DETROIT

ANN ARBOR

-

TO

Don M. Larkin

a.

With my Compliments

and the Autograph

of the Author

i6^uj^

THE TURNING WHEEL

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE IRON MAN IN INDUSTRY Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921

THE TELEPHONE IDEA Greenberg, Inc., 1926

JOHNSON OF THE MOHAWKS Macmillan Co., 1930

NATIVE STOCK Macmillan Co., 1 93 1

THE PENNS OF PENNSYLVANIA Macmillan Co., 1931

THEY TOLD BARRON

1930, and

MORE THEY TOLD BARRON

1931. The Notes of Clarence W . Barron, editor of THE WALL

STREET JOURNAL. Co-editor with Samuel Taylor Moore.

Harper & Brothers.

MOUNTAIN MORNING

Argus, Albany, 1932

AROUND THE CORNER

Sears, 1933

MEDAL BY NORMAN BEL GEDDES

commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of General Motors

THE

TURNING WHEEL

THE STORY OF GENERAL MOTORS THROUGH TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

1908-1933

BY ARTHUR POUND

Drawings by WILLIAM HEYER

MCMXXXIV

DOUBLEDAY, DoRAN & COMPANY, INC.

Garden City, New York

PRINTED AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN CITY, N. Y., u. s. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1934

BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIRST EDITION

Publisher's Note

i

T is probable that no invention of such far-reaching im- portance was ever diffused with such rapidity or so quickly exerted influences that ramified through the national culture, transforming even habits of thought and language." This quotation from the report of the Hoover Research Com- mittee on Social Trends refers to the motor vehicle.

The commonplaceness of motor cars in our daily lives makes us unaware of their significance. It is almost im- possible to realize a present-day world without automobiles, and yet motor cars are little more than a generation old.

This book, then, not only helps to make us conscious of the marvelously rapid development of a new art, a new convenience, a new means of transportation, but also, in giving the history of one of our important industries, it provides a view of the vast social consequences of inven- tion and enterprise. And yet General Motors is but twenty- five years old.

Innumerable histories of nations, rulers, wars, and peoples have been published of much less significance than this story of a great industry. Our leading business groups will find here many instances and examples of enterprising public service. Here is a broad yet carefully written history of an industrial enterprise which directly or indirectly affects intimately the lives of our people.

vi Publisher's Note

In this book will be found illuminating accounts of in- ventors, financial geniuses, scientists, business statesmen. Their accomplishments have altered our lives and will affect those of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. While making motor cars, they have also been making history.

Foreword

G

ENERAL MOTORS in 1933 reached its twenty-fifth mile- stone. Since the founding of General Motors Company of New Jersey in 1908, the growth of the organization has contributed a unique chapter to American industrial his- tory. From beginnings so small that its birth escaped notice in financial centers, General Motors has worked its way steadily forward to a place where its leadership in many of the most exacting branches of production and distribution is taken for granted and where it meets the public of many lands with a wide variety of merchandise and services. Scientific research, close attention to dealer and consumer needs, and constructive public policies are among the fac- tors accounting for General Motors' present strength.

The older companies of General Motors, now known as divisions, go back to the early days of the automotive indus- try, and some of them far beyond. Their taproots reach down to carriage- and wagon-building, to firearms, station- ary and marine gasoline engines, milling machinery, roller bearings, bicycle gears, lathes, and even to door-bells. Their branch roots stretch back to the beginnings of scientific experiment, since the self-propelled vehicle is the child of physics and chemistry. Chapters n and in trace that long evolution. As one follows the rise of General Motors against the broad background of latter-day industry and

viii Foreword

science, he comprehends that the flowering of large-scale production in our day is the inevitable result of generations of inventiveness, organizing ability, and the willingness of capital and labor to pull together toward common objec- tives. Among those objectives are the lifting of the stand- ards of living, the satisfaction of old wants with less labor, and the creation of new wants on a higher level of comfort, convenience, and culture. Modern industry has conquered the old-time dearth of goods, and more and more it searches for a balance wheel through whose steadying influ- ence its products can remain available to all industrious men and women at all times. To steady economic life is perhaps as real an industrial need today as mass production was fifteen years ago, as real a need as the automobile was forty years ago, when men traveled at the pace of the horse over wretched roads.

My acquaintance with General Motors began at its birth in 1908, and as a somewhat impartial observer of social trends I have watched its progress with keen interest ever since. After observing General Motors employees as work- men and citizens, I began, more than thirteen years ago, to write in Flint, Michigan, my Iron Man papers, noting some of the social effects of modern industrialism. The Cor- poration seemed then to foreshadow many of the develop- ments on the social side which have since come to pass. I welcomed the opportunity to complete a full-length study with access to records, believing that the story of a great corporation's growth through twenty-five years would be of more than passing value, since corporations are the most efficient of modern groupings and probably also the most meaningful from the standpoint of basic social relations: work and wages, production and distribution, consumption and investment. If it appears that approval is voiced here more freely than the reverse, that is because the record is clean and clear.

