Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/832

This page needs to be proofread.

America's Five Million Pleasure Cars Represent

���If it were possible to concentrate into one car the aggregate of 120,000,000 horse-power of the 5,000,000 pleas- ure automobiles in the United States, that car would be able to travel with a speed of 155,000,000 miles an hour, somewhat less than one fourth the velocity of light. Ignoring speed laws it would travel from the earth to the sun in 35 minutes

��Each vehicle uses on the average 500 gallons of gasoline a year, a total of 2,500,000,000 gallons. To pump all this gasoline would take one of the modern fireboats eight months. In that time, if the city had been in flames, that same fireboat could have thrown enough water upon the buildings of Manhattan Island to drench every structure

��816

�� �