Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, a film by Ken Burns, follows Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson on his adventurous and often hilarious drive from San Francisco to New York City in 1903. On the evening of May 19, 1903, in the exclusive University Club in San Francisco, a debate raged over the reliability of the new horseless carriages that had been showing up on the streets of major American cities. Horatio Nelson Jackson, a 31-year-old retired doctor from Vermont who was passing through San Francisco, accepted a wager. Under the terms of the bet, Jackson would win 50 dollars if he made it all the way to New York City, something no one else had every done before, in less than three months.

"Horatio's Drive" captures the nation at a moment of change. In 1900 there were 8,000 cars in America compared to 14 million horses. Most Americans rarely traveled more than 12 miles from home. And there were only 150 miles of paved roads, most of them in large cities. The year 1903 was remarkable for the movement of people and information. A cable was laid across the Pacific Ocean—the last link in a web of wires for a round-the-world telegraph—and Marconi's new wireless also made it possible for President Theodore Roosevelt to send a New Year's greeting across the Atlantic to England's King Edward VII. The same year, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane over the beaches at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

At 4:30 in the morning on Sunday, July 26, Jackson and his traveling partners crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan. Jackson had made it from San Francisco in 63 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes—well within his wager of 90 days. A few weeks later, on August 7, he arrived home. Just as he drove the Vermont into the stable, the drive chain snapped in two. He never collected his 50 dollars. Keith David narrates. Tom Hanks is the voice of Horatio Nelson Jackson.