Benjamin Franklin
First great American teacher of thrift and investing for profit
Charles E. Duryea
Maker of the first american gasoline automobile that ran
Henry Ford
Father of quantity production of the automobile

Story of the Automobile

Its History and Development From 1760 to 1917 With an Analysis of the Standing and Prospects of the Automobile Industry

By H. L. BARBER

Economist and Financial Writer Author of “Making Money Make Money,” etc., etc.

CHICAGO A. J. MUNSON & CO. 1917

Copyright, 1917, by H. L. BARBER

PREFACE.

So far as I know, there is no book in circulation that tells, in concise form, the story of the mechanical and commercial evolution of the automobile, mirrors its sudden leap into popular use, and shows how it has demonstrated, in a most amazing way, the power of money to make money, describes its benefits to the world, and forecasts the future possibilities of the automobile industry as an investment.

This book, the “Story of the Automobile,” shows the struggle of man for one hundred and fifty years to devise a means of propelling a vehicle without animal power.

It describes the various stages of the evolution of the idea of motive force other than animal power, in France, England, Germany and the United States, and its triumphant culmination in a successful horseless vehicle. And it makes clear how, when the automobile became of practical use, its successful commercialization became most profitable in the shortest period of time of that of any product of man’s ingenuity supplying an article to meet human wants.

But if this were all that could be recorded of the story of the automobile, this book would not have been written. The automobile’s success demonstrates all this, and something more—something that would not ordinarily occur to a person unless his attention was called to it.

The astonishing history of the automobile’s success affords one of the most convincing and the best modern instance of the opportunities that are being constantly presented for investing for profit.

It is a signal example kept in our hearing every day by the Niagara-like roar of the cars along our boulevards, of the fact that this is the age of golden opportunities for making money make money—of opportunities that disclose themselves, sometimes unexpectedly, and, when embraced, are apt to respond with a veritable avalanche of profits.

For was it not an avalanche of profits that overwhelmed the man who in thirteen years made $200,000,000 and was offered another $200,000,000 for only a small part of his business? And this great fortune made by Henry Ford did not exhaust the Ford automobile’s possibilities, for millions are still being taken out of the business, one investor of $2,000 having received over half a million dollars out of it lately.

When men who are not 40 years old today came out of high school they either did not know what an automobile was or, if they had seen one of the very earliest samples, they had no vision of what it would develop into—no conception of what the future had in store for the wabbly horseless vehicle, zig-zagging down the street, as a potential money-maker.

And in the early days of the automobile’s struggles for recognition as a promising investment, no banker or other moneyed man could be brought to believe that it held out any reasonable hopes of great gain. No one could foresee, not even the inventors of the automobile, that in less than two decades the business done through its comparative perfection would rank fourth in order of the industries of the United States. And still less was there anybody so foresighted in the possibilities that lie in money to make more money, as to vision the billions of dollars of profits to be paid out by this one idea of a horseless vehicle.

We can find few instances which so forcefully show, as the automobile industry shows, the chances for profitable investment in a short time which may come from sources supplying the needs or pleasures of the great mass of the people.

The chapters of the “Story of the Automobile” devoted to its commercialization make clear that its greatest success has been due to the production of automobiles at a price within reach of people of ordinary means. For this the one man most responsible is Henry Ford. He has demonstrated in a manner of many millions that the most money is to be made out of things used by the greatest number of people—things that become common needs.

The enduring truth of the profitableness of Philip D. Armour’s apothegm, “Make and sell things that are ‘et’ up,” is not discredited by the automobile industry, for the use of the automobile “eats” up steel, brass, wood, rubber, leather, gasoline and many other natural resources. The automobile wears out and has to be replaced, so it properly comes in the category of things “et” up.

This truth, that the greatest profits lie in products that can be given general distribution, with a consequent large sale, which is one I have maintained in my book, “Making Money Make Money,” in my magazine, “Investing for Profit,” and in all my teachings on the science of investing, finds a splendid exemplification in the automobile industry’s success as a phenomenally profitable form of investment, and the circumstances of this success are but cumulative evidence of the soundness of my doctrine.

And the success of the automobile industry in the measure and with the speed it has achieved verifies not only this claim I have made and maintained, but confirms my contention of the value of co-operation.

I have preached co-operation as urgently as I have advocated, as the best objects of investment, the value of things used popularly and in quantities.

The “Story of the Automobile” could not have had written into it the glamour of the golden guerdons of Golconda but for Ford’s idea of quantity production, reinforced by co-operative standardization of parts. Co-operation between the manufacturers produced standardization, and standardization enabled quantity production, and the low price which quantity consumption warranted has caused automobiles to be bought by millions, and the purchase of the automobile in millions, instead of thousands, has made the hundreds of millions of dividends which this wonderful mine of profits has yielded.

The “Story of the Automobile” is one of the best and most notable proofs of two of my convictions bedded in the concrete of experience, namely, that the most promising investments are those made in natural resources and enterprises which the largest number of people can patronize, and that co-operation is one of the most effective forces in nature, and, therefore, applicable to the affairs of men as a beneficent influence, and, if efficient, the handmaiden of success.

The story of the automobile has herein been treated in a way that not only presents a graphic relation of the automobile’s development as an invention, its commercialization, its benefits to man and the position it occupies as a notable example of earning power, but in a manner that develops the many morals taught by its success. The method of treatment of the subject matter is uncommon, and, for this reason, interesting, I trust, to those who read the book.

The chapter contributed by Mr. Edward G. Westlake, automobile editor of the Chicago Evening Post, is a resume of automobile conditions from the intimate viewpoint of a writer who has specialized in the automobile, and enjoys a deserved reputation as the dean of the automobile editors of the daily newspaper press. Every one interested in automobiles will derive information and entertainment through reading Mr. Westlake’s presentation of the amazing features of automobile industrial figures. In it he states interesting facts not stated elsewhere in the volume.

The book’s interest and value as a contribution to automobile literature, of which there is not much in book form, would be less than they are, but for the participation in its preparation by the Business Bourse International, Inc., New York, whose vice-president, Mr. J. George Frederick, is one of the highest authorities on business economics.

The chapter by the Business Bourse deals with the automobile industry from the standpoint of the financial and investment aspects of the automobile, accessory and tire manufacturers’ securities, and Mr. Frederick’s reputation in the financial world is a guarantee of the authoritative accuracy of the facts presented in this chapter.

Credit for salient facts in the history of the automobile, obtained and used in the “Story of the Automobile,” is given to a large volume of nearly 500 pages, “The Romance of the Automobile Industry,” by James Rood Doolittle, issued lately by The Klebold Press, New York city. This volume is the most exhaustive work in book form yet published on the automobile, and covers graphically every phase of its development and popularization. It is virtually a textbook and reference guide of facts of motor car history, and devotes particular attention to the personnel of the founders of the industry and those engaged in it, and the association features.

I can only hope that the work entailed in presenting this, the “Story of the Automobile,” has been done sufficiently well to make it interesting and instructive to those who read it.

H. L. Barber.

Wheaton, Ill., April 2, 1917.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

“What did Benjamin Franklin have to do with the automobile?” a great many readers of this book will ask.

Benjamin Franklin was many-sided, and he had a great deal to do with much that affects the birth of the American nation; and if it had not been for what he and other patriots, statesmen and diplomats did, the automobile business might have been in this country today exactly what it is in England today—and that is a very insignificant industry.

Among other things Franklin was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and it was the American Revolution that made the automobile industry of today possible; for, had there been no revolution, we would probably still be a dominion of Britain beyond the seas, and it is pretty certain that England would have had in force in the colonies the laws she kept on her statute books until 1896, practically prohibiting, by the imposition of excessive road tolls, the use of the public highways to horseless carriages.

For, strange as it may seem to us in this country, which Emerson epitomized as another name for opportunity, the English horse owners and people generally resented, as early as 1840, the progress represented by the automobile, and stifled all development of it from that time to a date when France, Germany and the United States had made it a real factor in transportation.

If, therefore, Franklin had not helped to free this land from the British yoke, the automobile industry might have been in the United States what it is in England today. France and Germany might now have been doing the automobile business of the world, with England and this country buying from them, as England and France are now buying from the United States, whose automobile supremacy at this date is unquestioned.

While the gasoline type of automobile today is the most popular, this is not to say that the electric type is not a success scientifically and commercially. Indeed, the future extent of the automobile’s use for commercial purposes is said by experts to depend largely on the electric driven type.

And who will deny that but for Franklin the electric motor would not have been, for it was he who wrested the thunderbolt from heaven, as well as the sceptre of dominion over our land from the tyrant. Franklin as the discoverer of electricity may well be accorded the credit for the electric automobile, which has played no small part in the development of the automobile industry, a fact which every student of automobile history will concede.

It is, however, on an even firmer foundation than either of the causes mentioned that Benjamin Franklin stands as contributing to the success of the automobile industry. The inventors could invent and the manufacturers could make the automobile, but who, pray, was to buy it, if it was to be in general use, if not the common people? And how, may we ask, were the people going to buy it without money?

As the great teacher of frugality and thrift, Franklin laid the cornerstone, 150 years ago, on which the superstructure of the American automobile industry has been erected. For, assuredly, had the seed planted by him failed to germinate and ripen in the American consciousness, we could as well have been today a nation of spendthrifts as a people self-denying, thrifty and frugal. He inculcated those principles of temperance and economy in the lives of our forefathers which have been handed down to us from one generation to another, to our advantage and as an aid to our saving habits, by which we are enabled to buy automobiles.

Many a motor car today owes its ownership to the teachings of Franklin. Many an automobile buyer would never have become one had he not heeded Franklin’s injunction, to “Remember, a patch on your coat and money in your pocket is better and more creditable than a writ on your back and no money to take it off,” and the investor would not have put money in stocks of automobile companies if he had not learned the truth of Franklin’s teaching that “Money makes money, and the money that money makes, makes more money.”

Franklin having done what he could to prepare American citizens to economize and save against the day of the automobile, and to invest their money in its manufacture, and the American citizen having followed his teachings and accumulated enough to buy at least a Ford, and perhaps a few shares of automobile company stocks, the man appeared who produced the first gasoline automobile in the United States. That man was Charles E. Duryea. His reputation rests on the fact that, though there were steam and electric automobiles in existence, and the gasoline motor had been developed, he was the first to put gasoline motor and buggy body into co-ordination and make the first run the second. To Duryea, the constructor of the “buggy-aut,” is accorded the credit, by automobile history, of being the father of the American gasoline car.

