Thursday Trivia

Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: Who was the first person to break a documented 100 miles per hour in an automobile, and what was that automobile?
If you think you know all that make the jump and see if you’re right.
Part of the attraction of the automobile is how fast it can go. In fact, that was one of the main impetuses for their creation as Nineteenth Century Ring Times at the Nürburgring were stuck at an not very impressive 31 minutes owing to the limitations of horse breeding.
Okay, so that wasn’t really one of the reasons, but speed and racing did play an important role in the early development of the automobile. Not only that, but the innate quest for bragging rights that is part of human nature drove (literally) ever increasing achievements in speed and daring do. One of the most notable goals was the breaking of the 100 miles per hour barrier. That accomplishment was realized – and documented – by, like many early automotive feats, by a Frenchman, in a French car.
From Car Covers Direct:

On a warm summer day back in July 21, 1904 there was a crazy Frenchman by the name of Louis Rigolly who was determined to do something that nobody else had ever done before: break 100 mph in a car. He and his team went to a beach (roads weren’t that great back in the day) in Ostend Belgium for a shot at the history books. Their car of choice? A 13.5 litre Gobron-Brillié. Rigolly hit 103.561 mph and completed the 1 kilometre course in just under 22 seconds.

Rigolly’s speed record would stand for a mere 3 months before it was broken. He would go on however, to be one of the earliest participants on the Grand Prix circuit. The company that produced the record-setting car – Gobron-Brillié – was notable as well for an earlier and very unique engine. That was a twin-cylinder, four-piston design in which the opposing pistons acted on a central combustion chamber. Interesting but unnecessarily complicated, the design was replaced by a more conventional type by the time of the record run.
Image: Car Covers Direct