Chapter III: Commercializing the Motor Vehicle (1)

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.

After much difficulty he got money from half a dozen persons and organized the Ford Motor Company with a capital of $100,000. At first he owned only 25-1/2 per cent of the stock, but later he borrowed $175,000 and bought 25-1/2 per cent more, and still later by paying 700 per cent of its face value, secured 7-1/2 per cent more, which makes his holding in the company at this time 58-1/2 per cent of the stock.

The first Ford car to be a commercial success was put out in 1903, and the record of production of Ford cars to date is as follows:

Year. No. Cars.
1904 1,708
1905 1,695
1906 1,599
1907 8,423
1908 6,398
1909 10,607
1910 18,664
1911 34,528
1912 78,440
1913 168,220
1914 248,307
1915 308,213
1916 533,921

In 1916 the Ford production was over one-sixth of the 3,000,000 cars in use in the United States. In that year he produced nearly one-third of all the passenger cars made in that year.

Ford’s car was a small, low priced car from the start. Haynes’ was a larger and higher priced car. Winton’s was likewise a large and more expensive car.

A RAIN OF AUTOMOBILE MAKERS.

The year of the Spanish-American war—1898—saw the beginning of a veritable rain of automobile manufacturers in the United States. In that year the Stanley, Stearns, Thomas, Matheson, Winton, and the Waverley Company entered the field.

In 1899, there appeared the Locomobile Company, Olds, Baker-Electric and Pierce-Racine (later absorbed by J. I. Case and now the Case car).

In 1900, Packard, Peerless, Glide, National Electric, Lambert, Elmore, Babcock, Jackson, Knox and Lane were entrants in the lists.

In 1901, Acme, Gaeth, Pierce-Arrow, White, Royal Tourist, Stevens-Duryea, Waltham-Orient, Pope-Toledo, Welch, Pullman and Rambler.

In 1902, Cadillac, Franklin, Pope, Studebaker, Sultan, Okey, Walter and Schacht.

In 1903, Ford, Auburn, Overland, Moline, Premier, Corbin, Bergdall, Holsman, Columbus and Chadwick.

In 1904, Buick, Cleveland, American Napier, Stoddard-Dayton, Marmon, Mitchell, Jewel, McIntyre, Pittsburgh Electric, Ranch & Lang and Simplex.

In 1905, Alco, American, Dorris, Johnson, Jonz, Kisselcar, Maxwell, Monarch, Reo, Studebaker, Garford and American Mors.

In 1906, Anderson, A. B. C., Cartercar, Brunn, Thomas-Detroit, Kearns, Sterling, Mora, Moon, Pennsylvania, Palmer & Singer and Staver.

In 1907, Albany, Atlas, Brush, Bertolet, Byrider, Carter, Chalmers, Coppock, De Luxe, Oakland, Regal, Selden, Speedwell, Interstate, Lozier and Great Western.

In 1908, Sharp-Arrow, Pittsburgh 6, Crown Midland, Rider-Lewis, Paige-Detroit, Velie, Cole, E. M. F. and Hupmobile.

In 1909, Hudson, Advance, Cunningham, Coates-Goshen, Ohio and Abbott.

Since 1909 to date new cars put on the market include:

Stutz (1911), Chevrolet (1912), Grand, Chandler, Saxon and Scripps-Booth (1913), Dodge and Dort (1914), Owen Magnetic (1915), Drexel and Elgin (1916). Other automobiles in the field are the Maibohm, Allen, Ben-Hur, Crow-Elkhart, Harroun, Lexington and Madison.

A table giving a complete list of automobiles is printed elsewhere in this volume.

The earlier manufacturers of motor cars included many who had been engaged in manufacturing bicycles, and following them was a group that had successfully manufactured wagons and carriages. Still another set of manufacturers were machinery men.

In the list of names of automobile companies which have been organized during the period of the industry’s development, there are some which have gone out of business, but not many.

The industry, generally speaking, has had comparatively few complete failures. Mortality has been lower with it than with many other business enterprises.

This is chiefly due to the intelligence which the manufacturers brought to the business, plus the demand which sprang up for the automobile as soon as the people, instructed with great and liberal space by the press, realized it was the vehicle that could give what they wanted. Never was the value of a concerted campaign of education better demonstrated.

That unusually intelligent study of the subject of suiting the popular desire was given by manufacturers is evidenced in many ways, but in none that is so typical as was the standardization of motor cars.