As I review the history of General Motors in my mind, I think of the many thousands of men and women who

Foreword ix

made its present competence come to pass by their labors in factories, laboratories and offices, and in the field; of workers in all branches of production; of craftsmen and designers striving to combine beauty with serviceability; of scientists patiently attacking problems in chemistry, elec- tricity, metallurgy, and engineering; of foremen, superin- tendents, and inspectors; of dealers and salesmen in every land searching for the sales by which the Corporation lives and by means of which it pays wages and dividends. This book is the history of a joint effort which succeeded be- cause, when a long, strong pull was needed, team-play tri- umphed over the frictions which tend to dissipate human efforts and destroy institutions.

Those who recognize in General Motors a force of the first magnitude in America's economic life will find here several references to the Corporation's policies which have contributed to its present standing. Some of these policies apply to interdivisional operations, others to employees, dealers, suppliers, and the public. Beyond the equities in- volved in strictly commercial contacts, any large corpora- tion which touches the lives of millions of persons here and abroad can scarcely escape being rated and appraised by public opinion. General Motors has been a leader in pro- viding full and detailed accounting to stockholders and in giving the general public accurate news of what it is doing and why it is doing it.

The history of General Motors records scientific and commercial achievements of a high order, but this is true of many corporations. What makes this corporation most interesting is the fact that its expansion was rapid and yet it was marked by relatively few of the discords usually connected with swift industrial growth.

In the appendices will be found historical notes on many subsidiaries and affiliates not treated in the text.

The author acknowledges gratefully the assistance of persons too numerous to mention who have contributed in- formation to this work, including many formerly active in

x Foreword

Corporation affairs but now retired, and others whose busi- ness relationship with General Motors in its early days qualifies them to testify on the events of that period.

Special thanks are due to Dr. Dixon Ryan Fox, Professor of American History at Columbia University, for his in- terest and encouragement, to Dr. John S. Worley, Pro- fessor of Transportation at the University of Michigan, and to Dr. M. M. Quaife, secretary-editor, the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, for their aid in research.

ARTHUR POUND

Contents

PAGE

Foreword vii

CHAPTER

I America on Wheels I

II The Evolution of Self-Propelled Vehicles 6

III The Formative Period: 1879-99 27

IV Oldsmobile: First "Quantity" Car 41

V Buick: The Foundation Stone of General

Motors 68

VI Oakland and Pontiac: Old and New 91

VII Cadillac : The Triumph of Precision 100

VIII The Birth of General Motors in

IX The Bankers Take the Wheel 131

X Chevrolet : The Cinderella of Motor-Car

History 143

XI The Corporation Established 153

XII The War Years 167

XIII The Expanding Corporation 176

XIV The New Era Under President du Pont 193

XV Rounding Out General Motors 209

XVI Later Histories of Passenger Car Divi- sions 218

xi

Xll

Contents

CHAPTER

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

APPENDIX

I II

III

General Motors of Canada, Limited General Motors Across the Seas Research: The March of the Open Mind

