‘Navigating’ to campus

By Rose McIlveen

It has been written that there were more technological advances in the first half of the 20th century than there were in all of the previous years of recorded history. Those advances inevitably brought some conflicts between the old ways and the new.

The past and the future nearly collided on the Bloomington to Martinsville road shortly after the dawn of the 20th century. An Indiana University physics professor discovered that not all Hoosiers were rushing headlong into the future.

Arthur Foley, a very bright physicist on the faculty of the university, was, as the saying goes, "up on all the latest." He was so far up, in fact, that in 1903, he was the proud owner of an automobile when other Bloomingtonians weren't all that sure the newfangled machines were practical.

Foley didn't buy the thing just to stand around and look at it. Early in the month of May, he put his parents and sister, as well as himself, into his auto and headed for Indianapolis.

The Bloomington Telephone of May 15, 1903, described what happened. "...they had clear sailing until about nine miles south of Martinsville near the little town of Hindoostan, where a man was met driving a huckster wagon." (Hucksters sold general store-type goods in villages and rural areas. The town today is known as Hindustan.)

Indiana's roads weren't all that wide in those days, but they had been designed with enough room for two wagons to pass. Foley's auto couldn't have been as wide as a huckster wagon, but suddenly there loomed before the professor a serious problem coming from the opposite direction.

Continued the Telephone: "The auto' was approaching the wagon, which held the middle of the road at a merry little gait, and the driver of the huckster wagon came closer and closer without giving an inch of the road." Foley had no intention of maiming the huckster's horses, and at the last minute before an inevitable collision, turned the steering wheel sharply as far as it would go.

"...the professor was forced to turn his machine out to the side of the road and into a ditch, and in doing so, he broke the throttle of the ‘auto,' which completely disabled the machine," explained the newspaper.

Foley, his family and the auto were transported by wagon to Martinsville, where the auto was left for repairs. The Foleys took a trolley car to Indianapolis. Several days later, the professor returned to Martinsville, picked up his car and drove back to Bloomington without further mishap.

Foley was very upset—upset enough to do some investigating about the driver of the huckster wagon. The Telephone reported what the professor found out. "On inquiry the professor was informed that the driver of the huckster was never willing to give a part of the road for a bicycle, auto or any kind of modern vehicle, and it is likely that he will have to learn a lesson through the law."

After the incident, Foley swore he would file a lawsuit to establish automobile rights on the roads. That may have been easier said than done. There was the problem of where to file the suit, state or county? Too, since Oldsmobile had built only 425 cars in 1901, and Henry Ford produced his first Model A runabout in 1903, automobile owners were vastly outnumbered by buggy and wagon owners who powered by horseflesh rather than horsepower.

But the Hancock County native, who received two degrees from IU and a doctorate from Cornell University, was doing his best to move technology in the right direction.

He actually had a locomotive parked next to the old Assembly Hall as part of his experiments to improve train whistles. (That research was prompted by the deaths of several little girls who did not hear the train coming.) Foley was also a consulting acoustic engineer for radio and phonograph companies.

The professor was invaluable to the university in other ways as well. When the Student Building construction project suddenly needed a contractor, Foley filled in. At IU President William Lowe Bryan's request, he designed a new water supply system for the university. One of his most visible projects is the Well House, which Foley designed for Theodore Rose, the donor.

Foley retired in 1937 after more than 40 years as head of the IU Department of Physics.