At one stage of the industry its very life was threatened by a lack of uniformity in the mechanical construction of the various types of the automobile.

The big idea that has made Henry Ford’s millions was a combination one. It was the building of a motor and car combined which could be constructed at a cost that would command large quantity production. This conception by Ford, alone, simple though it was, proclaims him the genius he undoubtedly is.

The purchase of cars between 1898, when sales first began to be made, and 1903, when Ford put out his car, was practically confined to people of wealth and leisure. It required both to own and operate an automobile. Men bought them at a cost of $3,000 to $12,000 each. Purchasers were exhilarated by auto-intoxication—with little thought of the practical uses the invention could be put to. Snobbishness, social impression and display of superior wealth were back of many purchases.

But for the manufacturers’ quick recognition that the future of the automobile did not rest with the rich, that to be a great money-making industry, they must make automobiles for the mass and not for the class, the business would probably today be no further advanced than it was fifteen years ago. A parallel of what might have been may be found in yachting or motor boating—two methods of deriving pleasure and speed which are confined to the rich, largely because prohibitive in cost to the mass.

Popularization of the automobile demanded standardization. Automobilization of the nation would never be accomplished if the hundreds of manufacturers that sprang up produced hundreds of different cars with different sizes of parts, and different standards, requiring owners of cars with which something had gone wrong, to wait indefinitely for a particular device used by a certain company.

Early owners of cars learned by bitter experience what it meant to have a screw loose or a tire put out of business in a town where the supply stores did not sell that particular screw or that particular tire. The spread of distance, annihilated by the auto, was threatened by difficulties such as these.

High maintenance and repair costs ate up many an automobile buyer in the early days of the craze. It wasn’t the original cost, although that was high enough; it was the upkeep.

Men of real ability—competent business men and expert engineers—got into the business, fortunately, largely for the rewards it promised, and by standardization and systematization brought the cost production down.

GETTING THE PRICE OF AUTOMOBILES DOWN.

The engineers banded together and studied standards of hard steel, screw threads and wheel rims. The manufacturers, preserving open minds, co-operated, and today automobiles are the most interchangeable of all assembled mechanisms.

But for this the farmer, the moderate salaried city man, the mechanic and the small tradesman would not today be consumers of motor cars. But for this the average price for passenger cars, originally in 1900 around $3,000 and by 1911 reduced to $1,000, would never have been gotten down in 1916 to $605.

The average price of all motor vehicles, combining pleasure cars and trucks, was, in 1916, $636. The preponderance of passenger cars at the lower prices brought the average down, since the average price of motor trucks alone was about $1,800. For every motor truck sold, eighteen passenger cars were disposed of in 1916.

With standardization and the consequent lowering of cost, the automobile industry acquired a momentum that has carried production forward on a constantly ascending scale, as witness these figures of passenger cars alone:

Year No. of
cars made
1909 80,000
1910 185,000
1911 200,000
1912 250,000
1915 842,249
1916 1,617,708

The manufacture of motor trucks almost doubled in one year. The number produced in 1915 was 50,366. In 1916 the number made was 92,130.

The above table, showing the rate of increase in passenger cars made in seven years, makes it clear that the greatest growth in the passenger car business has been since and including the year 1911.

That was the year in which the largest number of medium and low priced standardized cars with refinement of detail and added equipments, selling from $1,500 down to $500, was first put on the market. Ford almost doubled his output in that year. The next years, 1912 and 1913, also he more than doubled each year his output of the previous year. And in 1916 he made nearly one-third of all the passenger cars produced in the entire United States in that year.

Could anything demonstrate more conclusively than these facts, that if you have an article within the price of the mass of the people, it will sell, if the people want it? The one idea of Henry Ford—quantity sales—saved to the United States the premiership in automobile making. For other manufacturers adopted it, some radically, others in a modified form. Its influence was unquestioned in putting the price of motor cars at a figure at which a person happening to have less than the income of a millionaire could afford to buy one, so that when every one of the many values and benefits of the existence of the modern automobile is scheduled, let us, in giving credit for them, place the name of Ford at the head of the list.

When we have arrived at our destination, or have attained an object much desired, our satisfaction is such that we are in a forgiving mind and prone to forget the sacrifices we had to make, the difficulties we had to overcome, the strenuous work we had to do. The end justified the means, and we don’t think long about the hardships in the means.

