| Genre : | History |
| Runtime : | 02h00 |
| First air date : | October 06, 2003 |
| Diffusion : | Television (PBS) |
| Director : |
Ken Burns |
| Writer : |
Dayton Duncan |
| Keith David | Narrator |
| Tom Hanks | Horatio Nelson Jackson |
| Adam Arkin | |
| Tom Bodett | |
| Philip Bosco | |
| Kevin Conway | |
| John Cullum | |
| Amy Madigan | |
| Eli Wallach |
The documentary presents the historic journey of motorist Horatio Nelson Jackson. In the spring of 1903, on a whim and a fifty-dollar bet, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson set off from San Francisco in a 20-horsepower Winton touring car hoping to become the first person to cross the United States in the new-fangled "horseless carriage." At the time there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country, all of them within city limits. There were no gas stations and virtually no road maps as we know them today. Most people doubted that the automobile had much of a future. Jackson's trip would prove them wrong.
