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

Disclosure: I spent a minimum of ten hours comparing pictures of cars and trucks to the among Lyon being in his vehicle. To confirm my info about the vehicle I enlisted the aid of one the top antique car preservationists in the country, Jeff Orwig. Jeff is a good friend of mine and the curator of Bob Bahres splendid car collection housed on Paris Hill in Paris, Maine. You can learn more about the collection here..

By zooming in on the image you can look at some essential information including the shape of the front door on the automobile, the shape of the front of the vehicle, and a little badge on the front of the vehicle.

At this point the process ends up being a little bit of uncertainty followed by a process of comparison and removal. There are some indicate think about before rating what kind of automobile remains in the photo. Heres a list of those points to think about:.
Initially, the image was taken in 1927, a year before the flight of the Southern Cross.
From reading about him, we understand that Lyon was not a man of remarkable wealth, but most likely middle to upper-middle class.
Based upon Lyons financial standing along with looking at the information of the automobile we can most likely get rid of high-end brands from our guesswork.
When we zoom-in on the automobile we can see that it has some flaws as the result of driving and or post-manufacturing modification. Significant, there are what appears to be 2 wooden bench seats behind the chauffeurs seat. The back half of the body appears to be wood.

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 car and youll start to notice that the shape of the door in his automobile does not match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). Disclosure: I spent at least ten hours comparing images of cars to the one of Lyon sitting in his cars and truck. To validate my info about the car I employed the help of one the leading antique cars and truck preservationists in the country, Jeff Orwig.

Now that weve thought about the points above we can begin thinking at the producer of the production and the vehicle year. Keeping in mind that cars didnt substantially 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 difficulty. At this point, turning to Google Image search is our next step. A search for “1920s cars” or “1910s vehicles” is a beginning location. Those results typically include examples of high-end cars of the time. Were searching for cars and trucks that could have been owned by middle to upper-middle class people of the time. At this point at the same time its valuable to have a list of American automobile makers of the 1910s and 1920s. Once again, we may rely on Wikipedia for such a list or to any variety of antique automobile sites for such a list.

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

Based on the lists of American vehicle producers and what we understand 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 consider vehicle producers. Some grownups will still consider Studebaker as an American car maker. Dodge is also a common guess as it satisfies both the rate and appeal components of our mission. So now its a matter of comparing photos of automobiles produced by those manufacturers throughout the 1910s and early 1920s.

Alternatively, you could have followed the tip about using the Maine Memory Networks website then headed there to do a search within the site for references to Harry Lyon.

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

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

Do a quick Google search for “southern cross plane” and the top outcome will be a Wikipedia page about the plane. Its essential to include “aircraft” in the search due to the fact that searching Google for just “southern cross” will put a music video of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Southern Cross at the top of the outcomes. Even more down the search results page for “southern cross” youll find links to posts about the constellation of the exact same name, links to an energy company, and links to a Brazilian award for chivalry.

On Tuesday I shared
a search challenge and wrote that you could email me if you wanted the answers to the questions in the difficulty. I got
Yesterday morning I spent time composing out the process of finding the responses to Tuesdays search difficulty. If you missed the challenge, you can
find it here. The option is detailed below..

When youve identified who the members of the flight team were, the next step is to determine which one had a connection to Maine. To do this, open the Wikipedia page for each member of the flight crew then use keyboard commands of CTRL+F (Windows computer systems) or COMMAND+F (Mac computer systems) to browse each page for the word “Maine.” Just the pages for Charles Kingsford Smith and Harry Lyon consist of a match for “Maine” and the match on Smiths page is only found in the context of the word “remained.” Lyons page includes “Maine” as part of a link to the Maine Memory Networks site which is pointed out in the tips for this difficulty.

Action 3: Find the recommendation to Paris Hill. If you follow the link to the Maine Memory Network from the Wikipedia page about Harry Lyon, youll discover a relatively long short article about Lyon and his life consisting of that his moms and dads bought a home on Paris Hill and Lyon later lived there.

Use Google Images to find pictures of Ford, Studebaker, and Dodge cars produced in those decades. Compare the photos carefully to those of the image of Lyon sitting in his vehicle and youll begin to see that the shape of the door in his cars and truck does not match those of Ford and Studebaker (theyre not as rounded at the bottom). The front of Lyons lorry is likewise more rounded than that of the Fords and Studebakers made at the exact same time. When we look at the radiator caps of the lorries, a last information is on the hood of the cars and truck. In all 3 cases, the Dodge examples follow what we see in the photo of Lyon in his car. The final answer is a Dodge Touring automobile produced around 1919 (offer or take a year) that was customized in the back.

Step 4: Find the referral to a cars and truck. At the very bottom of this Maine Memory Network page about Harry Lyon youll see an image of Lyon being in a vehicle in his driveway in 1927. (The image is copyrighted so youll have to see it there)..

There are a couple of ways to reach the responses. What Ive detailed listed below is the most direct method to get to the responses. (Thanks again to Daniel Russells.
Delight of Search for motivating the development of search difficulties like this one).

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