Preëminence of the United States in the motor field has not been gained without hardships, sacrifices and disappointments by those engaged in it, nor was it reached by the immediate and uninterrupted success of all companies organized to commercialize the invention.

While, as we have stated before, the number of final failures of companies was small compared with those in some other avenues of enterprise in the development stage, the number of individuals and corporations in the automobile business that started on the wrong road and found it impassable, was not small. But here again it was fortunate for humanity, reckoning the automobile as one of the greatest boons vouchsafed the human race, that the mechanical perfection of the automobile was reached at a date coincident with more enlightened thought, a liberalism of view and a clearer vision of the possibilities of the future by our men of business.

For automobile enterprises that took the wrong road and got mired in the mud of mechanical and management difficulties and financial complications were, most of them, lifted out of the slough by men who knew the right road and were better drivers. Had the automobile developed mechanically to near-perfection a score of years before it did, not only would the people as a mass not have been ready for it, but it is doubtful if business at that period had developed to the point of efficiency where it could recognize the possibilities latent in the motor car as a money-making machine. Where money is, the best brains go. Capital is timid. But brains and capital want only to be shown.

Some of the most successful motor cars and motor car companies of today were deeply mired in financial difficulties a decade ago, but were pried and towed out and made great successes by new brains and new capital administered by a new set of men.

Nor was the industry immune from the bane of all invention industries—the patent right. The man who gave it the most trouble was the man whose name is far up toward the head of the list of men who were responsible for the inventive ideas involved in the motive feature of the automobile—Selden.

He kept the industry in a ferment for ten years or more, whether designedly or not, through his patent, the mere existence of which tended toward restraining its development by discouraging inventive expansion, and ceasing to exercise the depressing effects of a wet blanket on automobile growth only when the influence of his patent was neutralized by an adverse court decision.

The earlier commercialism of the automobile was characterized by many extravagances in expansive plans, high financing and even recklessness, not only on the part of manufacturers, but buyers of automobiles as well.

In getting the price down to a figure which is not excessive, the manufacturers removed the cause which militated most against popularization of the invention and provided one of the reasons for opposition to it by many people. To pay the prices which originally prevailed, men mortgaged their homes and women sold their diamonds and went bankrupt on the upkeep of the car. Manufacturers expanded too lavishly, overcapitalized, and attempted great stockjobbing consolidations, while incompetent officers were paid excessive salaries, until conservative financiers entered a protest and the banks called a halt.

The abuses which were co-existent with one of the eras of the automobile’s development caused the industry to be regarded by a class of the people as a luxurious outlaw and a menace to the well-being of the country.

Vice-President Fairbanks raised his voice to protest against the new manifestation of human nature’s appetite for joy and comfort.

James A. Patten declared a Kansas City bank held fifty-two mortgages on as many automobiles, and that that sort of loaning was going to be stopped.

Certain banks blocked, as far as possible, loans for purchases of automobiles. A prominent banker as late as 1910 declared that the initial cost of automobiles to American users, being $250,000,000 a year, with as much more for upkeep and incidental expense, was equivalent in actual economic waste each year to twice the value of property destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake.

A year after this statement was made, 1911, saw the dawn of the epoch of low priced cars, and the low priced car has reversed the condition from an economic waste, if such it was, to an economic gain, which it undoubtedly is.

Through all the storms of protest and criticisms, manufacturers went on their way, just as the automobile inventors had done under similar circumstances when men laughed and scoffed at them and called them crazy.

The depression of 1893 came too early to affect the automobile industry, but that of 1907 hit it at the time when it was by no means as strong as it was later; and yet, while in that year dozens of companies were bankrupted, and in 1910, fifty-two went out of business, it should be said that the great majority of them were not actually starters in the race. They were entrants that never toed the scratch. Their failure to make a start was due to lack of capital or inefficient organizers. A very large proportion of automobile companies that actually started in business have survived and are successful.

Names of automobile manufacturers who are prominent today were familiar names in the earlier stages of the industry, and more of the original automobile makers have survived than have fallen by the wayside.

REMOVING OBSTACLES TO AUTOMOBILE PRODUCTION.

One objection the old philosopher has to the automobile is an objection that is strengthened by the fact that he does not own one. It is that the automobile contributes toward making the age one in which a really short time appears to be and is generally regarded as a long time. It destroys proportions as it annihilates space.