Body by Fisher: The Motor Car as a Style Vehicle

Frigidaire and Electric Refrigeration

Commercial Vehicles

General Motors in Aviation

The Point of View of General Motors

The Stockholder Interest

Marketing the Motor Car

Financing and Insuring the Buyer

Cooperative Plans

Public Relations

Conclusion

Roster of General Motors Officers and Directors

General Motors at the Century of Prog- ress Exposition

IV Short Histories of Subsidiary and Affili- ated Companies

V Some Discontinued and Inactive Com- panies

Bibliography Index

PAGE

235 243 266

288

304 310

3i8 329 348 359 380

395 4i5 432

Chronology of Self-Propelled Vehicles 435

448

453 456

484 491 501

Illustrations

Medal by Norman Bel Geddes Frontispiece

PAGE

Ancient Egyptian Wheel 2

Simon Stevin's sailing chariot, Holland 7

Cugnot's artillery tractor, 1769 II

"Orukter Amphibolis" — Oliver Evans' Amphibian 12

First self-propelled vehicle to attain speed of ten

miles per hour, 1810 14

Sir Goldsworthy Gurney's steam carriage 16

Richard Dudgeon's steam carriage, New York, 1860 22

First motorcycle — oil motor 29

R. E. Olds's first horseless carriage 33

R. E. Olds's first factory, Lansing, Michigan 35

Horseless buggy of Charles E. Duryea, 1893 37

"Horsey Horseless Carriage," Battle Creek, Michi- gan 39

Glidden Trophy 42

R. E. Olds 45

First Oldsmobile, 1897 48

Xlll

xiv Illustrations

PAGE

Authorization for construction of first Oldsmobile 49

First American automobile factory, Olds Motor

Works 52

Detroit to New York, Roy D. Chapin in Oldsmobile 54

Oldsmobile curved-dash runabout, first quantity car 63

Chauncey M. Depew, at wheel of Olds runabout,

1904 64

First Buick, Detroit, 1902 70

Original Buick factory at Flint, Michigan, 1903-4 75

First Buick car built at Flint, Michigan, 1903 77

William C. Durant 83

1904 Buick 88

Henry M. Leland 101

Cadillac "one-lunger," 1902 104

Cadillac cars which won the Dewar Trophy, 1908 106

Dewar Trophy 108

C. S. Mott 112

James J. Storrow 127

Thomas Neal 133

Charles W. Nash 138

Walter P. Chrysler 140

The first Chevrolet, April, 1913 144

Chevrolet uRoyal Mail" roadster, 1914 146

Model 490, Chevrolet 149

John J. Raskob 158

Buick war tractor, 1918 169

First home of Dayton Engineering Laboratories 171

General Motors Building, Detroit 180

Illustrations xv

PAGE

Fred J. Fisher 182

Pierre S. du Pont 195

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. 206

Opel Six at Shanghai, China 208

Bob Burman at wheel of Buick racer 220

Cadillac: first car with electric self-starter 223

W. S. Knudsen 228

Robert McLaughlin 236

R. S. McLaughlin 238

Opel car in African exploration 251

Charles F. Kettering 270

Research Building, Detroit 277

Charles T. Fisher 290

Miniature Napoleonic coach 294

Map of General Motors Proving Ground 302-303

Early motor fire engine 311

Pioneer police patrol wagon, Chicago 314

GA-43, all metal monoplane 320

GA-43 : front view 323

GA-43: side view 325

Flying Lifeboat: GA-FLB 327

Weather Bureau Station, General Motors Proving

Ground 346

Entrance to General Motors Proving Ground 346

New York headquarters of General Motors 351

Lammot du Pont 353

Buick on steps of Summit House, Pike's Peak 358

Night Scene: Century of Progress Exposition 366

xvi Illustrations

PAGE

Chevrolet Assembly Line 370

Dr. Carlos C. Booth 378

Harry H. Bassett 410

General Motors Institute, Flint, Michigan 412

Albert Champion 457

Herbert C. Harrison 468

John Wesley Hyatt 469

Alexander Winton 481

THE TURNING WHEEL

Chapter I AMERICA ON WHEELS

I

N A single picture are caught and recorded centuries of history. In the distance, ready to vanish over the hill, is an Indian family departing with its poor goods and beaten gods. A tiny pony strains between two poles, across which is a laden platform. The poles drag on the earth. In the foreground is the settler's covered wagon, drawn by strong horses and ready to roll westward as long as its tall, iron- shod wheels hang together.

The wagon holds more wheels and the produce of wheels : a spinning wheel and the cloths which wheels have fabri- cated; a plowshare which some wheel has helped to smooth and point. There is a rifle fashioned on a lathe to which the principle of the wheel has been adapted. A continent is being surrendered to those who come on wheels. The conqueror sets his wheels in motion and moves on with calm assurance to occupy the empire which wheels have enabled him and his kind to possess.1

It is one of the paradoxes of history that America, where modern civilization runs on wheels, was a wheel-less country before the white man came to its shores. Other peoples,

Bernard de Voto, Mark Twain's America, p. 24.: "That winter he [Marcus Whitman, the missionary] gathered a large mission. Also he found a wife; and she and another woman joined the caravan that took the trail the following spring [1836]. The caravan possessed, too, wagons and a light cart that were to go further into transalpine America than wheels had ever gone before. The western filtrate had now no boundary to its passage but the Pacific sea."

2 The Turning Wheel

no more primitive than the American Indian, had discov- ered and applied the wheel in the dawn of civilization; in- deed, it is likely that without the wheel Western civilization would never have emerged from its birth throes. The two- wheeled chariots of Nineveh broke down the barriers of space and the boundaries of empires built on self-contained river valleys. The mergings of peoples, exchange of ideas, tools, and goods over wide distances — in short, the early education of the race in commerce, mechanics, language, and thought — were destined henceforth to proceed through and by, and to a large extent directly on, wheels.

