Trucking the Church

For the first time in history, we'll soon be buying more trucks than cars. When these trucks first started rolling about 100 years ago, however, people didn't know what to do with them.

America's love affair with trucks is about to hit the record books.

We used to crave cars, and weren't so passionate about pickups. Back in the 1960s, Detroit sold a whopping 8.5 million cars for every 1 million light trucks.

But check your rearview mirror today, and you can see a change. Annual sales of light trucks are at the 7 million mark and could soon surpass cars for the first time in history.

Curious, given the fact that 100 years ago people had a hard time figuring out what the point of a truck was.

In 1898, the Winton Motor Carriage Company produced the first American truck, a gas-powered delivery wagon. But 12 years later, there were only 11,000 trucks on the road, compared to 450,000 cars.

How come?

One reason was that business people couldn't see the advantage. A truck was often more expensive to operate than a horse-drawn wagon. Several dairies in New York City found that trucks were inferior for home milk delivery because the ordinary milk horse was a well-trained and...