Seventeen years is a shorter time in the view of the philosopher of 60, accustomed to reviewing events in his past life half a century back, than it appears to a man of 34. It is just half the length of this young man’s years. Time, as to duration, is thus comparative to different views.

Seventeen years is not long for a commercial industry to take the place which the automobile business now occupies in a country as great as this. It is a short time in which to build up a business representing the figures of two billion on the mark of the American dollar.

But this business, which has not been a business for even a score of years, did not arrive at its present estate without vicissitudes, and without strenuous work in removing obstacles in the way of its progress.

The seventeen years in which the industry made its record, saw the rise and the fall of the steamer type of car, the wresting of an Old Man of the Sea, in the form of a discouraging patent holder from the shoulders of the manufacturers, the electric car largely depopularized and the gasoline car established in wellnigh universal favor.

The procession of the more important earlier pioneers in the commercialization of the automobile started with the Pope Manufacturing Company at its head. In 1897 this company, which had successfully made bicycles, manufactured electric cars at Hartford, but was unable to find a market for them in the United States. An effort was made to get the Newport set to take them up, but the wealthy owners of Newport villas could not be induced to be even mildly interested.

So the Pope company decided to send them abroad, and shipped them on the steamer La Bourgogne. But this ship sank at sea and the cars were lost. The Pope company then made electric cabs, many of which appeared on the streets of New York in 1898 and 1899, and finally sold its electric vehicle business to the Columbia Automobile Company of New Jersey.

This corporation was formed by a party of capitalists headed by William C. Whitney of New York, and included P. A. B. Widener of Philadelphia, A. F. Brady of Albany, and Thomas F. Ryan of New York. All were interested and actively engaged in street electric traction development in the East. Whitney, who was in public life as Secretary of the Navy under Cleveland, was a man of far vision in industrial possibilities, and recognized early in its development stage that the automobile had a future. He was as quick to see, also, that the gasoline motor drive was the coming means of propulsion, and he caused the Columbia Automobile Company, whose name was changed to the Electric Vehicle Company, to negotiate for and finally secure complete rights to the Selden patents for gasoline motors.

Having a sweeping license agreement with Selden, the Electric Vehicle Company undertook to enforce its rights, and one of the first concerns sued for infringement was the Winton Company, whose gasoline car, sold in 1898, was the first gasoline car disposed of by a manufacturer in this country. The United States court upheld the patent, and nine of the then leading automobile manufacturers, finding they must pay royalties, formed an association under the title of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.

For thirteen years thereafter, until 1911, gasoline automobile manufacture in the United States was under tribute to a royalty of from four-fifths of one per cent to 1-1/4 per cent of the retail price of all cars sold. The beneficiary of this license fee was the Electric Vehicle Company, which “split” the fees with Selden, and the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers itself. The fees amounted to very large sums, and the licensees wriggled and squirmed; but the United States District Court having upheld the Selden patent, there was no way out, unless a deliverer appeared.

And such a deliverer did appear.

It was none other than Henry Ford.

For a pacifist, Henry Ford is about the greatest fighter the American industrial ranks have ever produced. His history has been a succession of fights—fights to make a motor that would go inside a hat box, fights to get anybody to believe in him and invest money with him, fights to convince people that nearly everybody would buy an automobile if the price was low enough, and finally the fiercest and most prolonged fight of all—the fight to break the Selden patent monopoly and free the industry from serfdom, give it free rein and relieve it of the incubus of tribute.

Ford had refused to join the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers and had gone on making his engine and adapting it to a car which he put out, as has before been said, in 1903. The Electric Vehicle Company, which held the reins and was driving all the gasoline car makers except Ford, cracked its whip in Henry’s direction and brought him up standing, and bristling as well.

In the suit for infringement against Ford the Electric Vehicle Company won in the lower United States court, but it reckoned without its Ford. That product of a strain of Irish-English fighting blood didn’t consider he was whipped because one court decided against him, as all the other manufacturers, who submitted their necks meekly to the Selden patent yoke, had done.

He promptly appealed and fought the case like a wildcat up to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and through that tribunal, and with such success that, in 1911 this court reversed the finding of the lower court and gave the decision to Henry Ford.

The original suit in the lower court was begun against Ford in 1903, so that his fight against the first and only automobile “trust” was an eight year war.

