Camille Jenatzy (1868 – 1913), the “red devil”, as he was called due to his flaming red hair and beard, was a remarkably talented Belgian race car driver. He went down in history thanks to this curious cigar, which he himself conceived and built, and which made him the first man to overcome the crazy speed of 100 kilometres per hour, on the 29th of April 1899. Then, ten years later, he broke his own record by winning a race in Ostenda at 200 km/h, on board a Mercedes.
However, it was his first enterprise that became truly memorable for human kind and our ability for individual movement; an extraordinary watershed between five thousand years of history in which the maximum speed was the one of an animal-towed carriage, and this last century in which the possibility to travel more and more quickly has radically changed human life.