Following Duryea by only one year, came the genius who put into general circulation the universal car.

A reading of Henry Ford’s biography discloses that his first idea, that the big money was in production in quantity—that a million articles sold at a profit of 50 cents each was a better paying transaction than ten thousand sold at $3.00 each—was in connection with a watch. Watches and clocks were the first things that Ford subjected to the mechanical promptings of his boyish mind, and he had it all planned out to make a 50-cent watch before Ingersoll had conceived the commercial possibilities of a dollar one.

An accident which his father met with called him from Detroit to the Michigan farm, and this accident deprived the country of a 50-cent watch and gave it a $350 automobile instead. And most people will agree that it was a fair exchange and no robbery. Thomas A. Edison, strange as it may sound, was responsible for the practically universal use of the Ford automobile, for he it was, who, by the chance remark, “What you want to do to make money is to make quantity,” started Ford on his downward price career. We have it from Mr. Ford himself that he heard this statement by Edison, and that it so impressed him that he made it the rule and guide of his life; that he never renounced the idea. When, after building a motor that was a success and commanded the attention and capital of moneyed men in Detroit, Ford formed his first company to build his car, this great idea was obstinately adhered to by him, and was the cause of his falling out with his moneyed partners. They could not see the light which has given Ford his halo—the great white light of quantity production. This light burns with steady brilliancy because it is generated by the great principle of the greatest good to the largest number. Ford’s associates in his first company were not believers in this principle, evidently, because when they fell out with Ford about it, and Ford got out of the company to start the one he now controls, they went ahead making cars that sell today for from $2,300 to $3,900. But though they have made fair profits, they have not made the fabulous sums that Ford has, and one can only wonder how they feel about it, and if they realize the error of their views. They are probably wiser if not richer.

The success of Ford’s idea of quantity sales demonstrates a great fact in the affairs of life. It is that fields of human endeavor are not exhausted or worked out until the human race has ceased to exist. Take any line of enterprise you will, and it has as many facets as a prism. An idea only is needed, which, if the right one, illustrates the enterprise as lights thrown on the prism cause it to sparkle in many colored rays.

We think, for instance, that the acme has been reached in the making and marketing of bread, but along comes a man with an idea for making bread of bran, and he is immediately ushered into the inner sanctum of the temple of great profits. Or we imagine that the last word has been said in cereal foodstuffs, when lo, and behold, the man with the right idea proves that the field has room and to spare for a financial success in so simple a thing as rice dressed in a palatable and salable form. And so it is in everything, automobiles especially. The man who conceives the idea of a sport car supplies a want that others have neglected. There may be many automobile tractors on the market, but the human brain conceives one with some feature lacking in others, such, for instance, as making a Ford automobile interchangeable into a farm tractor, and it has an immediate and large success. And if anybody had an idea that the profits from producing petroleum might be limited by the use of gas and electric light, it was because the automobile’s enormous consumption of gasoline and the use of oil by ships could not be foreseen.

The field for investment is kept constantly fallow, and ready for the seed that is to fructify into great profits, by the human brain which is ever active—ever thinking. If its product is not an elemental, it is a supplementary idea, as the rubber tire, the demountable rim and the self-starter for automobiles. Until the world has arrived at perfection in all things, the ultimate will not have been reached. The opportunities of today and tomorrow are as great as they were yesterday. It is a question whether they are not greater, for if the quotation ascribed to Emerson is true, that the world will beat a path to the door, though it be in a forest, of him who makes a mouse trap better than his neighbor, the future possibilities of enterprise are favored by increased population and the element of the cumulative nature of the wants of man. As inventions and articles of use increase in number, new needs which demand supplementary products are created. Each new thing given to the world brings in its train other new things. The crank of a Ford auto creates a demand for a self-starter. The increase in population and wealth brings in its train a multiplication of human units whose use of created things is on a crescendo scale.

The financial successes in the automobile business, great as they are, have followed the inexorable law that the richest returns in all investments are the ground floor ones. The history of no big business demonstrates more clearly that the way to make money is to invest in new companies when they are offering the first authorized capitalization for investment subscription. Money-making opportunities for new investors are always greatest in enterprises whose development is ahead and in the future. If they have reached the stage where development is already producing great profits, the door is closed to the new investor, or else he must pay a premium to sit in such paying company.

In the ground floor days of the Ford money-making machine, Miss Couzens “risked” $100 on Ford. That $100 produced $100,000 in cold cash. But it did so only because the inception of the Ford enterprise provided the opportunity. Having made its half a billion, or more, the Ford enterprise is no longer enterable on any basis that would give such returns for each dollar invested. When money is needed enterprise is willing to pay liberally for its use. When enterprise has all the money it wants, money’s value to it is less. This is the most natural law. It is a law that operates in other things besides money. “He that hath, needs not; he that hath not, wants.”

The automobile industry illustrates graphically that when an enterprise develops to the point where it is well grounded and has reached a period of age and steady earning capacity, it is not new investors who may come in and gather the richest plums, but the old ones, those who helped to give it its start, who stood by it when the future was obscure, and the ultimate outcome not certain. There is probably no business that shows as many people in it now, who were in it at the start, as the automobile business. This applies to manufacturers, distributors and investors, and is, to a certain extent, due to the industry’s newness. The original Ford investors are practically all intact. It is the original investors who have reaped the reward of their courage in embarking in new enterprise, and who have shared in the division of the juicy melons the automobile companies have cut in the form of huge stock and other dividends. We need no better proof of the fact that ground floor investments promise the greatest returns on money invested than the financial history of the automobile.

While quantity production and the co-operative spirit which led to standardization were the keystones in the structure of the present day automobile success, the history of the successful development of the automobile demonstrates another fact, which is a vital one in the realm of investment.

This fact is that most great financial successes are built on our natural resources. This is peculiarly so of the automobile industry. The steel, wood, rubber, leather and glass of which the automobile is composed, are all products of the ground, the forest or the farm. It could not be said that the products of the earth directly make the profits of a stock life insurance company, but this can be said of the automobile industry, and its history discloses that the automobile business of the United States was four times rescued from failure, first, by petroleum, for steam and electric cars would not sell in quantities, and the gasoline from petroleum was needed to give the automobile its great vogue, once by tungsten, vanadium and chromium, again by the quantity production theory, and finally by co-operative standardization.

At one period of automobile development, the manufacturers were ready to give up in despair because cold-rolled and high carbon steels only were available, and these made the weight of the car and the price obstacles to its popular adoption. At the stage when failure to produce a car at popular price was imminent, there entered on the scene tungsten, chromium, vanadium and aluminum, all natural resources, and they, combining with standardization, made quantity production possible. Tungsten, alloyed with steel for valves, chrome steel for springs, vanadium in steel to impart purity, and aluminum for lightness, reduced the weight of the automobile 25 per cent, enabled motors to be made smaller, tires lighter, original cost less, and cut down upkeep cost to the users of cars. Quantity production thus was made possible, and natural resources again vindicated their claim to being premier possibilities of profit.

Of the future of the automobile and of products allied with it or sharing in its construction and prosperity, as continuing money-makers, all indications are that the profits already taken out of the motor car industry in the United States are but placer croppings, and that the years to come will record the workings of the real vein. This real vein, in the opinion of the man who looks ahead, is in the use of passenger cars, haulage trucks and motor tractors by the fifty million of the population of this union of states who are on or of the farm.

As yet, the farmers have not risen to the full possibilities of motor power in economic superiority over horse power for haulage, ground cultivation, and other uses to which the horse is now put. Elements which will hasten this awakening are the scarcity of man labor and the workings of the immutable law of economics. There is not enough food being produced by the world to supply the demand. If there were, prices would be lower. Prices will remain high as long as the supply falls below the demand. As long as they remain high, the stimulation to greater production will continue, and this urge can have but one result, which is to force the producer to adopt the most economical method of production.

It has been determined that motor power is cheaper than horse power. It is, therefore, only a question of time when the horse will go from the farm as he is disappearing from the cities. In this evolution will be found the money-making possibilities of investment in the motor tractor and the motor truck. Their adaptation to the smallest as well as the largest needs of the tiller of the land is now being assured.

With the horse, the farmers of the United States have been able to break up only 70 per cent of the cultivable land not in timber. There are over two hundred million acres of tillable land that have never felt the cold steel of a chilled plow. There are two hundred million more acres in timber that will, much of it, ultimately come under the plow. Besides crippling the labor supply in this country, the European war has taken a million horses out of our supply. The case in favor of the tractor coming ultimately into common use seems from all this to be completely made out—its adoption in large numbers being only a question of getting the price down to a basis which will insure quantity production. As this was done with passenger automobiles, it would be folly to say it will not be done with tractors and trucks.

Figures showing the total amount of money that has been taken in profits out of the automobile industry have never been compiled. It is a business that has developed so rapidly and feverishly that the water churned up by the commotion it has made has not yet settled. But there is a record of enough individual instances of gigantic profits to prove that the largest individual appetite for dividends should have been satisfied by the ratio of earnings already made in automobile manufacture.

But in every case the greatest profits were in the stock of those companies that complied with Edison’s rule of large money-making—“What you want to do to make money is to make quantity.” And they were also companies which made an automobile that could be “‘et’ up,” as Armour put it, by time and use, in less time than it takes time and use to eat up a higher priced machine.

Ford, Overland, Reo—you will recognize this trinity as the leaders in sales, and by the same token they have been the leaders in profits. When it is stated that Henry Ford made $200,000,000 in thirteen years, and was then offered a like amount for only a small part of his enterprise, we may well believe that he credits his own statement that “anything for only a few people is no good. It’s got to be good for everybody or it won’t survive.” Other Ford investors profited on the basis of $5,000,000 for each $10,000 invested. After the parent Ford company had established a record of a million dollars a week in profits in the United States alone, Ford stepped across the river into Canada and organized a company there which is earning fifty per cent a year on its capital of $10,000,000.