But during it all, he never faltered in his activities in perfecting his car and making his elaborate preparations to build and market it. His confidence in his final victory was not affected in the slightest degree. He went on, pursuing his object with unruffled mien.

It must have been a trying brand of chagrin that the gasoline car manufacturers, who had tamely submitted to their first setback in the effort to slip the fetters of patent rights, had to wear around with them. They had looked askance at Ford. They feared he was likely to kill the automobile “game” by putting out a car that would make automobiling common, and put a damper on the purchase of the cars they made, by people who could afford to buy them. At best, he was calculated to be a disturbing element in the business—probably driving down prices to a point where there would be no profit in them.

And here he had been the savior of the automobile business.

Many men have written letters that have been their undoing. Selden had made an entry in a personal notebook or diary that brought about his downfall and the loosening of his grip on automobile manufacturing.

The ground on which the United States Circuit Court of Appeals decided for Ford and against the Selden patent was that the intent of the inventor had been to patent a motor designed after the type of a motor invented by Brayton of which the Ford motor was not an infringement, and not after the type of the gas engine of Otto the German, of which the Ford motor would have been an infringement, and that Selden had clearly disclosed this intent, as evidenced by a slurring entry in his diary regarding the four-cycle Otto engine, characterizing it as “another of those d—d Dutch engines.”

The Otto engine for stationary purposes was in use before Selden filed his application for the patent, and if he did not intend the patent to cover an engine of that type he had no hold on the manufacturers who, with scarcely a single exception, were making automobiles, with motors patterned after the Otto type. These manufacturers could have done what Ford did—taken the case up and got the same decision, but they didn’t do it, thereby making Henry Ford the emancipator of the automobile industry.

This delivery by Ford of automobile manufacturing from patent restraint and his quantity production idea, without any other of the many things he has done, would have made Henry Ford what he is—the most commanding figure in the automobile industry today.

There can be no doubt that the very existence of the Selden patent with the rights it conferred to tax every single automobile, was a deterrent to the growth of the business, because with the wiping out, through Ford’s court victory, of the right of William C. Whitney’s Electric Vehicle Company to take toll of all gasoline autocars produced, encouragement was given to capital to invest more largely in the business.

If, in the springtime, the season when the grass begins to sprout, you remove an old door that has lain flat on the grass all winter, the grass in the space covered by that door will literally spring up.

So when the lid—the Selden patent—was lifted from the automobile industry, it sprang to the front. The year 1911 was the epochal year in volume of production in the business. From that year dates the present era of automobile high production. It wasn’t that many new companies entered the field. It was that those already in it expanded and increased their output. There was no longer an Old Man of the Sea, in the form of a tax on production, clinging to their necks and shoulders. The age of standardization had come, and the soundness of Ford’s quantity production idea had been demonstrated. Thence on, the automobile industry had a clear course, if not in all cases easy sailing, and it has traversed it on a straight line, with a current of popular demand running strong in the direction it has been headed.

GASOLINE CAR IN POPULAR DEMAND.

Pioneers in manufacturing gasoline cars during the period beginning at the time—1898—when the first gasoline car, a Winton, was sold, were Clarke Bros., makers of the Auto-car, E. R. Thomas whose name the Thomas Flier took, Stearns, Chalmers, Jeffery, Wilkinson, who designed the Franklin car, Olds who changed from steam to gasoline, Brush, Ford, Leland who produced the Cadillac, Haynes and Apperson. Many familiar cars came into the field later, or were developed and advertised by men who became identified with them at a later date. Although its manufacture was started in 1903, the Overland car, which ranks second to Ford in quantity production, did not become the factor in the industry it is today until John North Willys, a salesman, became identified with it and gave it its remarkable vogue through his personality and spectacular salesmanship.

The gasoline car was struggling to perfection when the electric and steam types of cars were reasonably well established on the market.

In 1896, New England saw its first motor race of electric cars. The names of make or makers of electric cars familiar from that date on include those of Riker, Pope, Waverley, Baker, Woods, Barrows, Studebaker, whose first cars were electric, Columbus Buggy, Rauch & Lang, Detroit, Ohio and Anderson.

But the electric car industry never has reached the proportions of the gasoline car industry. It has never advertised in the lavish manner adopted by gasoline car makers. It has not entered races to the extent its gasoline competitors have. It adopted conservative methods which have given it a slow growth. It is only within the last five years that shaft drives have been perfected in electric car construction, while producing controllers that would not arc, whatever the provocation, have been matters of slow evolution.

