Tom Swift Behind the Curve
Quite a few people sent me notes yesterday telling me that Tom Swift absolutely did not invent the RV. There were a fair number of one-off custom jobs wobbling down the roads since the very early Twenties. In fact, a commercial RV was being sold to the public as early as 1928, which was a whole year before Tom Swift and His House on Wheels hit the bookstores.
There was a custom job called the Flordellen, built for a wealthy New Yorker named Leonard Whittier in 1927. It had a full bathroom, a stove, a refrigerator, and Pullman-style beds, and could
have served as the model for Tom Swift's dream vehicle. For the hoi polloi there was the Road Yacht (left) mass produced for a while starting in 1928. It reminds me a little of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion car, for the swoopy contours if nothing else. Supposedly Henry Ford had a sort of prototypical RV in which he would take junkets into the wilderness with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. No photos or real details on that one, but boy, would that have made for some fine campfire conversation!
Tom Swift, for once, was behind the curve. On the other hand, I think modern readers misunderstand the older Tom Swift books a little. Like all Stratemeyer Syndicate titles, they were extruded from a sort of juvenile fiction sauage grinder, and the non-negotiable aspect of each book was not a glipse of the future but adventure. The old Tom Swift books had more skullduggery and gunplay than anything in the Tom Swift Jr series, and the gimmick was sometimes a piece of slightly enhanced present-day technology (like a hotrodded motorcycle or an electric locomotive) set in the thick of sinister plots and endless running around. One I remember only vaguely (Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers) came off a lot more like Indiana Jones than anything else.
I haven't come upon a genuine history of the RV, but now that I know how far back things actually go, it's ascended a few notches on my to-be-located list. If I find it, you'll read about it here.