Profits of $52,000,000 in capital stock alone which has been built up almost entirely of dividends earned, is the record of the Willys-Overland Company. John North Willys founded the success of this great money-making business on his personal check of $500, cashed at great trouble during the panic of 1907, when the Overland company was ready to go into bankruptcy. Besides the dividends applied to increasing the capital, an immense amount in profits has been disbursed by this enterprise. The dividends in 1916 were $11,000,000, over 20 per cent of the capital. This year they will likely be nearly double that amount. The Reo Motor Car Company has paid over $50,000 on an investment of $1,000. These three are not by any means all the automobile companies which have contributed to make the automobile industry a signal example of the earning power of money, but they represent the leaders of the popular or quantity-production-through-low-price type. There are about 150 passenger automobile companies that are profitable in varying degrees, proportioned to their price, not to say anything of trucks and tractors, in the marketing of which fortunes are also being made.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY—AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRIAL FIGURES ARE AMAZING.
By Edward G. Westlake,
Automobile Editor, The Chicago Evening Post.

During the year 1916 the automobile industry in the United States entered the “billion dollar class,” and manufacturers who have membership in the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce which holds the industry, as it were, in the hollow of its great hand, made no more ado over this significant, almost amazing development than to meet in the annual banquet and reiterate their statements that the critic did not live who could predict, with certainty, the gain that might be made in 1917.

It was expected that the industry would climb into the billion dollar fold—men said that the fourth industry in the country had the financial stage set for starring the “Big Billion,” and they never permit themselves to see a possibility of a recession unless steel becomes too great to be kept within bounds—in short material price is the only problem the venturesome automobile maker will put down for earnest discussion.

Accurate figures spread on the records of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce indicate that retail sales of motor vehicles in 1916 totaled $1,068,028,273. This total includes a production of 1,525,578 cars and 92,130 trucks. The passenger cars were valued at $921,378,000 and the trucks were listed at $166,650,275. When the statisticians of the national organization compared figures and found the gain was 80 per cent, and paused long enough to find that the gain the year previous had been 36 per cent, they talked about the complete automobilization of the country and the inevitable addition of more than 2,000,000 to the total of cars in operation in the United States.

Price Drop In One Year.

Weight decreased, as the engineers had planned, and the average price of cars decreased in one year from $671 to $605. In the eight previous years the average price of automobiles had dropped from $2,125 to $814. Wall Street, which once had only the cold shoulder for the automobile producer, took a permanent seat at the table where daily the industry was dissected, analyzed, weighed, discussed and reviewed; and, as a result, it is as difficult to keep from the financial eyes of Wall Street the operations of the great automobile factories as it would be to hide the clearing house reports. The keenest financial and commercial experts of the United States have learned to keep the motor car industry constantly under surveillance—not that they mistrust the manufacturers, but that they have found the industrial situation is so firmly linked to the dollars and cents program of the country’s economy that nothing may successfully act to deprecate the importance of the auto industry. Time was when General Motors sold as low as 40—what Stock Exchange expert would expect to see this stock sell for less than 105?—and if conditions were to become so chaotic that General Motors, with its prosperous units, were to break to a point or two under par, what financial student would not search for something akin to a Black Friday?

Immutable laws work in the automobile industry. The maker daily takes a course in the University of Production, because an army of selling factors constantly is attending to the absorption facilities of the country’s markets and he rarely permits himself the task of figuring on the “probable saturation point.” It is a wonderfully important thing to the maker that the national Organization gets official reports, guides the policies of standardization, holds an indefinable influence over the engineers of the industry, and sits as the congress of the Republic of Motor Car Production. The auto industry of today is, perhaps, the most intricate thing in the country, and yet so responsive to the law of supply and demand that there is not an element of guesswork in it.

Although more than two hundred automobile concerns that had entered the arena of business, developing from the “blue print stage” to manufacturing concerns of considerable output, had failed in the last twelve years, the automobile industry had been a big paying one. Pioneers who remain and whose works annually pay dividends, accepted the failures as the necessary concomitant of a great business that only showed an output of 3,700 cars in 1899 and only 11,000 vehicles in 1903, the amount growing to 485,000 cars in the year 1913.

“Our house is a generally well ordered one,” the maker delighted in saying. “The industry is like a science. The engineer has brought standardization to almost finality, the matter of styles and body designs is an exact science, the tire companies have been keen rivals but beneath their terrific competition they have permitted the stream of co-operation in tire standardization to run smoothly, and the manufacturer has spent his money wisely in equipping his plant with plenty of large-quantity type of machinery and increased his plant to enable him to handle the large production. Increased production in economically managed plants spells the maximum of profit.”

Point of Saturation Far Off.

And with experts bold enough to say that the field of prospects facing the industry numbers 5,000,000 probable buyers, little thought is given to imminence of “saturation” and a consequent rehabilitation of the motor manufacturing and distributing plans. In the plainest language that it is possible for the automobile maker to use he says today: “The maker who has an adequate organization and builds a pleasure car or truck that is as good as specified and who permits no retrogression in his organization, will succeed.”

“Luxury and necessity.” The automobile maker is willing to have his product classed in this way. For the early years of the industry the car was a clear cut “luxury.” It weighed so much that its cost was prohibitive to the big family of “Necessity.” The car simply had to be “had” by men of large incomes. Automobiles were not sold by intensive salesmen in those days—the family bought them, even as a fine jewel was purchased at the great jewelry houses. Tremendous prices were paid, in comparison to the set prices of the automobile industry at this day. The “make” of the car that stood in front of the owner’s home often was accepted as a basis for rating the social position of the owner. Seat cushions, slip covers, fine upholstery and the name plate on the car told a big and varied story.

Immediately following the craze to buy the high priced cars, developed the “man Friday” of the industry—the chauffeur. And the chauffeur worked readily with the wealthy man, often advising the purchase of the foreign machine upon which Uncle Sam collected a very large duty. But the foreign made car had its stamp of distinction, perhaps much easier to utilize in the form of extravagant, even snobbish, style of life that the owner of the foreign car elected to affect, and the United States manufacturer of cars was not at all prepared to put out a car that would correct the desire of Americans to drive around in an imported article.

But the domestic car had a friend in this contingency. Economical living was that friend. Ruin often followed the extravagance of those who bought the high priced and, as many experts said, inferior imported cars. Homes were mortgaged and all the financial trails were traversed in the effort to maintain an impossible extravagant life. The banker began to detest the automobile. It seemed to him that it was undermining the life of the nation. Something had to be done to correct, also, the tone of the domestic automobile maker’s life. He developed a desire for watered stock. Over capitalization of his plant was suspected by the banking interests, and on every hand the motor car industry was decried. Waste and inflation stalked arm in arm through many plants. It even was said that the industry was only a “game”; that incompetent executives kept their eyes on the broker’s tape, while corps of associates in the factories were ready to play the “game” for all it would stand.

Few were blind to the prospects in the motor industry at that time, if the financial interests of the country were estranged; but no one was able to withstand the developments. The fire of criticism cleaned out the dross. Organization, the big thing needed to eliminate the “game” and give the industry the foundation upon which the large “billion dollar business” subsequently was built, began to come into being. Men of energy and brains got to work. These characters have remained. There are those veterans of the industry who say that the year 1907 marked the start of the business on the basis of a real industry. In that year 44,000 cars was the total output, and the value of the product was registered at $93,400,000. This was the highest total of value for the output of the industry so far reached in the United States.

The next year the industry built 85,000 cars, valued at $137,800,000, and quantity production, efficient buying of material, strict attention to cost production in the plants, effective steps toward standardization, engineering methods that abolished a great deal of weight, etc., began to be set standards among car makers. The official statements of the industry show how well the improvements fitted in. In 1909 the production of automobiles amounted to 126,500, valued at $164,200,000. The following year the output climbed above the 200,000 mark, and since then the production figures have mounted steadily. Automobiles were sold and competition became keener, but the output increased.

Value of Reliability Contests.

With the new era of development in the early nineties came into prominence farseeing manufacturers who paid heed to the thought that the best way to put a fit and efficient motor car into the hands of the public was to test the car, its material and its mechanical practices, in some officially conducted series of reliability contests. Besides, it was urged there was a “romance of business” attached to the motor car industry that would lead to a greatly increased amount of publicity in the press.

The national annual reliability competitions grew into wonderful favor. Makers strove hard to win the reliability titles. The “Glidden” tours became the tests that attracted not only the attention of every automobile man, but the general public. The whole country became the testing ground. For several years these national events did well the work they were expected to perform. Automobile building received, perhaps, its most practical aid. Makers learned. They took advantage both of the mechanical data and the publicity. A complex but valuable adjunct of the national tours became popular—every region in which the American Automobile Association was a factor, and this organization continues to be a powerful aid to the industry, had its reliability or its endurance classic.

It has been said that the manufacturers of automobiles lost interest in national reliability tours after the test of 1911. Perhaps many did. But the truth, as told by a wonderfully efficient engineer, is that there remained nothing more that a national tour could teach the car builder. He had measured the power of his steel to withstand shock, he had calculated the efficiency of his motor to stand its daily tasks on a strenuous schedule, he had learned of the troubles of his rivals and he had spent his money liberally, at the direction of his engineering department, to make a car that would do anything a less skillful driver than a national tour pilot could ask of the machine. The national tour became a luxury. It was revived in 1913 on the long and strenuous grind from Minneapolis to the Rocky Mountains, and an immense amount of valuable information was the result. But the national tour seems to be now chiefly remembered by the occasional discourse of an engineer who tells of the long struggles in the mud and the hardships of sand and dust storms.

With the added development of the plants, came another reason why the national tour was not necessary. Testing tracks were added to the maker’s plant assets. Testing on the roads followed the block tests of the motors, and it began to be accepted as an axiom in the industry that the engineer knew to a hair’s breadth what his engine could do before it went out of the secret room where the chief engineer worked.

Meanwhile prices constantly were beaten down. The field of opportunity to own a car widened. It was, even then, so much bigger, in comparison to that in the Old World, that even the clerk and small salaried man in general looked with a smile toward the day when he would own a car.

It is recalled that when the manufacturer began boldly to put the farmer in the class of available prospects—openly declared his idea of building a car that he could sell in the agricultural districts as readily as cars were sold in the city districts, one man who this year is making 750,000 automobiles, gave to the world his edict which resulted later in the United States court sustaining his contention that the “Selden patent” under which the organization of makers was maintaining its official life, “was not basic, in fact was not worth the paper it was printed on,” and he would refuse ever to recognize the right of the national organization to grant licenses to make the internal combustion engine and the chassis that went with it.