Yet prehistoric America somehow missed this potent ap- plication of the wheel to earth. Their grave lack was early noted by scholars. The learned Dr. Robert Hooke, in the 1726 edition of his Philosophic Experiments and Observa- tions, says that ignorance of the wheel in aboriginal Amer- ica indicates that its inhabitants could not have come hither from Europe, Africa, or Asia, since the wheel "is an in- vention of so great use, that it seems impossible to be lost by mankind, after it be once known."

Ancient Egyptian Wheel

The American Indians possessed marked capacities in many directions. They were excellent workers in stone, as well as hardy hunters and bold warriors. They traversed wide areas in both war and chase; they were essentially moral and lived a primitive religion of exalted concepts and close harmonies. In their intertribal relations they were capable of acute political sagacity; The Great Peace Pact

America on Wheels 3

of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, which endured at least three centuries, is one of the most subtle adjustments of conflicting national political interests ever devised, more intricate and better balanced than the League of Nations. Yet the Indian gave way before the whites be- cause the newcomers had better tools, especially better weapons and vehicles.

At one time or another the American aborigines had used the other five primary machines: the lever, wedge, screw, pulley, and the inclined plane. With these the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala and the Incas of Peru built mas- sive edifices. But there is no evidence that the Red Man ever had command of the wheel. In the meantime, through the centuries of recorded time and before, the Asiatics, Europeans, and Egyptians had not only evolved wheeled carts and chariots, but also they had made so many efficient combinations of the wheel with the other five primary ma- chines that they had evolved the compass to guide them to America, domestic tools of many sorts, the well-ground sword blade, and the musket which spat fire. The conquerors had inherited a superior technology as well as superior form of carriage on land and sea. Hence the aborigines gave way. One reason — and perhaps the root reason — for the failure of the aboriginal inhabitants effectively to occupy and defend North America may well have been their failure to master the wheel.

But merely to put two wheels on the ground, with an axle-tree between them, is not enough to satisfy an artful folk with pressing problems to solve — problems of suste- nance and distribution, problems of state and war. The fabled wheel of Ceres, the goddess of Agriculture, might be turned into a country cart, the scythed chariot might do for war, but not for long could either satisfy the eternal demand of a questing people for more speed, more thrills, more wealth. The ancients applied more power to wheels by harnessing eight and twelve horses to their chariots and as many oxen to their wagons, increasing their teams of draft animals up to the full limit of the wit and muscle of men in controlling them. Within the limits prescribed by flesh and blood these ambitious men of ancient days did

4 The Turning Wheel

what they could to increase their power in transport. They built gorgeous equipages of state, rode furiously in their hunts, developed strains of horseflesh suitable to various purposes — chargers for war, draft horses for tillage, light palfreys for milady to ride, high-stepping carriage horses. They developed wheeled vehicles in great variety, from the simple cart to impressive and beautiful coaches of royalty. But ever and always each generation was restricted in its burning desire to conquer space and time by the fact that the horse represented at once the strongest and most flexible power plant he could apply to the wheels of his vehicles. Other animals might outdraw the horse, but no other animal could combine pulling power with as prompt acceleration. The unique conformation of the horse's leg from hoof to hip-joint gives him a leverage out of all proportion to his weight, and for centuries he was the best motive force man had at his disposal for transportation purposes.

The Horse Age lasted from the dawn of history to recent times. In those slow-moving centuries enormous advances were made in other directions, but land transport remained keyed to draft animals. Man charted the solar system, dis- covered the mass of the earth by laying out a geographical degree on the plains of Greece, applied the arch, tenon, and pillar in architecture, constructed huge cathedrals of surpassing beauty, worked out the basic laws of physics and mathematics, began experiments in chemistry, developed marine transportation from the oar to the sail, applied the compass to the discovery of America and the circumnaviga- tion of the earth, built large and cunningly contrived vessels for the mastery of wind and water, and harnessed water power to turn looms. Laboriously he brought water trans- port by means of canals to assist in his problems of land carriage. In all the practical arts the advance of knowl- edge had been tremendous, but from the dawn of history down to modern times mankind had available in quantity for land transport no better motive power than the horse.

Yet the challenge toward improvement persisted. Dimly the more progressive peoples have understood the truth laid down in the report of a Select Committee of the British House of Commons on Highways in 1808, that

America on Wheels 5

"next to the general influence of the seasons upon which the regular supply of our wants and a great proportion of our comfort so much depend, there is perhaps no circum- stance more interesting to men in a civilized state than the perfection of the means of interior communication."

A philosophical investigator of transportation has said, "with the exception of land and ruins there are few things of any material value to man which do not derive that value, in part at least, from transport from their original position." One might go further and say that life, shorn of the prospect of ever improving transportation, would be dull, flat, and unprofitable. Truly civilization has run on wheels from the stone discs of the primitive cart to the rubber tires of the automobile.

