100 Years Since First U.S. Automobile Fatality
14 September 1999
A Poignant Centennial
Sept. 14, 1999--Exactly 100 years ago today, a 68-year-old widower named Henry H. Bliss died at New York's Roosevelt Hospital, after being run down the night before by an early electric car. According to Peter Salwen, a New York City historian and author of "Upper West Side Story, A History and Guide" (Abbeville Press, 1999), that made him the first American ever to be killed by an automobile."By a strange coincidence, Mr. Bliss had been involved in a sensational murder case just a few years earlier," Mr. Salwen said. "His estranged wife had been poisoned, and her daughter, Mr. Bliss's stepdaughter who was then living with him - had been accused of the crime. She was acquitted, but there must have been some people in the city who saw the accident as retribution of some kind."
Mr. Bliss' accident had occurred the night of September 13, as he stepped out of a trolley car at Central Park West and West 74th Street. He had just turned to offer his arm to his companion, a Miss Lee, when an electric taxi driven by Arthur Smith suddenly veered across the avenue to avoid a parked truck, and ran him down, fatally fracturing his skull.
"About three million Americans have been killed in automobile accidents since then," Mr. Salwen observes. "Yesterday, a citizen's group called Transportation Alternatives had a little ceremony at the site of Mr. Bliss' accident, trying to highlight the issue of pedestrian safety, but they didn't get much attention. It seems we Americans generally accept this level of carnage as the inevitable price of being able to get around freely by car."
Actually, Mr. Salwen says, we may not be doing so badly after all. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, total auto fatalities in the U.S. peaked at 54,589 in 1972 - an annual figure roughly equal to the total American body count in the Vietnam War - but has since declined to under 42,000 per year. "In fact, the current auto fatality rate of around 15.68 per 10,000 people is the lowest since the government started tracking these things in 1921," Mr. Salwen adds. "It's a little too early to start celebrating, but maybe we are beginning to learn from our mistakes."