The public read with a strange feeling, the record of the great litigation against the “basic patent.” It seemed like a battle of Titans, and ordinary folk thought it might result in danger to the industry. But only the lawyers were strenuously engaged. They argued and submitted briefs for more than two years, the national organization of the makers who accepted the license of the “Selden patent,” honoring their national organization by paying to the treasury their pro rata on the amount of cars made.

An enormous fund grew. But the man who wanted to make from 200,000 to 750,000 cars a year was determined. He won in the Federal court and almost immediately the “licensed association” began to break up. The contributions of license fees ceased and soon the association was a thing of history. It was succeeded by the National Chamber of Commerce which has become the senate, house of congress—the parliament, if you please—of the automobile industry in the United States. Some, there were, who had a very poorly defined idea of the actual mission of the “licensed association,” believing that it was a “trust,” called its function destructive. They thought that the officers of the association would lay an embargo upon certain manufacturers and allot a more liberal figure on annual output to the larger and stronger firms in the organization.

Ford, a “Wizard” and “Genius.”

Unfortunately at that time, the licensed association had not the grasp on patent protective measures, engineering work, standardization, etc., that obtains in the present national organization, and the real mission of the licensed association never became wholly evident to the public. But the organization did its part in laying the foundations of the industry. It made the handwriting on the wall for popular price so large, that every man who subsequently invested a dollar in automobile making read, pondered and agreed. It placed popular price and standardization of mechanism in the same category—linked them so that the words of the Detroit automobile manufacturing wizard became axioms. The Detroit genius had proved that the depth and capacity of the automobile market was exactly in ratio to the possible price reduction. Amazing but true, the big men said, was the field that the lower priced car opened to the thoughtful maker of cars. Manufacturers began to talk of some day building and selling as high as a million automobiles in one year. Others calmly declared that when the motor car sales in cities began to “slow up,” there would be still more than 5,000,000 prospects in the agricultural districts. Others drew diagrams intended to show that there would be a market for any priced cars that were built in this country, the few persons with large incomes assimilating all the high priced cars, and the many with average incomes absorbing the quantity production at popular prices. All allowances were made for the increase in the cost of labor, materials such as steels and other metals, leather, etc., and some even went far enough to include the possibility of a foreign war on large proportions and its effect upon the industry.

No one gave concrete thought at that time to the possibility of a skillfully conducted partial payment organization of a national nature that would aid the small salaried man in buying his automobile on time payments. But that came about and still is working out its part in the great economic scheme of distribution of the factory output. The makers did not essay digging into the dealers’ and distributors’ plans for moving cars delivered to them for cash from the factories, and they were not bold enough to say they could finance any time payment and chattel mortgage plans. But many of them admitted the great value of the plan, if a distributer, through a proper alliance with his banker, could make sales in that manner and realize his money. The public learned well, early, that the maker of cars rarely consigned any automobiles to a dealer. The maker sold for cash—the draft had to be presented by the dealer or distributer before he could unload the freight car. It would be legitimate business, the public said, for any automobile dealer to finance himself so that he could sell cars on time. On time today is a mighty big phrase in the industry. It means many a car added to the annual output.

With the growth of incomes in the United States the statisticians found there were more than 6,000,000 people in this country with annual incomes of more than $1,200, and 3,500,000 with annual incomes of more than $1,800. All these things aided in installing confidence in the big men of the motor industry. Quantity production became the password for the manufacturer. A new development in distribution was wonderfully improved—dealers from all over the country were brought to the factory of the car maker, and after a convention of a few days, the dealers were invited to sign up for the coming year, nominating the number and type of models they would buy. The maker pored over his order blanks when the dealers left, made his plans for material accordingly, and there was only prosperity in each automobile factory, as a rule, for the remainder of the year. The orders were indicative of, safely speaking, sixty per cent of the signed total. Some makers took chances and built very close to the total agreed on by the dealers, and, except in few cases, the scheme worked out. Today the maker studies all conditions and accepts the orders of his dealers, setting the figure of output after numerous factory conferences.

Makers who could point to an annual production of, say 400 cars, took counsel among themselves, and some 50 increased their factory efficiency and financial responsibility that they can now point to an output of as many cars in one day as they made early in their manufacturing experience in one season.

The writer recalls one manufacturer who, about nine years ago, had an output of about 500 cars for one season. Only recently he paid close to a quarter of a million dollars, if indeed his extra expenses did not bring the total to $300,000, to conduct a twenty-one day convention at his factory covering a site of seventy-nine acres, at which dealers from the four quarters of the country were entertained. He had daily meetings in the big halls of his administration building, and his lieutenants carefully outlined to all the plans of the company for the year, and exploited the line of models.

“We have $30,000,000 in materials purchased, and expect to get all this material when we need it for manufacturing cars,” said the big man to his dealers. “But the war in Europe has caused many problems of price and quantify to arise, and heaven only knows what the material situation will be after July 1. I advise you to order all the cars you need—think well of your requirements—and stick by that number. Then you will not be like many are bound to be, who are indifferent to manufacturing conditions—you will have cars to meet the biggest demand the industry ever has known.”

That automobile president had the pleasure of meeting thousands of dealers, speaking to more than one thousand of them daily, and with his factory production manager he figured the probable needs of his country-wide organization of dealers and branch houses for the year. It is significant that the few changes he made on his early winter production table, which the writer was permitted to scan, were made only in the “increase columns.”

The Part Machining Plays.

It would lead to the exhaustion of the reader were many details to be given showing how the makers made quantity production and economy of factory operation an assured thing. The largest rooms of wholly automatic machinery were equipped, so that a large amount of crude steel wires, rods, etc., practically go into a factory at one end and come out at the other, fully machined and ready to go into the assembly of a machine. Cylinder boring, all with one operation, takes the place of operations that required many hours. Progressive types of assembly of the finished components of the cars make factories look like the “last words in manufacturing.” Machining crankcases and work of that nature that required hours, is done in minutes. Aluminum, that magic metal of the early days of the automobile industry, when it was comparatively cheap, now enters so largely into engine and other parts that at its greatly increased price it is more than a magic metal. It is no uncommon thing to find in an automobile factory that a machine costing more than one hundred times the maker’s cost of an automobile, has been installed to hasten production.

In all the field of manufacturing there has not been wrought such magic as in gear cutting. Forges pound out tons of steel forms, but the most important machinery of a plant soon has these forms turned into gears and other machined parts for the assembly.

The medium priced car of today stands as the best exemplification of the approval of the Society of Automobile Engineers. This is an organization that has done so much for the manufacturer that most of the makers of cars are members. They point to the self-starter and the electric lighted car as the triumph of the Society of Automobile Engineers. And certainly from the original starter and the early lighting effects, enormous strides have been made in the industry. Fully equipped cars predominate now, where only a few years ago even tops were not provided with the car as sold on the floor.

The self-starter is considered one of the greatest of the improvements added to a good automobile. With this feature the car has become so useful to women that the manufacturers have realized big returns. Better than that, say some critics, is the verdict that the self-starter returned—the chauffeur is no longer an indispensible feature in car driving. Women master the handling of a car and with the machines requiring less mechanical attention, one might say, every season, woman accepts the gasoline car as her own. The number of women drivers has grown so wonderfully that the makers of cars have registered the woman driver as a constant factor. There’s no cranking of the car necessary, and the wearing of fine raiment and white shoes is Milady’s prerogative, even if she drives her car to the party herself. She handles a multi-cylinder car quite as readily and with the confidence of a man. The tires, always a problem, have demountable rims, or they may be set in spare wire wheels, and troubles on the road from blowouts and punctures no longer deter the woman driver. It would be difficult to get the details on the number of women drivers added to the list each season, but one of the best known automobile makers says that it is so large that he would make his fortune safe if he only made cars henceforth for women pilots. The entrance of the woman in such an important manner in the automobile driving situation has made the gas car maker lose all fear of the greater development of the electric car. Woman has played an important part in the real estate world, distinctly due to her eagerness to drive cars, by starting a movement towards suburbs. The suburbs are “farther out and yet closer” as one maker put it.

Good Roads Industry’s Greatest Aid.

When the full effect of the work of good roads advocates is felt in this country, and regular appropriations are to be available in a regularly scheduled manner in most of the states, the biggest thing the automobile industry ever had to help it will have taken up its task in earnest. Less than ten per cent of the roads in this country are improved, say the good roads statisticians. One says that at least two-thirds of the reasons for present road developments are automobile reasons. When the proportion rises and the Lincoln Highway and scores of other long distance highways, intended to add to the cross country touring practice, are made into complete roads that make for genuine touring pleasure, the automobile industry will reap great benefits—more than the most enthusiastic ever dreamed would come from concrete, brick and other forms of specially prepared highways.

The war? Makers have varied opinions on the effect of the termination of the war in Europe. A majority have expressed the opinion that our exports of trucks and pleasure cars will take a big jump soon after peace is declared. But seeking for a peace after the years of warfare has become the least of the American auto maker’s trouble. Great war orders have been received and filled by the American makers of trucks. In 1914-15 the war orders rose to 14,000 trucks, as compared with only 784 in the season 1913-14. War orders still are being filled by some American truck makers, or were until the “ruthless submarine warfare” broke out anew, and after millions of dollars worth of the old models bought up in the United States and absorbed by the European powers had been swallowed in the mystery of the continent, United States truck makers began on later design models. In that way they are able to admit that the war has been a great blessing to the motor truck feature of the industry. “All a part of the great scheme of economics that makes for the approach of the complete automobilization of the country,” is the way one manufacturer puts it.

The automobile industry is set—it is fourth in importance in the United States. It will handle itself, so to speak. The makers know they must give value for every car and truck they build, and the people have become ready to continue in the industry every maker who plays the industry as it should be—not as a “game.”

CHAPTER II.
MECHANICAL EVOLUTION OF THE AUTOMOBILE.

The history of every advance toward greater perfection in the achievements of mankind, whether moral or physical, has been one of slow and laborious development.

We speak carelessly of the wonderful advance the automobile has made in a short time.

As a matter of fact, it has taken the automobile a hundred and fifty years to arrive mechanically at the point it has reached today.

We thought the development of the motor car was speedy, but we find that the measure of time required for its evolution, when put beside the span of human history, lengthens as the shadows grow longer in the dying day.

It is astonishing what stages this development has had to pass through, what problems have confronted it, and what apparently insuperable obstacles it has had to overcome.