Chapter II

THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-PROPELLED VEHICLES

T

In

.HE evolution of transport has been worked out by John Brisben Walker and others somewhat as follows :

Floating log

Animal's back

Sledge down hill

Horse-drawn sledge cart

Canoe

Ox cart

Chariot

Oared galley

Sedan chair

Sailing vessel

Canal

Man-powered carriage

Sailing chariot

Coach and carriage

Velocipede

Free balloon

Steam carriage

Steamship

Railroad

Bicycle

Cable car

Electric trolley car

Automobile

Airplane and airship

Observe, in the sequence, the progress from the simplest of motive powers, water running under the pull of gravity, to the explosions of rarefied gases in the internal combus- tion engine. Those in the first half of the list are shrewd adaptations of forces found in nature. Of special interest is the sailing chariot, known in China, and brought to its peak in Holland, where one designed by Simon Stevin, about 1600, covered forty-two miles in two hours, carrying twenty-eight persons, and was used quite regularly.

6

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 7

Even before man tried to harness the wind to land trans- port, he endeavored to "beat the horse" by various com- binations of muscle and machinery. Heliodorus notes a triumphal chariot at Athens moved by slaves who worked machinery. A Jesuit missionary in China, Matthieu Ricci (1552-1610), declared that he had traveled there inside a"

Simon Stevin's sailing chariot, Holland, about A. D. 1600

great wheel, propelled by two fellow passengers who used levers to give the wheel forward motion. A beautiful series of drawings comes down from the Middle Ages, showing men propelling heavy and ornate carriages by worm and other gears. The last supreme effort in that direction seems to be Sir John Anderson's 1831 patent, in which twenty-four oarsmen provided the energy.

We are accustomed to think of the steam engine as a world-shaking invention, but the fact is that for centuries after its first application the world wagged on without giv- ing the steam engine a second thought. Hero of Alex- andria, living in the second century before Christ (130 B.C.), described in his Pneumatica his famous self-propelled

8 The Turning Wheel

apparatus known as the Aeolipile, and also a fountain, both operated by steam. The principle used in the engine which worked the fountain became highly important centuries later, but the scientific Hero appears to have had no dis- coverable successor until the forgetful Middle Ages had come and gone, although engines like his probably were used in unimportant ways and more to amuse than to per- form useful work. After the lapse of 1300 years, that bold monk, Roger Bacon (1214-94) uttered a prophecy to which no one listened: "It will be possible to construct chariots so that without animals they may be moved with incalculable speed." The prophecy is less remarkable than the revelation it gives of the complete loss of interest in science between Hero's time and that of Roger Bacon; so the latter could do no more than prophesy in a field where the former actually had experimented.

With the Renaissance, interest revived in science as well as in art and letters. Giovanni Baptista della Porta in 1601 began where Hero had left off sixteen centuries earlier, thus anticipating SaveryTs first practical and productive steam engine by nearly a century.

Ramsay and Wildgoose were not thinking of steam when they applied for an English patent, in 1619, for "drawing- carts without horses." However, the edge of the curtain was being drawn aside a little about this time for the intro- duction of the modern Steam Age. In 1629 Giovanni Branca, an Italian, came forward with a steam turbine, now rated superior to Hero's steam engine and also to that of the same type generally accredited to the great English physicist, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), which was along the same line. It is likely that the Newton engine was made after Newton's suggestions rather than by Newton him- self. Both Branca and Newton suggested certain uses for their simple engines, among them the propulsion of a vehicle by a jet of steam, a means still used in cheap toys. A Jesuit missionary in Pekin, China — Father Verbiest, about 1630 — used an aeolipile, says Lavergne, "with jets of steam playing on a revolving winged wheel geared to the wheels of a car." In 1633, Edward Somerset, Marquis of

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 9

Worcester, fathered a double-action steam engine, with dis- placement chambers, which was the first useful engine, though not commercially successful.

While Englishmen and Italians were pioneering in steam, a Dutch scientist, Christian Huyghens, in 1680 described the first step in the evolution of the modern internal combus- tion engine, the invention of a first explosion engine. In this ancestor of all internal combustion engines the ignition of gunpowder in a cylinder produced a vacuum into which out- side atmospheric pressure pushed the piston. Ten years later, in 1690, Denis Papin, a young French doctor ac- quainted with Huyghens, substituted steam for gunpowder, thereby earning himself a place in history as the inventor of the earliest piston-and-cylinder steam engine, although his efforts fell short of practical success.