But that the electric car is a perfectly balanced piece of mechanism and the one type of the automobile with the least fits and starts, is conceded, and this superiority will doubtless enable the electric type to make up in the future in the motor truck field what it has lost to the gasoline type in the passenger field.

If the passenger automobile has not reached the length of its use and consumption, and it unquestionably has not, what shall be said of the freight automobile, the industry in which is yet in embryo?

The greatest future field for the automobile is without doubt in this direction, as is evidenced by numberless indications.

The increase in motor trucks made in 1916 over 1915 was within less than 8,000 of being double the number of the previous year. The number produced in 1916 was 92,130, against 50,369 in 1915, with an increase in retail value of $40,000,000. A business that nearly doubles in product while showing an increase in total sales of only 33-1/3 per cent, as the automobile truck business does, is seen by analysis to be getting the price of its units down, and that is the surest means in commercial production to insure increased consumption.

Perfected devices are operating in the motor truck field as they did in the passenger car field to lower cost, and the lower the cost of motor trucks is gotten down, the more people will buy them.

The field of the motor truck’s usefulness is ever widening. The European war has demonstrated many directions in which it can be utilized, while its adaptation to the country is as feasible and economical as its adoption by the city. Its use by national, state and city governmental departments is growing rapidly, and the best evidence exists of its superior economy to the horse for many purposes. And when the high wave of motor truck use rolls in, the electric type will be found riding on its crest. Already there are upwards of 50,000 electric trucks alone in use.

The electric passenger car, while far behind the gasoline car in the race of automobiles, is distinctly in the lead of the steam type. Never was the biblical saying, “and the first shall be last,” truer than of the steam automobile. First to arrive at the starting line, it was distanced early in the quarter stretch. The first steam car in the United States was sold in 1889, the first electric in 1892 and the first gasoline in 1898. And though it had a start over the gasoline car of nine years, it was never able seriously to compete with it, and 1905 saw only one large manufacturer left in the steam car industry.

At one time, about 1900, it looked as though steam and gasoline cars were running neck and neck in popular favor, and the names of Riker, White, C. E. Whitney and Stanley were as well known almost as those of Ford, Chalmers and a score of gasoline car makers are known today, but the contest was a short one.

The gasoline car forged ahead. Its success discouraged the steam car makers, most of whom changed from steam car to gasoline car manufacturing, and the business of steam car making narrowed down to two manufacturers—Stanley and White. Finally, in 1911, White gave up making steam cars and devoted his facilities to gasoline cars only, leaving Stanley to share only with Doble in the steam field.

The reason why the car buying public gave enthusiastic patronage to gasoline cars and scant encouragement to steam cars was that the use of the steam car requires more mechanical knowledge than does that of the gasoline car, and the work of making repairs is more complicated. The man of today wants to do a thing in the easiest way. His education, through the conveniences supplied in modern life, is all along the line of short cuts to anywhere and anything. “Why work when you don’t have to,” is his motto, and he has never been able to see why he should take the time to become a proficient mechanic to give himself pleasure, when he can buy a gasoline car and escape doing so—and much work in running his car and repairing it, as well.

The steam automobile reached the zenith of its vogue prior to 1905. Beginning with that year, its use declined and that of gasoline cars increased. The gasoline type is now almost universal in passenger automobiles, and the fact that the power units in the operation of the gasoline motor are more economical than either electricity or steam, has its bearing on their general popularity.

AUTOMOBILE DEMAND MADE ACCESSORIES NECESSARY.

A history of the commercializing of the automobile which does not make mention of the manner in which the development of the industry called into being an almost endless list of incidental and accessory products, is not complete.

The production of the finished automobile involves a multiplicity of units, and as no automobile manufacturer makes all of these, but depends on independent factories for certain of them, there has been a multiplication of enterprises supplying products entering in the construction of automobiles, whose development and financial success have kept pace with those of the automobile itself.

Foremost in the list of accessories for the automobile are tires, and the industry in this product is of vast proportions. The production of automobiles—passenger and freight—having been 1,617,708 in 1916, and the manufacturers having delivered each of these vehicles complete with a set of four tires, the number of tires required for 1916 sales of automobiles alone was 6,470,832.