In the light which our knowledge of the automobile now sheds on the present day mechanism of this invention, it is difficult for us to realize why these persistent struggles toward development of the mechanical ideas summoned to the aid of the inventors did not produce speedier results.

We can hardly conceive as we look upon the perfect limousine, skimming over the smooth asphalt with a motion that contains no more vibration than that in the glide of the expert ice skater, the crudeness, cumbersomeness and racking joltiness of its first forbear, which was the original expression of the mechanical idea involved in making wheels revolve by a motive power other than that exercised by man, the bullock or the horse.

If we want to relieve our minds of the strain of comprehending the difference between the automobile de luxe, as we of today know it, and the first automobile ever produced, and, by putting the two pictures side by side, span the period of the development of the art of automobile making, we must journey to Paris.

For, although internal combustion to drive a piston in a cylinder was produced with gun-powder in 1678 by Abbe D’Hautefeuille, and a carriage to be driven without the horse was a chaise propelled by human foot work, first conceived by John Vevers of England in 1769, there is no record that the two ideas were combined until it was done in France somewhere between 1760 and 1770.

The first automobile ever made was that produced by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, a Frenchman, and it is today on exhibition in the Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris.

There is no record of how Cugnot came to conceive the idea of his invention, but it is surmised that he had read about James Watt, in England, having discovered the principle of steam as motive power. This was about 1755.

The history of Watt’s experiments in applying steam to run engines does not, however, disclose that any engines he produced were ever seen by Cugnot, or that any adequate description of them was published at the time when Cugnot could have taken advantage of it.

So all we may actually know of Cugnot’s reasons for thinking he could make an “animalless” road vehicle is locked up in the rickety century-and-a-half-old Cugnot invention which we may see in the Paris Conservatory.

And what we would see would be:

An object which might make us laugh, did we not soberly reflect, in the light of our superior knowledge of today, that it was the first step in the long, laborious journey, extending over 157 years, that inventors had to travel to produce our luxurious limousine, our satisfying touring car and our terrifying speed demon of the oval racing course.

Cugnot’s body returned to dust 113 years ago, but his idea went marching on.

The visible expression of this idea which we can see in the Paris Conservatory is in the form of a tractor for a field gun, Cugnot having been a captain in the engineering corps of the French army.

The tractor has a single drive wheel actuated by two single acting brass cylinders, connected by an iron steam pipe with a round boiler of copper containing fire pot and chimneys.

Attached to this first motor-driven road vehicle is a wagon, on which it was Cugnot’a idea to have a field gun mounted.

On either side of the single drive wheel of this clumsy contrivance are located ratchet wheels. Pistons acting alternately on these ratchet wheels revolved the drive wheel in quarter revolutions.

For the copper boiler of this first motor car, additional water was needed after the machine had travelled a few feet, the exhaust of steam quickly leaving the boiler dry. The speed attained was very slow, by reason of the mechanical complications in transmitting power to the drive wheel. As for running smoothly, the machine wobbled, and bumped, and strained, and groaned, and finally ran into a wall. This was because it was overbalanced by its boiler and engine and had no steering gear.

Having run into a wall and been partially wrecked, that was the end of the forerunner of the automobile, except for its subsequent rescue from a junk heap and its installation in the Paris Conservatory; for, disheartened by what he regarded as his failure to make a successful steam-driven tractor to relieve men and other animals of the burden of transporting field guns, Cugnot turned his attention to devising a cavalry gun, at which he was so successful that when he died in 1804 he was enjoying a pension of 1,000 livres a year, given him by Napoleon.

Cugnot could not, of course, have visioned what his first crude automobile would develop into in the next century and a half. He probably never thought of a car holding seven passengers—much less of a speed for it of 60 miles an hour and more. In truth, since he abandoned his efforts, he probably concluded the obstacles in the way of even a practical fulfillment of his idea were insurmountable.

The one fact remains to keep company with the Cugnot motor tractor in the Conservatory of Paris, that Cugnot was the father of the idea out of which the automobile was evolved. He was the first to invent a motor-driven road vehicle.

English Make Automobiles Almost Practicable.

The English people have an enviable record for successful mechanical inventions, and they were early experimenters on lines similar to those of Cugnot. About the time that Cugnot ran his machine into a wall, William Murdock, a mechanic, was working for Watt, the English inventor of steam. Whether he knew of Cugnot’s automobile attempt or not, there is no evidence extant. The idea of an engine-run road contrivance may have come to him through inspiration, or in some other way, as it did to Cugnot.

Murdock was quite familiar with Watt’s engines. He helped to build them, and he was curious to know the different forms in which they could be used, especially as to a road vehicle. He talked to Watt, but was sternly discouraged by the latter. Just as Cugnot, no doubt, concluded that his automobile would never get anywhere, Watt opposed applying his engine to a road travelling machine, because he was firmly convinced that no vehicle that could be invented could successfully negotiate, at a speed to make it worth while, the execrable roads of that day.

In this we have a fine illustration of the peculiarities and uncertain nature of the human mind. It is an organism that astounds by its perception of possibilities in one direction, while numb of any sensation whatever in glimpsing the possibilities in another direction.

Watt could invent steam, but he could not imagine good roads. Had he possessed the vision, he might have seen that roads, which he so abhorred as to see nothing good in them, would be reformed if he but encouraged applying his engines to road travelling mechanism.

In William Murdock’s way of taking the doleful discouragement of Watt, we see an illustration of that mental attitude that man has universally adopted in mechanical advance, toward the lugubrious prophet of failure. He has matched hope and optimism against despair and pessimism.

Despite Watt and his mournful views of the impossibility of building an engine-run road carriage that would advance over English roads, Murdock went ahead and built a model of an engine-run road carriage; but when he had it finished, Watt’s discouraging views prevailed, and Murdock did not attempt to enlarge his model to a full sized form. He stopped with the model, which is at the present day in the British Museum.

Murdock’s invention was tested, and the tests showed that an advance in efficiency over the creation of Cugnot had been made. The model was driven by a single cylinder of three inch bore. It had a one and a half inch stroke. A crank converted the reciprocating motion of the steam engine into rotary motion, the service performed in the Cugnot invention by the quarter revolution ratchet drive. Murdock’s idea was patented by a man named Pickard, in 1780.

The first automobile known to have been constructed and put on the road was built by Richard Trevithick at Camborne, England, in 1801. It was in the form of a stage coach, accommodating six or seven persons. The engine, boiler and firebox were at the rear. The engine was one of the first high pressure engines. A single cylinder motor was employed, and spur gear and crank axle were used to transmit the motion of the piston rod to the drive wheels.

With this coach Trevithick carried six or seven men over hills for a mile the first day of the trial. The second day it made six miles. Even with these performances, the invention’s impracticability must have been decreed, because it was not continued in operation.

Trevithick himself felt, no doubt, that it must be improved upon, for, in 1803, he built another contrivance driven by a horizontal single cylinder with 5¹⁄₂-inch bore and a 30-inch stroke. But the driving wheels were ten feet in diameter. Fatal were these great clumsy wheels to popular approval of the invention, and no further advance was made. Trevithick had made one further step, and there the matter rested. He had developed the high pressure steam engine, and he had really made the first automobile, if such it could be called.

America’s Early Efforts in Automobile Making.

Just as the English, represented by Murdock and Trevithick, were laboring on the steam propulsion idea, and France, in the person of Cugnot, was experimenting with it, so America was groping to find the solution. Cugnot’s activities began about 1760 and ended with his death in 1804. Trevithick’s period was from 1780 to 1803. The American experiments started about 1784. The man whom records show to have been the pioneer in practical excursions into the realm of carriages driven by steam, was Oliver Evans, born in Delaware but living in Philadelphia.

He developed the high pressure, non-condensing engine, although his only knowledge of steam was derived from reading what little was then printed about it, and his own discoveries. It appears as if Evans, who is known to have had knowledge of Cugnot’s construction of a road carriage, or, more properly speaking, a gun carriage, connected in his mind his engine with a road travelling vehicle, because in 1787, four years before Trevithick built his steam coach at Camborne, England, Evans secured a patent from the State of Maryland, giving him the exclusive right to make and use, within its borders, carriages propelled by steam.

That he immediately built a steam carriage in pursuance of this authority is doubtful. The only authentic record of an attempt is of one that he constructed in Philadelphia seven years later and under peculiar circumstances. It is likely that his act in securing the Maryland patent was done on the spur of a determination to build an automobile, but it was not immediately carried out. He went on perfecting steam engines up to 1804, when he accepted an order from the city of Philadelphia to build a steam flat boat for dock work.

His mind appears to have then reverted back to the time seven years before when he contemplated applying an engine to a road vehicle and got the Maryland patent for that purpose, for, after building the steam flatboat and installing a 5-horse power engine on it, he announced his intention of mounting the flatboat on a wagon, on which he proposed to drive the boat about Philadelphia.

A horseless carriage, no doubt, had been a hobby with him for years, and he saw in the steam driven wagon, carrying a steam driven flatboat, an ocular demonstration of the practicability of the horseless carriage.

The four wheels of the wagon he built were connected by belts and gearing with the engine on the boat, and the vehicle was driven up Market Street by steam, bearing the flatboat and its engine in triumph. It circled the squares on which the City Hall and the statue of William Penn now stand, and proceeded to the Schuylkill river. Here flatboat and wagon were separated, and the former launched on the river. A paddle wheel was affixed to the stern and connected with the engine. The boat ran as well as the wagon had done. It steamed down to the Delaware river and all the way to Trenton. The wagon, divorced of engine and gearing, became only a wagon again, and whatever became of it, history does not say.

The skepticism, the derogatory observations, the pessimistic prophecies and the contemptuous disapproval of the many persons witnessing the Evans’ pilgrim’s progress up Market Street aroused the inventor’s ire.

Had he but been philosophical, he would have appreciated that such has been the fate and greeting of all inventions. But Evans was choleric. When a citizen said his wagon was only what might now be dubbed a “flivver”—that it would never run over five miles an hour, and other things that the minds of the unimaginative conceive of innovations, the inventor drew from his wallet $3,000 that the city of Philadelphia had just paid him for his steamboat, and said the carping critic could transfer the “roll” to his own pocket, if he could produce a horse that would run faster for five miles than a steam wagon that Evans would build. The size of the roll was too much for the pessimist, and he betook himself and his criticisms off.