In 1698 Thomas Savery (1650-1715) obtained a patent for a steam engine designed to raise water, and applied to it a safety valve by J. T. Desaguliers, thus realizing on the suggestion of della Porta, put forth nearly a century earlier. Raising water from coal mines seems to have been more of a problem at this time than swift transportation, and for nearly a hundred years that field was cultivated by inventors to the practical exclusion of others. Thomas New- comen, an associate of Savery, produced various atmos- pheric steam engines, from 1705 to 1711, which found im- mediate and high favor with the mine operators. Other engineers contributed to this development, yet none of them seems to have followed seriously Papin's lead toward loco- motion. But witty Bishop Berkeley could see further than the men who knew tools; in 1740 he said: "Mark me, ere long we shall see a pan of coals brought to use in place of a feed of oats."

Soon men again began to think about power transport. Spring-driven carriages were made in Germany in the Middle Ages. The spring method of propulsion lingered for a long time and developed some fairly successful vehicles, but of course they did not solve at all the problems of speed and power. A step in the latter direction came a little later, in 1753, when Daniel Bournoulli demonstrated to the French Academy the point at which steam power could be

10 The Turning Wheel

applied to navigation, and was given a prize by that body which even then exercised an inspiring influence on the new science. The stationary steam engine had proved its useful- ness, and was at work daily in hundreds of places. The question was: how to make the steam engine portable, gear it to wheels, and get it on the road?

This question tormented the learned Dr. Erasmus Dar- win (1731-1 802 ) , who urged Boulton and Watt, the steam- engine manufacturers, to produce a "fiery chariot" which would fulfill the startling prophecy contained in Darwin's poem, The Botanic Garden:

Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on the waving wings, expanded bear The flying chariot through the field of air; Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move, Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowds, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy clouds.

James Watt was a canny Scot who is generally regarded as the inventor of the steam engine, though we have seen that he had several predecessors. He made, however, a good many telling improvements on Newcomen's engines from 1769 on, bringing the steam engine to the point where others more daring than himself were willing to place it in carriages and vessels.

So the scene shifts to France for the great experiment in which a full-sized steam carriage, designed for a special task, took the road. It will hardly do to say flatly that this was the first self-propelled vehicle, but it was certainly the first definitely constructed for a concrete and practical pur- pose in contrast to those strictly experimental and of small scale. Under the stern call of war Captain Nicholas Joseph Cugnot designed and directed the construction of an artillery gun tractor which, had it been successful, would have given Royalist France undisputed control of Europe. Seldom have the destinies of the world waited so directly upon the success or failure of a machine.

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 11

It was a three-wheeler, with the single front wheel carry- ing a tremendous load in the boiler and engine, all of which had to be moved on a pivot in order to change direction. But it also had the failing, repeated over and over during the next century, of being underpowered for the work to be done. It traveled at about three miles an hour, had to be refueled at fifteen miles, and on the second test, upset. The

Cugnot's artillery tractor, 1769, first self-propelled vehicle built for road work

fickle Ministry, which had financed construction at great expense, turned upon the inventor, and he went into exile. When Napoleon came to power twenty years later, he re- called Cugnot, put him on a pension, and sought to revive the project, but by failing to follow up this idea of artillery transport, he lost a telling chance to increase the mobility of his artillery, just as his failure to adopt Fulton's sub- marine lost him his chance to invade England.

12 The Turning Wheel

Three years after Cugnot's daring effort, Oliver Evans (1755-1819) of Delaware dreamed, in 1772, of using steam to propel carriages, but, by his own statement, did not work out the plans for his engine till I784.1 He was certainly the first American to apply steam to a road vehicle. It was he who received the first United States patent covering a "self-propelled carriage," dated October 17, I789.2

'Orukter Amphibolis" — Oliver Evans' amphibian, driven in Philadelphia, 1804

This extraordinary man, whose genius was better recog- nized abroad in his day, and still is, than at home, antici- pated Trevithick in applying the high-pressure principle to steam engines. He sent to England the drawings of his 1787 engine; these are said to have been seen by Trevithick in 1794-95 and applied by him. In 1804 Evans astonished the mechanical world by moving in Philadelphia, partly by water and partly by land, a combination steam-wagon and flatboat, the first authentic amphibian of record. A pic- ture of Evans guiding his 2i-ton Orukter Amphibolis hangs in the Automobile Wing of the Arts and Manufactures Section of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D. C., facing the display of ancient motor vehicles which are in direct line of descent from Evans* first American self- propelled vehicle. He is the great American name in the early stages of motor vehicle development.

Another candidate for inventor of the first American steam carriage is Dr. Apollos Kinsley of Hartford, who is

*The Young Steam Engineer's Guide, by Oliver Evans. First edition, Philadelphia, 1805. Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth ed. vol. 10, p. 2.

