For decades, Airstream trailers...
For decades, Airstream trailers have given pleasure to thousands of adventurers.
These early travelers were called Tin Can Tourists because refrigeration was primitive at the time, so people ate mostly from tin cans. The parks offered a place to dump their trash and to shake off the dust of the road, but they served another important purpose too: as places to exchange ideas, designs, directions, and improvements.
Thus, in the late '20s, the Wiedman Company of East Tonawanda, New York, founded around 1919, was making modular camp bodies that could be factory-mounted on any truck chassis of the customer's choice, or even shipped by rail to be installed by the buyer. They were pretty roomy, with lots of windows, which saved weight, and could be customized inside by the buyer to his individual needs. He could order appliances for installation by Wiedman or install his own. The Wiedman Company also supplied its units to oil companies for use as mobile temporary housing.
The 1929 Gilkie tent trai...
The 1929 Gilkie tent trailer.
Although in 1929, you could still save some money by getting a simple single-axle Covered Wagon trailer with leaf-spring suspension and canvas roof stretched over hooped conduit in the manner of the old Conestoga wagon, Firestone's more dependable tires and the artistry of custom interiors had combined to produce very high-end mobile accommodations.
Through the '30s and '40s, rapid improvements came in building increased utility into small trailer beds as well as larger mobile homes. Trailers began to sprout expandable canvas tents with isinglass windows-not the rapid pop-up and pop-out collapsible tent extensions that we have today, but with some patience (and preferably if it wasn't raining) a small-bed trailer could support the erection of a fairly sophisticated addition of covered space. At the same time, larger trailers that could more properly be called mobile homes underwent large strides in improvements. In the 1950s, 18- to 20-foot travel trailers with bright aluminum weatherproof flat siding, birch wood interiors, and home appliances began taking advantage of the nation's new interstate highway system.
Life was much simpler in the...
Life was much simpler in the early days of RVing, where a tent served as your home away from home.
Wally Byam, the developer of the Airstream trailer idea, became enormously influential in helping to mature the business as he traveled the world in the '40s and '50s acquiring the best modular and lightweight components and appliances for his product, importing them when necessary, and many of these elements became standard across the industry or inspired improved variations by domestic suppliers. As a result, improvements became more affordable.
When Winnebago, which had been a successful trailer company with more business than it could handle, was subcontracted to produce motorhomes of a specific design introduced its first self-propelled true motorhome in the 1960s, the business changed again, and today their iconic vehicles are seen all over the country.
Today's RVs range in size from 900-pound tear-drops to luxuriously furnished overland busses, equipped with leather furniture, full kitchens and bathrooms, and all the amenities of home. Many of their appointments are borrowed from the world of corporate jets and ocean yachts, and the cross-pollination of design technologies has benefited improvements in all three.
There was a time when RV enthusiasts were regarded with a certain mild suspicion as gypsies, unconventional rootless people who weren't content to live "normally" in established neighborhoods. Of course, as any of us would happily admit, that was at least partially true and still is. Besides the large population of RV buffs, who also own permanent homes and live "normally" much of the year, over the past 100 years, RVs have given people all over the developed world a comfortable and independent way to travel free of security lines, baggage clerks, and petty restrictions.
RV'ers might be happily ensconced in their homes one day, but when the ancient restless urge to migrate comes over them late in the night, by morning there might be nothing left in the driveway but an oil stain. They can leave conventional neighborhoods on a whim, and in a matter of hours, or days, be taking the curves in the ancient hills of the Appalachian range or cruising through the painted forests of New England, or even out on an endless sea of sagebrush, where the mountains lean against the sky and the stars move in close at night, often falling out of the black silence, far from the scruples of culture.