So we see that as there was a first automobile, so was there a first automobile enthusiast on automobile speed. Why it is that motordom hasn’t erected a monument to Oliver Evans for his abiding faith in the future of the motor car as a speed demon, is up to motordom to explain.

Automobile Apathy Century Old.

Oliver Evans tried but was unable to get any one interested in developing his wagon run by an engine into an improved horseless carriage. The minds of that day regarded the practicability of his invention with as much skepticism as we would regard an invention to visit Mars, if exhibited in our day.

So Evans gave up any idea of improving his self-running wagon, became busy with an iron foundry which people could understand, and died rich.

There was a measure of justification for the lack of popular imagination and vision toward the automobile in both England and America when the first samples appeared. They were slow, noisy, erratic in performance, and positively dangerous—threatening explosions, collisions, and all sorts of dire things—and it was natural that people should predict their failure.

So progress in the development of the horseless carriage lagged. It was twenty years after Evans’ Philadelphia exhibition when it was next heard from. Then the scene of operations shifted again to England.

In 1824, W. H. James, who had patented a water tube boiler for locomotives, built a passenger coach, of which each drive wheel was revolved by two cylinders receiving steam by means of a pipe from a boiler.

A pressure of 200 pounds of steam to the inch was maintained. The equivalent of differential action was supplied by independent application of power to the two drive wheels. The coach accommodated twenty persons. The contrivance ran satisfactorily on trials, and James secured financial backing and built another coach weighing 6,000 pounds which ran 12 to 15 miles an hour.

But the higher the rate of speed, the worse off the early automobile builder was. Although James equipped his coach with laminated steel springs, the road shocks and vibration stopped it every few miles. Steam joints and connections were broken as fast as they could be put together. The great need was a method of shock absorption, and either no one knew that this was the key to the problem, or, if it was realized, no one knew the remedy. So James failed to make the auto-coach a success, and died in the poorhouse.

A year after James built his first motor-coach in England—in 1825—Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, Mass., revived the horseless carriage subject which, in America, had been last experimented with by Oliver Evans in 1804.

Blanchard built a road vehicle that was one of the best produced up to that time. It was easy of manipulation and climbed hills successfully. Blanchard took out a patent on it, but when he started to find people who would buy a completed carriage he could discover none. Nobody wanted it. And so Blanchard’s efforts ceased.

At the time James was building his two coaches, and after Blanchard had given up trying to interest Americans in his invention, a Frenchman named Pecqueur was experimenting on phases of the auto-carriage. He discovered the principle of the “differential,” the balance mechanism which enables one wheel to revolve faster than the other in turning corners. He invented a planet gearing in this connection, which was the origin of the idea of the differential, and applied it to a steam wagon which he built in 1828. The differential of today is based on the principle discovered by Pecqueur.

While Pecqueur was evolving this invention, Goldsworthy Gurney in England made a car which was a practical failure in about everything except that it demonstrated that sufficient friction between the drive wheels and the road-bed could be created to produce propulsion. A trip of almost 200 miles from London and return was made in 1828 by Gurney in the second vehicle he built, in which the engine was concealed in the rear. His car made 12 miles an hour for part of the trip.

From this time—1828 to 1840—the automobile really had a vogue in England. A number of them were made and run as passenger carriers. For four months a motor carriage made the nine mile trip from Gloucester to Cheltenham four times a day. The “Infant” built by Walter Hancock made trips between London and Stratford. The “Era,” also made by Hancock, ran from London to Greenwich. To such an extent did the auto-bus business develop, that speed of 30 miles an hour was claimed, and one conveyance in 1834 ran over 1,700 miles without repairs or readjustment. At least, that was the claim made, and as a claim it has a familiar sound. The twentieth century automobile manufacturers who claim a run of so many thousand miles without repairs to this and that, have here a precedent for it that is as old as the industry.

But there was one feature about these early English motor busses that was their undoing. They weighed three tons and over, and the wheel rims were metal. The diameter of the wheels was six feet. The rubber tire was unthought of. The effect on roads of running a 3-ton, metal rimmed vehicle, carrying eleven to twenty passengers, was disastrous, and parliament, incited by horse owners and others, legislated them out of existence by making the toll charges prohibitive. Where the toll was $1 for horse drawn vehicles it was made $10 for steam auto buses. The consequence was that their manufacture and operation ceased about 1840.

In 1878 Bollee built a steam omnibus which ran between Paris and Vienna, making 22 miles an hour. In this car was reached the highest efficiency the art had attained up to that time. Practically an identical car was built in 1880 by Bollee, which was entered by him 15 years later and won honors in the Paris-Bordeaux race.

In 1879 the automobile development germ returned to America.

In this brief sketch showing the struggle of auto-mechanism to advance, from the very first inspiration of Cugnot about 1770, we must be impressed by the determination with which the idea of auto-mechanical perfection persisted. This persistence was so determined in the face of all obstacles and opposition that it is almost eerie.

It was just as if some force of nature was struggling to break through the crust of man’s consciousness. Or shall we credit it to man, and say, rather, that it was man’s mind that was the impelling force in the persistent attempts to read a mechanical riddle?

Whatever the impelling force, whether man or nature, man heeded its behests and continued his efforts.

In 1879 an American did a thing which has had much to do with giving the United States its long delayed start in the automobile industry. This man was George B. Selden of Rochester, N. Y. He applied for the first patent for the gasoline motor, as the driving force of a road vehicle. This was before any automobile had been equipped with an internal combustion hydro-carbon motor. This motor had, however, been in use for some time in running stationary engines.

The bicycle had, at that time, been an acknowledged success, and in considerable use for seven or eight years, and had had a great deal of influence in improving roads. Better roads caused people to look more favorably on the possibilities of the motor vehicle.

Selden built a gasoline motor under the specifications contained in his application for a patent, and it performed satisfactorily in experiments. But he did not build an automobile containing the gasoline motor. He did not secure his patent until 1895, 16 years after he had made application for it.

In those sixteen years he was endeavoring to interest capital, while at the same time he was perfecting his motor. While the use of bicycles had improved roads and this improvement caused a more favorable popular view of the possibility that automobiles might be made successfully, a new motive power appeared on the horizon just at this time.

It was electricity. It was in 1890, eleven years after Selden had applied for a patent for a gasoline motor, and while he was still wrestling with the problem of getting capital to aid him, that reports that the storage battery had been more nearly perfected became rife.

Men to whom Selden went for financial aid feared that even if the gasoline motor was feasible, it might be overshadowed by the storage battery, and held off. Selden even went abroad to raise money, but had no more success there than here.

Although an inventor and a skilled mechanic, Selden lacked salesmanship ability. He was handicapped by impatience and irascibility, and his predictions of the success of his gasoline motor, its general adoption, and the extent to which automobiles would in the future be used, were regarded by people with whom he talked as so extravagant that they bluntly declared he was crazy, and avoided him.

He had proceeded so far on one occasion in interesting a Rochester business man, that he had him in his store and was on the point of getting him to put up $5,000, when he made a simple remark that completely “spilled the beans.”

He said: “Jim, you and I will live to see more carriages on Main Street run by motor than are now drawn by horses.”

The prospective investor looked at Selden for half a minute, and came to a conclusion expressed in these words:

“George, you are crazy, and I won’t have anything to do with your scheme,” and with this ultimatum the man stalked out of the store.

Twenty-five years later this man met Selden, and, extending his hand, said: “Well, George, you were right years ago when you said there would be more automobiles in Main Street than horses.”

But Selden ignored the man’s extended hand, and with passion thrilling in his tones said: “Yes, and I wasn’t so —— crazy as you and the other fools said I was,” and walked off. And he never spoke to the man afterward.

Selden’s patent could have been issued any time within the sixteen years that he let it lie dormant. He kept the application alive at the patent office by legitimate methods, and his reason for not bringing the matter to a head was that at no time in those sixteen years was he ready to manufacture under it, and he put off the actual issuance until such time as he was prepared to take full advantage of the privileges it conferred.

He was alive to the fact that the years of a patent are numbered, and he aimed to time the issue so that the patent would not expire before he could derive the benefits from it.

It was in 1895 that the patent was issued, and in 1900 Selden disposed of it to the Electric Vehicle Company of New Jersey.

In the meantime, the development of electric motor vehicles had begun, and in 1885, Benz, a German, built the first road vehicle to be run by the internal-combustion, hydro-carbon motor. It was a tricycle, and its motor was single-cylindered, four-cycled, after the type of an engine developed in 1876, in Germany, by Otto, and water cooled. It had electric ignition and a mechanical carburetor. Benz secured a patent in 1886 on his invention and it ran successfully, making ten miles an hour. Benz was limited to the use of certain streets in Mannheim, Germany, for running his machine, out of deference to the tendency to nerves of horses and their drivers or riders. This tricycle by Benz was the forerunner of the Benz automobile. This is one of the most successful and popular cars in Germany—and before the war, in all Europe. The first automobile imported into the United States was a Benz car brought to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Up to 1917 the Benz car was an entrant in most automobile speed contests.

While Benz was perfecting the gasoline motor in its attachment to the tricycle, Gottlieb Daimler, another German, was producing, in 1885, the motor-cycle. Daimler had devoted himself sedulously to the problem of reducing the weight and increasing the power of the gas engine, in order to adapt it to high efficiency road vehicles. He invented the hot tube ignition to take the place of ignition by flame. By regulation of the heat of the tube, the compressed charge of hydro-carbon vapor could be fired automatically at a specific point in the cycle. Through the increased speed thus produced the size and weight of the motor could be reduced.

The Daimler motor was a big step in advance, as was proved by the supremacy which the German and French automobile makers at once attained. The French secured rights to the Daimler motor and operated under them with such success that from 1889 to 1894, before the United States had really waked up to motor car making, they were beginning to put out gasoline automobiles successfully.

America Builds Steam and Electric Cars.

At this time, we, in this country, were following the steam and storage battery fetishes. The first steam car in the United States that might be called modern was built by S. H. Roper of Massachusetts, in 1889. In 1900, steam car building in America gave promise of disputing the gasoline car records then being made in France, but by 1905 the gasoline car manufacturers had taken the cue from the European gasoline successes, and this form of motor came to the front.

Contemporaneously with the activities in steam car building in the United States, was the pioneer electric car construction era.