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 13

described in Forest Morgan's Connecticut as a Colony and a State as "driving the highways of Hartford in one of the first steam carriages ever conceived, of which he was the inventor at the close of the i8th century."

Many an idea which events have shown to be sound was unduly delayed by the inability of inventors to find back- ing. A strange example of this misfortune is William Mur- dock (1754-1839), a subordinate of Boulton and Watt, who made a model of a steam carriage which was far ahead of its time in the simplicity of the application of power, but he never patented it because his employers dis- couraged him.

There is something dynamic and challenging in the turn of a century which stirs the soul of man to fresh creative effort. It was so in 1800. Inventions flooded into the British patent office. Then Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), the "Captain Dick" who was destined to taste the triumph of placing the first locomotive on wheels, to make and lose fortunes, and to die at last in poverty, stepped into the field of the steam carriage. Wherever Dick Trevithick took his stand in his prime he made history. He brought forward in 1 80 1 a steam carriage whose boiler was of American descent, since Trevithick was directly influenced by the Americans, Oliver Evans and Nathan Read. It produced sixty pounds pressure. Trevithick used a long-stroke engine coupled directly to the driving wheels. He had been at work on this design five years. It was put together in a black- smith shop. One of his friends left this lively picture of its initial trial :

In the year, 1801, upon Christmas eve, Captain Dick got up steam, out in the highroad, just outside the shop. When we see'd that Captain Dick was a-goin' to turn on steam, we jumped as many as could, maybe seven or eight of us. 'Twas a stifEsh hill but she was off like a little bird. . . . They turned her and came back to the shop.

Merry Christmas for Captain Dick — that of 1801! He ran this car in and out of London several times at an aver- age speed of five miles an hour. But there was then no market for such an innovation, and Dick and his partner

14

The Turning Wheel

Vivian approached the end of their slim resources. In May, 1803, Trevithick thought he could sell one quarter interest in his patent for £10,000, but the deal fell through. His car- riage tore down a fence and was denied the road by pur- blind authority. The carriage was dismantled; the engine sold to operate a mill. Alas for dreams ! But within another year Captain Dick was ready to place upon the rails the first steam locomotive, and by so doing earn beyond cavil a secure fame.

England in the first decade of the nineteenth century was still a rural and rustic land, full of conservatives, rich and poor. The roads were not generally good, but the main roads were kept passable by toll-roads associations in which considerable capital was invested. The coaching interests and the toll-road interests coincided on one point at least, that newfangled vehicles should be discouraged.

First self-propelled vehicle to attain speed of ten miles per hour, 1810

These interests were sure to rise against a new form of highway transport which drew nearer practicability year by year. In 1811 Blenkinsop of Leeds made a practical appli- cation of steam power in transport by drawing thirty coal cars from Middletown to Leeds, three and a half miles, in one hour. Interest rose until hardly a technical magazine appeared without mention of some new vehicle or experi- ment. The Monthly Magazine (London) for November i, 1819, contains five items on self-propelled vehicles, mostly

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 15

hand- or foot-propelled in ingenious ways, and all prob- ably bone-shakers. But the extent of the interest in self- propelled vehicles in London can be seen in this sentence: "A steam carriage has been invented in Kentucky, of which word is eagerly awaited."

In 1821 Julius Griffiths led off, with a well made steam carriage, a line of these vehicles destined to become so numerous in the next few years that the highway problem they created caused a Parliamentary investigation.

In the primitive state of the art, inventors had not yet learned even the primary truth that driving wheels would give them enough traction, and that passengers could be safely carried on the same chassis as the engine. Like the locomotive, which from the first was a "drag" pulling other vehicles, many of the early steam carriages made no pro- vision for passengers, and these were accommodated in stagecoaches attached as trailers. Of the latter type was the Patent Steam Carriage of 1824, designed by W. H. James and produced by him with the aid of Sir James Anderson, Bart. It contained several features of novelty and long-continuing interest. James used four cylinders coupled to two crankshafts. Each pair of cylinders and each driving wheel was independent of the other, to avoid a compensating gear in turning corners. In a second vehicle, 1829, James forsook his original principles of design, "mistaking failure in detail for failure in principle," and produced a steam tractor more in accord with common practice.

While England was entering into a fury of experimenta- tion, there appeared in France, in 1828, a steam carriage by Pecqueur of Paris which Lavergne says contained the germ of all the vital mechanisms of the modern automobile, chief among these being a driving wheel geared to the rear axle, planet gearing, spring suspension, and a competent steering arrangement. What English invention lacked in these respects it made up for in aroused feeling among inventors, whose search for capital and public acclaim lashed them into furies of controversy against each other. It is impossible, at this distance in time, to sift the wheat from the chaff in the printed evidence of these broils.

