"Have you seen the new motor car?" thundered the Hongkong Telegraph. "Imagine an overgrown tricycle rushing along at 12 miles an hour and coughing like an elephant with the croup."
An American dentist, Dr. Joseph Whittlesey Noble, is credited with owning the first car in Hong Kong. This story appears in one or two standard history books – but that's about all they tell you about him.

In 1887, at the age of twenty-five, he started a dental practice in partnership with an Englishman. Things began to look bad after the partnership broke up. Fortunately, an American millionaire who was having trouble with his teeth hired Noble as his personal dentist to accompany him on his luxury yacht to Japan.

Noble turned up later in Peking (Beijing) where he looked after the teeth of the members of the Manchu Imperial family. This was both lucrative and highly prestigious, and he made enough money to open a chain of dental clinics in Shanghai, throughout China and beyond, including Singapore and London.

His reputation in the medical community in Hong Kong was considerable. Together with Sir Patrick Manson, known as "The Father of Tropical Medicine", Sir Kai Ho Kai, the first Hong Kong Chinese to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and Sir James Cantlie, Dr. Noble was one of the founders of the Hong Kong College of Medicine.

Cantlie, like Manson, was a tropical diseases specialist. He was also dean of the new college. One of his students was Sun Yat Sen, who later became the first President of the Republic of China. When Sun was kidnapped by Manchu agents in London, it was Cantlie who rescued him.

Sir Patrick Manson recognised that there was a need to provide the colony with pure fresh milk so he established the Dairy Farm Company. Soon after he left Hong Kong there was a catastrophe when all but three of the cows in the Dairy Farm herd died from rinderpest. This enabled Dr. Noble to buy enough shares very cheaply and gain control of the company. He was its chairman five times and the senior member of the board of governors until 1923, when he retired.

He became a brilliant entrepreneur and businessman. Noble served on the board of many of Hong Kong's leading companies including Hong Kong Electric Co., Hong Kong Tramways, China Light and Power Co., Ltd., Green Island Cement and many others.

A British journalist Alfred Cunningham and an eminent scholar Tse Tsan-tai were the principal founders of the South China Morning Post that first appeared in 1903. This fine modern English language newspaper was produced at a loss. In 1907 Cunningham went on holiday. This gave Noble, who was on the board of the newspaper, the opportunity to stage a coup. He accused Cunningham of gross mismanagement and spending too much money on paper and ink. Cunningham was fired and Tse resigned.

Four years later, Noble bought outright the Hongkong Telegraph whose former editor had disapproved of motor cars and amalgamated it with the South China Morning Post. This deal gave him control of the Post.

In 1913, he erected the Dairy Farm Building, which stands on the corner of Lower Albert Road and Wyndham Street. The south end of the building is now occupied by the Fringe Club and the north end by the Foreign Correspondent's Club famous for the amount of drink and fine food its members consume. They seem to be unaware that their club was built by the former owner of the South China Morning Post, Dr. Joseph Whittlesey Noble, who seems to have been a bit of a health freak. The dentist was known to have subsisted on a strict milk diet for months at a time.