Over the past few years, van life has become more alluring than ever, and thanks to vinyl wrapping services, even older, tired-looking motorhomes can have a new lease on life.
Much of this can be credited to a quartet of industrialists who pioneered a lot of the early principles that make living in a motorhome or converted van so tempting and desirable today, even if they were not strictly the first to make and use luxury caravans.
Known as The Four Vagabonds, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs would regularly take cars and caravans to various natural retreats, cabins in the mountains and other beautiful vistas.
Given that they were the inventor of the first successful motor car, one of the most successful tyre manufacturers in the world, a man credited for inventing the light bulb and electrifying the western world, and a conservationist nature writer, respectively, they were more than slightly influential to the development of the motorhome.
The concept began in 1914, when the former three travelled across California following the Panama-Pacific Exposition, but began in earnest the following year as the group travelled through the Adirondacks of New England in 1916, before a trip through the blue-ridged mountains of West Virginia.
The camping trips were undertaken for the same reasons many people buy caravans and motorhomes; it is a way to escape everyday life for a few weeks or months without losing all of the comforts of home.
There are some huge differences between the trips the Vagabonds took and modern van life.
The biggest of these is the scale; most people have a single van or a car and caravan, whilst the Vagabonds had upwards of 50 vehicles travelling in a convoy with all of the luxuries and staff from home.
Ultimately, following Mr Burroughs’ sudden death in 1921 and the increasing publicity of the Vagabonds’ trips, the caravan journeys were discontinued.
However, the desire to adapt as much of our home life as possible into a campervan-sized shape was initially inspired by four of the most influential early pioneers of van life and how they reshaped the car to fit.