The first electric automobile was built in 1891, and made its first exhibition appearance in the streets of Chicago in September, 1892. The builder of this, the first electric driven vehicle, was William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa. It was bought by J. B. McDonald, president of the American Battery Company, Chicago. Description of the street scenes attending the showing of this car bring home to us the extent to which an automobile was a novelty so short a time ago, comparatively, as 1892. “Ever since its arrival,” said the Western Electrician of September 17, 1892, “it has attracted the greatest attention. The sight of a well loaded carriage moving along the streets at a spanking pace, with no horses in front, and apparently with nothing on board to give it motion, was one that has been too much, even for the wide-awake Chicagoan. In passing through the business section, way had to be cleared by the police for the passage of the carriage.”

To think that this description fits a scene enacted during the period of the present generation! Eighty-eight years before in Philadelphia, Oliver Evans’ steam propelled wagon, bearing in triumph a flatboat surmounted by an engine, moved along Market Street with no horses in front, and was a sight that was too much for the Philadelphian.

The world “do move,” but very slowly, and this 88-year span of time is practically the measure of the period consumed by automobile development to the point where a motor carriage would really run, and keep on running.

The date of the building of the first American gasoline automobile that ran was 1892. The man who performed the feat was Charles E. Duryea. He had the assistance of his brother, Frank Duryea, but what was more, he had the benefit of knowledge of what had been accomplished in Europe in the gasoline motor field.

Panhard, Levassor, Peugeot, De Dion, Bouton, and Serpollet were Frenchmen who had done things with gasoline cars, all (except Serpollet and Levassor) principally through the manufacture of finished cars. Levassor conceived the idea of a central frame to carry the power plant, and thus solved the problem of road shock.

Serpollet had done more. He had invented the flash boiler, reviving an art the English had previously discovered, which made the use of dry or superheated steam possible. Higher pressure could be used, water economies effected and weight reduced.

When Duryea and others, about 1892, gave concentrated thought to gasoline propulsion, all the problems of automobile making had found solution, except two. They were a method of cushioning wheel rims, and some method by which the motor could be so placed that it would be immune from shocks and vibrations.

So, when Duryea, in 1892, built the first American gasoline car that would run successfully, he merely “assembled” the ideas that had then accumulated.

The first auto-race in the world was run from Paris to Rouen, about 80 miles. It was run in July, 1894. There were 46 cars entered, of which twelve only were steam cars. The Petit-Journal, a Parisian newspaper, was the organizer and patron of the race. The winners were all equipped with the Daimler gasoline motor.

A little over one year later—Thanksgiving Day, 1895—the first American automobile race was run from Chicago to Waukegan. The organizer and patron was a newspaper—the Chicago Times-Herald. Of two entrants, the “Buggyaut” of Charles E. Duryea was one.

Duryea built his first car in 1892.

Henry Ford built his in 1893.

Elwood Haynes built his in 1894.

There were but four gasoline cars in the United States in 1896—Duryea, Ford, Haynes, and Benz, the last being the German car which was imported.

With the accomplishments of the builders of steam, electric and gasoline motored vehicles at this time—1895—the practical success of horseless carriages had been definitely settled. Practically all fundamental problems had been solved. To make them finally an accepted addition to the world’s methods of transportation in general use, two things only were needed.

One was the development of perfecting devices, such as rubber tires, the production of which began about 1889; and the other was the general acceptance of automobiles by the people—a cordial, popular approval, manifested by their purchase and use. And while the development to greater perfection could be left to work itself out, the popular approval to the point of enthusiastic general adoption was another matter.

Inventors could develop, even if it took over a hundred years, a complete, perfect machine, finally. But human doubts, mental apathy, and man’s opposition can be overcome by only one means—enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is to man’s opposing mind what the oxyhydrogen flame is to steel, and it is one of the potent forces that will burn itself into mentality.

Around the period of 1893-1898, the attitude of the mass of the people in this country toward the automobile was one of good natured toleration, but indifference. A few of the “class” were interested and convinced that the automobile had arrived, but the “mass” believed it was a passing fad, and from its practical side, of particular interest chiefly to mechanics. If, in its opinion, the automobile had any future, it was as a luxury of the rich.

The people could not sense what they feel now—the value of the automobile in time, health and recreation, and in its possibilities as a factor in economics. They saw the disadvantages of owning an automobile, but were without appreciation of its benefits.

So one of the most interesting facts in the history of the development of the motor car is that the first American made gasoline automobile sold in the United States was disposed of March 24,1898. The sale of steamers and electrics had been going on for several years before, but not very extensively.

This fact of the date of the first sale of a gasoline motor car fixes clearly that the use of automobiles in the United States practically increased from one car to over three million, in less than twenty years.

The first American gasoline car thus sold was disposed of by Alexander Winton to Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pa.

So that, while Duryea completed his car in 1892, Ford his in 1893, and Haynes his in 1894, it was six, five and four years, respectively, later, that the first gasoline car was purchased in the United States.

From 1898, the time of the sale of the Winton car, dates substantially the development of the automobile industry in this country.

Beginning with this date, the first real enthusiasm was put into the sale of cars.

Enthusiasm had not existed before. Confidence, which is the mother of enthusiasm, had hesitated and halted. But now confidence believed the automobile was a reality—all doubts had been resolved—and confidence bade enthusiasm run, not creep, crawl or walk; and we see how enthusiasm obeyed. In the enthusiasm displayed in the manufacture and sale of automobiles today, we are disposed to think it does more than run, that it actually flies.

CHAPTER III.
COMMERCIALIZING THE MOTOR VEHICLE.

In the production of the automobile, America did comparatively little in the fundamentals of invention which are now found in the modern perfected car.

Selden invented the three-cylinder gasoline engine, by which the rapid revolution of the crankshaft of his day was converted into slower but higher powered motion of drive wheels.

White invented a generator for steam cars.

Haynes was responsible for a discovery that caused alloy and specially heat-treated steel to be introduced, and Knight produced a superior motor.

But these were discoveries, inventions or improvements that were supplemental and perfecting, not elemental.

It was chiefly the English, the French and the Germans, with the exception of Evans of Philadelphia, who first conceived the idea of the horseless carriage, and helped it to its final development by a series of successive inventions. The names of Cugnot, Trevithick, James, Pecqueur, Hancock, Gurney, Lenoir, Bollee, Benz, Daimler, Levassor and Serpollet should form the nomenclative setting of commemorative friezes on the walls of the grateful motor clubs of the future, as those of Liszt, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod, Handel, Massenet, Bach, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Chopin take honored place in the shrines of Music, the “heavenly maid.”

Even in the production of automobiles in any quantity for use—the commercializing of the idea they represent—the United States did not lead at first. This honor belongs to France, as does the original conception by Cugnot of the horseless vehicle.

The first steam cars manufactured in the United States, on any basis entitling their manufacture to the dignity of a business, were made after 1894, and the names of Riker, White and Stanley are the prominent ones in the steam automobile field. Electric carriages were sold as commercial commodities in comparatively small quantities, beginning with 1897, and the first American gasoline car sold in the United States was made and sold by Alexander Winton in 1898.

Beginning prior to 1892, the French were selling automobiles by the hundred, while manufacturers in America were selling them by the dozen. Panhard and Peugeot were selling gasoline cars, and DeDion-Bouton was putting the steam automobile on the world’s market.

But the race is not always to the swiftest. While France started bravely on its commercialization of the automobile, and had in its favor what were then good roads of an old and well settled country to run them over, and perhaps the thriftiest people of any nation to buy them, there were causes existing in the United States destined to make of it the greatest automobile producing country in the world, and its people the largest users of the new invention, while at the same time operating to cause the United States to sell more cars outside its confines, to Europe and elsewhere, than are sold by any other country.

And inasmuch as these underlying causes, while explaining the supremacy of this country to this date in the manufacture and sale of automobiles, also explain the reason for believing that the future of the automobile business will dwarf the proportions it has up to this time reached, they will bear analysis.

In the first place, European manufacturers of automobiles, as well as of other products generally, with the possible exception in a degree, of the Germans, are bound hand and foot, and therefore handicapped, by tradition and convention. They make the automobile, especially the French and English, so solidly, with such fidelity to tradition and with such conscientious care as to detail, elaboration and finish, that the price to the buyer, when it is put beside that of a similar American made product, will not meet competition.

The American has a knack of turning out an article which is mechanically correct, has the wearing qualities, but is simpler in detail, and hence can be sold at a lower cost. Simplicity is the American manufacturer’s keynote.

Back of this is business organization system, standardization of parts used in the automobile, and that high order of constructive and executive talent that gives the American business man the distinctive reputation he enjoys and enables him successfully to compete in price and quality with the rest of the world. There has been a rare combination of inventive and business abilities in American automobile manufacturers.

American mechanical genius has been given great credit, but wherein is it any greater than that of the German, French or English? In one particular—its simplicity. The Europeans are elaborate—the Americans plain and simple.

It is possible that no European manufacturer would have conceived an automobile embodying the essentials of small size, simplicity and speed represented by a Ford car. His tradition and training would have impelled him to elaboration in size and finish. In this, he is, of course, moulded by European needs and tastes which differ, in many respects, from those of the people of this country.

He does not possess the American’s practical vision in successful salesmanship. Ford made his car with an eye to quantity. He was not only an inventor, but a salesman. As he worked on his motor, he worked on the problems of sales—producing a car that would sell to the largest number. The larger the number sold, the smaller the price could be made.

“Large sales and small profits” has been a principle which has made many American fortunes. Note how this same idea of Ford has been followed by Willys in the Overland, Olds in the Reo, the makers of the Maxwell, and half a score of other manufacturers in varying degrees, causing the gamut of prices of the most popular cars to run from $360 to $1,200 each.

This is one reason why the American car could invade England and her dominions beyond the seas, why Ford has factories in the British Isles and Canada, and why our yearly exports of automobiles have increased in the last five years over $100,000,000 in value.

Other reasons that make us an exporting country of automobiles through their low prices are our natural resources of iron, steel, lumber, coal and alloys, enabling us, by their plentifulness and accessibility, to manufacture at cheap cost, thus offsetting the higher price we pay for labor in this country than the European manufacturers pay.

But the biggest factor in the lead which the United States has taken in the production of automobiles, both for export and consumption within her own borders, is the universal method of standardizing in manufacture, adopted by the automobile producers of the nation.

