The Historical Progression of RVs

Travel trailers and motorhomes have a long history that has influenced how they are designed and used today.

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Words by Andrew Woodmansey

RVs have played an important role in our leisure history, emerging as a curious form of personal transportation despite suspicion and mild derision in the late 19th century. The first horse-drawn RVs were not invented. Instead, they evolved over many years as hybrids of other vehicles including gypsy vardos, living vans and even bathing machines.

Contrary to popular belief, gypsies were not the first to use horse-drawn caravans. It was roving circus and menagerie owners who started using mobile accommodation in Europe during the early 1800s.

In the 19th century, ‘recreation’ was a new social concept for those who could afford not to work. So, the first RVs of the late 1800s were owned and enjoyed by the wealthy. The ‘gentlemen gypsies’ of Britain, led by Scotsman Dr. Gordon Stables in The Wanderer in 1885, used the first purpose-built RVs. They commissioned heavy, horse-drawn wagons built by railway car manufacturers that were slow and uncomfortable.

The first motorized RVs were steam-drawn coaches of France that were built for royalty and well-to-do tourists in 1896. They weighed up to 10 tons and could only travel on roads next to rivers or canals so their steam boilers could be refilled. Passengers would travel in a separate coach behind a steam ‘tractor’ to reduce the risk of injury from exploding boilers.

When automobiles arrived at the start of the 20th century they were not powerful enough to tow anything, let alone make it over poor roads. So, goods trucks that were converted into ‘camp cars’ became the first motorhomes, mostly used by hunters.

They were noisy, smelly, unreliable and inflexible. Despite many attempts to combine engine and accommodations into a single vehicle, the generally unpopular motorhome did not sell in any numbers until the arrival of the Volkswagen Kombi in the 1950s.

In North America, settlers had to travel long distances along poor trails. Reliability took precedence over comfort. The significance of covered wagons as ancestors of the North American RV is overstated since they were designed to carry goods, far from comfortable and consequently, rarely used as mobile accommodations.

However, it was the ambulance wagon that influenced a number of design features of the first horse-drawn RVs. The self-built ‘houses on wheels’ seen in towns across North America in the 1890s often adopted flat floors, soft springs and the box shape of the ambulance wagon to convey their peacetime occupants. Converted ambulance wagons were used by so-called ‘health-seekers’ to escape the consumption (tuberculosis) outbreaks on North America’s east coast in the mid to late 19th century. Is history repeating itself today?

The McMaster Camping Car of 1889, probably North America’s first purpose-built, horse-drawn RV, used design elements of both the ambulance wagon and the Herdic carriage.

At the start of the motorized era, North American newspaper reporters in the early 1900s were dazzled by large RVs including the long-wheelbase Pierce-Arrow Touring Landau of 1910 and Roland P. Conklin’s double-decker ‘Gypsy Van’ of 1915, but these were cumbersome anomalies.

The first significant RV movement in North America was led by the tent trailer from about 1911. Towed by a Ford Model T, the tent trailer was both affordable and flexible and could reach lakes, forests and the newly established national parks with little difficulty. They were manufactured in the thousands and used by working families to enjoy a few days of camping each year. Now long forgotten, ‘small and light’ was the RV mantra of the day.

Motorhomes still tried to compete. The ‘camping autos’ of the 1920s produced by de Bretteville, Lamsteed, Zagelmeyer and others used ingenious folding or sliding mechanisms but were complex and expensive compared to tent trailers. ‘Housecars’ had some success but were still a niche product. Meanwhile, US roads were improving and automobiles were becoming more powerful, paving the way for the travel trailer to become the successor to the tent trailer in the 1930s.

The first post-World War I travel trailers in the UK were made from surplus aircraft parts. This trend continued in North America from about 1930 and the first manufacturers dismantled just about anything that once moved to make rudimentary travel trailers.

Self-built trailers competed strongly against established manufacturers, forcing costs down. Salesmen knew (and still know today) that it was fancy-looking appliances that sold RVs and used low-cost materials like timber, Masonite and canvas to frame their trailers, which they then filled with more visible home comforts including stoves, fridges, bathrooms and toilets. As travel trailers became more obese, double axles were introduced and the slide-out soon followed.

In contrast, travel trailers using the lightweight designs and materials of the aircraft industry were pioneered by Glenn Curtiss, Hawley Bowlus and Wally Byam but were initially expensive to build. From 1930, the ‘streamlining’ fad took hold of the industry and ‘canned ham’ trailers became popular for a time.

However, manufacturers preferred the ‘toaster’ shape of trailers since they were quicker to build, could contain more features and were easily used for business by travelling salesmen. Recreational fifth wheel trailers, first developed in Belgium in 1913, were pursued by Curtiss among others in the form of his sophisticated Aerocar, which unfortunately arrived at the peak of the Great Depression and were too expensive for most consumers.

Today, there are more RV models and styles than ever with good roads and powerful engines in North America facilitating some of the world’s largest RVs. To quote naturalist John Burroughs when describing the expeditions of the Four Vagabonds in 1921, “It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort”.

One hundred years later, with the advent of the weight-sensitive, fully-electric RV just around the corner, RVers may need to consider taking fewer or lighter comforts on the road. History would suggest that the teardrop trailer has a bright future.

Andrew Woodmansey is the author of a new RV history, Recreational Vehicles: A World History 1872-1939 published in hardback by Pen & Sword ($52.95) and available at all good bookshops. Andrew also has a blog at rvhistory.com.