early 1920s. And nearly just as quickly, that boom turned into a bust, abetted by a devastating 1926 hurricane that left much of Miami in ruins, including Fisher’s new board speedway. By this time, Fisher’s focus had shifted again, this time to Montauk, New York, at the eastern tip of Long Island, which he envisioned as a respite for the wealthy from the brutally hot Miami summers. The collapse of the Florida realty market, however, left him strapped for cash, and he decided to sell the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to Eddie Rickenbacker. Fisher’s dreams for Montauk were predicated on income from investments in Miami, which evaporated following the land bust and the 1926 weather calamity. Those, coupled with the 1929 crash on Wall Street, left Fisher virtually penniless. As Carl Hungness told us, Fisher turned to drink, and found himself living alone in a small cottage on Miami Beach, subsisting on a monthly stipend that his former investors paid him for doing what he did best, promotional work. Fisher, as great a business hero and genius at hurrahing the public as the early 20th century had ever produced, died in 1939 of a stomach hemorrhage. He rests for eternity in the sprawling Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, along with countless other Hoosier legends.

https://www.hemmings.com/blog/article/carl-graham-fisher/

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Auto Race Car Executive. Indianapolis Speedway co-founder. Developer of automobile headlights.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/3407/carl-graham-fisher

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https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHTS-RFL

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