The manufacturers of this country shine in the field of cost production, in the economies of purchase of raw materials, in the method of manufacture, and in marketing their product.

Advertising’s Help in Making the Automobile.

The extent to which economic methods of purchase of raw materials—getting the price down—economic standardization of manufacture, inventing short cuts as it were—affects production cost, is shown in the fact that the automobile industry ranks almost at the top in the manufactures of the United States in the per cent of value added by manufacture to the cost of material.

The per cent of value added by manufacture to cost of material in automobile production is 71 per cent, against 66 per cent in cotton goods, 55 per cent in iron and steel products, 51 per cent in boots and shoes, 16 per cent in flour and grist mill products, and 12 per cent in slaughtering and meat packing.

Strange as it may sound when first stated, advertising is primarily the base of this result. We know that the first principle of lowered cost is buying in quantities; that if we buy for 100, the cost for each is lower than the cost for one; if for 1,000 it is lower than the cost for each of 100, and so on.

So, when Ford buys the materials for 533,921 cars, which was the number he sold in 1916, he gets the price of the cost of each of these more than a half million cars down to a less price than if he bought material for 1,708 cars, the number he made in 1904, or even 168,220, the number he made in 1913.

This is patent to any one who ever heard of wholesale and retail prices.

But how did Ford find a sale for 533,921 cars in 1916?

By advertising.

The first thing a manufacturer must do to lower the cost of production of the single unit is to make in quantities.

How to insure the disposal of that quantity has been the big problem that American automobile manufacturers have had to solve. The solution was at hand. It was advertising. The commercializing of automobiles with the speed and to the extent to which it was done between 1900 and 1917 could not have been successfully accomplished before this period, because the recognition of the value of advertising had not become widespread up to that time.

Advertising had gone through a process of development that was as slow as that of the automobile business. Both arts emerged from darkness into light at about the same time. Here is evidence that a very bright and smart set of men engaged in automobile production at the very outset.

They were mechanical, they were versed in business methods, and they were conscious of the value of advertising.

This combination of knowledge by the men engaged in it has made the automobile industry a record breaker in point of the time consumed in its development. It has made it stand out as unparalleled by any other industry in this country in the speed with which it progressed from final experimentation to an established recognized enterprise, involving mammoth investment of capital and huge profits.

That the automobile business has been the most extensively advertised business of any in which we are engaged, almost anyone will concede from knowledge gained from his own observation.

Advertising is like the rainbow—many hued. It may be one form, or it may be another. It may whisper, or it may shout. We must concede that the advertising the automobile promoters have done was more largely of the shouting than the whispering kind. That is not to their discredit—rather otherwise. The distinct injunction to advertise is contained in the Bible. It was: “To so let your good work shine that,” etc., and the people of scriptural days were admonished not to hide their light under a bushel.

Newspapers are said, somewhat carelessly, to have made the automobile business. It is not exactly fair to make this statement so sweepingly. They did for it a good deal more than they did for any other line of industry, and are still doing it.

They never devoted the space that they gave to the automobile to railroads, steamboats, the telephone, street railways, oil, lumber, mining, meat packing, or any other commercial industry. It was not, necessarily, that the automobile manufacturers, in all cases, asked for this liberal treatment by the newspapers.

It was that newspapers volunteered it. One started it, and others followed. The spell which the idea contained in the automobile weaves over men and women was cast equally over the editors and publishers in the United States. In recognition of the novelty of the automobile, they laid liberal offerings of free space on the altar of motordom. Its peculiar exhilaration penetrated the editorial sanctum, and in this distinctive exhilaration the automobile has had no parallel except in golf.

It has been quite generally accepted as an axiom that if you give, you receive. We see this statement proved in a hundred ways. A pleasant smile begets a smile. A good deed is matched in kind. No better reason for this exists, probably, than that it is ingrained in us to hate to be under obligations to anybody. So when we get a smile we promptly pay it back and are square, just as we invite to lunch a man who invited us to lunch. We are very particular about this.

The automobile manufacturers were not lacking in this trait, common to human nature. When publishers put their stamp of approval on the motor car and unreservedly threw open their columns to the progress made in its improvements and production, manufacturers appreciated and reciprocated.

The result has been that more money has been spent in advertising in the automobile business in the United States than has been spent in any other single line of enterprise. Possibly the nearest approach to it has been patent medicine, or the promotion of various enterprises.

And it has paid—every automobile maker, and every salesman will admit this as a matter of course. They will admit it because they know it to be so—a knowledge derived in their own experience.

The psychology of advertising shows that there are two principal things involved in making advertising profitably productive. One is that it informs, the other that it persuades. If the mind is informed of what an automobile is, what it does, and all the advantages and benefits it confers, it has a basis to work on, and from this working basis it will evolve conclusions.

The state of the mind in the conclusive stage is fallow field for persuasive effort.

In the advertising given in this country to the automobile which has placed millions of motor cars in the ownership of people in the United States, not counting those exported, the publishers of our journals have supplied the information, and the manufacturer the persuasion.

It is this double teamwork which, supplementing the business ability of our manufacturers, has put us in the front rank as automobile producers. But baldly to say that the newspapers made the automobile is not giving full credit to the other causes which contribute to our success in this line of enterprise. It has been a combination of causes working together which has made the automobile.

United States a Fertile Field.

There have been other forms of advertising used in automobile selling, besides space in publications, and they are forms the value of which cannot be discounted. “A satisfied customer is the best advertisement” is one of the oldest slogans of advertising. And it is true. The automobile manufacturers of the United States know it is true, and have been guided by it.

Road races, speed and endurance contests, employment of racing drivers with records, automobile shows, outdoor displays—all have been forms of advertising employed in the industry, and all have played their part and exerted their influence to one common end—that of putting the industry in the United States on the highest pinnacle it has attained anywhere in the world in seventeen years.

And while full credit must be given the vision and capabilities of the manufacturers, and the productive value of advertising in all forms, meed for the results can not be withheld from that element, which, in the final analysis, makes all things possible—the people, the base and groundwork on which all successful industrial structures are erected.

All the business ability of all the automobile makers, however great, and all the advertising, however convincing, that could be written, could not have made the automobile business of today if the people had not taken hold of the automobile and put their stamp of approval on it.

“Power of the Press”—what is it but the “Power of the People” expressed on paper? Power of the People—the force that revolves the world, revolved the wheels of millions of automobiles, and will go on turning the wheels of millions more.

The people of the United States supplied the fertile field in which the American automobile grew and blossomed.

The reason France, although it took the lead in the commercialization of the motor car, could not hold it in the race with this country is to be found in the difference between the peoples of the two countries.

France had good roads—has had them as has Europe for hundreds of years. The French had money—they are the greatest savers in the world.

But if you put your money in rentes or savings banks, you do not spend it for automobiles or anything else. The reason the French have money is the reason they do not buy automobiles.

No people in the world have learned, as have Americans, to spend money to make money. No people in the world take the chances Americans do, and no people win as the Americans do. In this is found one of many causes for the commercial success of the automobile in America.

The American is good to himself as is the man of no other nationality. He is further advanced in general knowledge, mostly gained by experience through intercommunication with his fellows. His bon camaraderie is effervescent, giving him opportunities to learn things denied to the self-restrained European. His school is the broad school of the world. He doesn’t have to travel to see the world; the world is in America and comes to him.

So, with the opportunities natural to a new country, with the standards of living and the mode of thought that they are in the United States, the 103,000,000 people of continental United States are a market for automobiles that dwarf the 464,000,000 people of Europe.

What such a market has been during the last decade and a half may be gathered from the fact that in the last sixteen years the population of the United States increased at a greater rate than ever in its history. The increase of the people of the United States in the sixteen years the automobile industry has been commercialized, was 25,887,904. In the previous twenty years the increase was 25,838,792.

People without money can not buy automobiles, so what has been the increase in wealth in the United States in this same period?

In the last twelve years it has been $99,221,764,315.

Staggering, you say? Rather, when you know that the increase in wealth in the United States in the last twelve years was nearly double the increase in the twenty years which preceded the last twelve years.

No epoch in the world’s history, therefore, was so favorable as the period of 1900-1917 for commercializing the automobile. It was timed just to the moment for quick and dramatic success. The period was coincident with the high water marks reached in the increase of population and in the nation’s money-making. Advertising had reached a stage of development it had not attained before.

Stars in Their Courses Fought for the Automobile.

We must credit enthusiasm for some of the influence in the success of the industry. We will have to admit that it is present in the factory and in the selling mart, in the shows and on the road. A satisfied customer, the best advertisement, finds expression in the loyal recommendation an owner gives his own make of car; enthusiasm of maker, of salesman, of owner—it runs along the line, and if advertising is the gasoline which makes the car go, enthusiasm is the oil which keeps the bearings of the industry lubricated.

The year 1898 saw the first real attempts of manufacturers in the United States, either of gasoline, electric or steam cars, to make them in any quantity.

The gasoline cars that were pioneers were the Duryea, the Ford and the Haynes, but until 1898 these were distinctly still in the field of experimentation. Ford personally built a car run by a gasoline motor of the two-cylinder, four-cycle type of his own construction, and this car ran 25 miles an hour. Ford was second only to Duryea who constructed the first gasoline car built in the United States.

Duryea persisted in producing a buggy type of car, and failed to get any sale for it. Ford and Haynes had no better luck in finding purchasers for their cars.

Alexander Winton entered the field after Duryea, Ford and Haynes, and in 1898 sold the first gasoline car that was bought for use in the United States.

Ford built his first car in 1893. It was not a perfect car, but better than any which had preceded it. He built his second car in 1895, with a 4 × 4 two-cylinder, four-cycle motor. In this year he organized the Detroit Automobile Company with a capital of $50,000. Ford owned one-sixth interest, and drew $100 a month salary as chief engineer.

In the six years Ford remained with the Detroit Automobile Company it put out only two or three cars. In 1901 Ford severed his connection with the company, which shortly became the Cadillac Automobile Company, and is now the Cadillac Motor Car Company. The Cadillac has had a successful career, and is one of the cars of which a particularly large number has been sold.

Leaving the Detroit Automobile Company, Ford started a machine shop of his own, and in 1902 produced a car with a 90-inch wheel base, and which is now regarded as standard gauge, using the two cylinders, 4 × 4, and a double opposed engine.