What Car Did Harry Lyon Drive? – The Answer to Tuesday’s Search Challenge

On Tuesday I shared
a search difficulty and wrote that you might email me if you desired the answers to the concerns in the difficulty. I got
a lot more emails than I believed I would. And some individuals I emailed the responses to wrote back asking for more details about the process of finding the responses. So yesterday early morning I hung around drawing up the process of discovering the answers to Tuesdays search obstacle. If you missed the difficulty, you can
find it here. The solution is detailed listed below..

There are a few ways to get here at the answers. What Ive laid out below is the most direct method to get to the responses. (Thanks once again to Daniel Russells.
Happiness of Search for motivating the advancement of search challenges like this one).

Disclosure: I invested at least 10 hours comparing pictures of vehicles to the among Lyon sitting in his car. To confirm my information about the vehicle I got the aid of one the leading antique car preservationists in the country, Jeff Orwig. Jeff is a friend of mine and the manager of Bob Bahres exquisite car collection housed on Paris Hill in Paris, Maine. You can learn more about the collection here..

Step 1: Identify the aircraft and its historical significance.The image itself gives us a huge tip. Do a quick Google search for “southern cross aircraft” and the top result will be a Wikipedia page about the plane. Its essential to consist of “plane” in the search due to the fact that browsing Google for simply “southern cross” will put a music video of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash tune Southern Cross at the top of the results. Even more down the search results page for “southern cross” youll discover links to short articles about the constellation of the exact same name, links to an energy company, and links to a Brazilian award for chivalry. In truth, you wont see any recommendation to an aircraft in the first 10 pages of Google search results page when browsing “southern cross.” In addition, “southern cross plane” isnt even a term that Google suggests when you get in “southern cross.”.

By zooming in on the image you can look at some important details consisting of the shape of the front door on the cars and truck, the shape of the front of the cars and truck, and a little badge on the front of the automobile.

As discussed above, the leading Google search results page for “southern cross aircraft” is the Wikipedia page about the plane. Go through that page and youll find out that it was the first airplane to be flown from the United States to Australia.

Based on the lists of American cars and truck producers and what we know about Lyon, Ford is the most common guess as it was the most popular brand name in the United States at the time and is still in the forefront of Americans minds today when they believe of automobile manufacturers. Now its a matter of comparing pictures of cars produced by those producers during the 1910s and early 1920s.

Usage Google Images to find images of Ford, Studebaker, and Dodge vehicles produced in those years. Compare the pictures closely to those of the image of Lyon sitting in his automobile and youll start to notice that the shape of the door in his car does not match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). In all 3 cases, the Dodge examples are consistent with what we see in the image of Lyon in his vehicle.

To do this youll desire to expand the image discovered on the Maine Memory Networks short article about Lyon. By zooming in on the image you can look at some important details consisting of the shape of the front door on the vehicle, the shape of the front of the automobile, and a little badge on the front of the vehicle.

Step 4: Find the reference to an automobile. At the extremely bottom of this Maine Memory Network page about Harry Lyon youll see an image of Lyon sitting in a car in his driveway in 1927. (The image is copyrighted so youll have to see it there)..

You could have followed the hint about using the Maine Memory Networks site then headed there to do a search within the site for references to Harry Lyon.

A search for “1920s cars” or “1910s vehicles” is a beginning place. Compare the pictures closely to those of the picture of Lyon sitting in his automobile and youll begin to observe that the shape of the door in his vehicle does not match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). Disclosure: I spent at least 10 hours comparing images of automobiles to the one of Lyon sitting in his vehicle. To validate my info about the automobile I enlisted the aid of one the top antique vehicle preservationists in the nation, Jeff Orwig.

Step 3: Find the reference to Paris Hill. If you follow the link to the Maine Memory Network from the Wikipedia page about Harry Lyon, youll discover a fairly long short article about Lyon and his life including that his parents bought a house on Paris Hill and Lyon later lived there.

Now that weve considered the points above we can start thinking at the producer of the production and the automobile year. Noting that cars and trucks didnt significantly change from one model year to the next at this time, if they did at all, were thinking the year according to decade or half-decade is a feasible method to this challenge. A search for “1920s cars and trucks” or “1910s automobiles” is a beginning place.

Step 2: Identify who flew on the aircraft.
Also on that same Wikipedia page youll discover that the 4 members of the flight team were Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Harry Lyon, and James Warner.

As soon as youve identified who the members of the flight crew were, the next action is to figure out which one had a connection to Maine. Lyons page consists of “Maine” as part of a link to the Maine Memory Networks site which is pointed out in the hints for this obstacle.

At this moment the procedure ends up being a little bit of guesswork followed by a process of comparison and elimination. There are some indicate think about before rating what kind of car is in the image. Heres a list of those points to consider:.
The photo was taken in 1927, a year before the flight of the Southern Cross.
From reading about him, we know that Lyon was not a guy of extraordinary wealth, but probably middle to upper-middle class.
Based upon Lyons monetary standing in addition to looking at the information of the car we can probably get rid of luxury brands from our uncertainty.
When we zoom-in on the vehicle we can see that it has some imperfections as the result of driving and or post-manufacturing modification. Significant, there are what seems two wooden bench seats behind the drivers seat. The back half of the body appears to be wood as well.

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