16 The Turning Wheel

Sir Goldsworthy Gurney occupies the chief place in this literature of controversy. As a boy he had seen Trevithick's steam carriage and followed that lead by diligently pro- ducing a succession of coaches known as Gurney's steam carriages. He is said to have made, in 1829, the first long sustained journey by mechanical means, from London to Bath and return, a distance of 200 miles, at a speed of 15

Sir Goldsworthy Gurney's steam carriage, London to Bath, 1829

miles per hour. This record is challenged by a rival, how- ever: the picturesque soldier of fortune, Colonel Francis Maceroni. The Colonel, with a rival machine in hand, had fish of his own to fry.

This and many other jealousies were brought into the open at and immediately following the hearings of the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1831, one of the important milestones in the history of self-propelled vehicles, because England then led the world as an indus- trial nation, and the state of the art was presented to the Committee by the leading inventors and engineers. This Parliamentary inquiry seems to have been an honest attempt to discover how far the highways were likely to be injured by steam vehicles, and what promise mechanical transport held out to the nation. We will understand its importance if we recall that the new departure in transportation was under fire from several substantial interests: the alliance between turnpike associations and stagecoach operators, the widespread antipathy of a public always conservative

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 17

and in those years of Chartist discontent bitterly opposed to the introduction of machinery in all lines of work, and the newly arisen railroad interest. The first railroad for regular passenger and freight traffic, the Stockport and Darlington, had begun operations six years earlier. Other railroads had been opened; some of them were actually earning money, and one of them was in a position to pay a first dividend. With this record of earnings, capital gen- erally was for "clearing the track" of competition.

Almost from the moment when Trevithick put his first steam engine on the rails, British railroading had marched ahead, until, after only twenty years of trial, railroading had begun to pay. Against this notable progress, steam travel on the highways could produce nothing comparable. Steam on the highways had never earned a shilling, had killed some persons, and thrown whole countrysides into terror, and both the influential and the ignorant set their weight to hold the highways for horses and pedestrians. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, for instance, was mobbed and his engineer injured at a country fair.

In the ten years from 1828 to 1838 Walter Hancock built nine large steam carriages, of which six were used in carrying passengers. His buses were safe, dependable, and handsome. The public liked them, and Hancock took in large revenues but was always under heavy expense from pioneering experiments and exorbitant tolls. He testified that one of his coaches, in three months* service on the Pad- dington road, covered 4,200 miles and carried 12,761 per- sons, without mishap or serious delay. He offered to carry mails at the then high speed of 20 miles an hour, the usual mail speed, attained through relays of horses, being 12 miles an hour on the fastest routes. He is credited with being the first power-vehicle designer to use chain trans- mission and the first to make tight metallic joints. His wedged drive wheels are also considered important.

Not far behind Hancock in the point of impressing the Committee with reliability of operation was Sir Charles Dance. Against Dance it was alleged that his steamer was noisy and dangerous, dropping coals and driving horsemen and teams into the fields.

18 The Turning Wheel

Another interesting development of the Committee hear- ings was the reappearance of Captain Dick Trevithick, to say that he had a new boiler with a condenser attached, so that the same water could be used over and over.

With full information before it, the Select Committee of Commons reported that it was convinced that :

1. Carriages can be propelled by steam on common roads at 10 miles per hour.

2. That at this rate they have conveyed upwards of 14 persons per vehicle.

3. That their weight, including engine, fuel, water and attendants, may be under three tons.

4. That they can ascend and descend hills of considerable inclina- tion with safety and facility.

5. That they are perfectly safe for passengers.

6. That they are not (or need not be, if properly constructed) nuisances to the public.

7. That they will become a speedier and cheaper mode of convey- ance than carriages drawn by horses.

8. That as they admit of greater breadth of tire than other car- riages, and as the roads are not acted on so injuriously as by the feet of horses in common draught, such carnages will cause less wear of roads than coaches drawn by horses.

9. That rates of toll have been imposed on steam carriages which would prohibit their being used on several lines of road, were such charges to remain unaltered.

A clear victory, on paper, for the road steamer men! If Parliament had seen fit to follow the findings of the 1831 report with appropriate legislation, Great Britain would have led the world in motor transport, adding greatly to her already dominant industrial leadership. England had the inventors, the roads, the capital, and a clear lead in the practical operation of self-propelled vehicles, but she surrendered this advantage by placing the new industry under handicaps which became more and more severe until at last, by the Act of 1865, ^ was decreed that no power vehicle could use a highway unless it was preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag. Sometimes the rule was relaxed to let the red flag be carried by a man on horse- back, as is still done on Tenth Avenue, New York, in

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 19

advance of New York Central freight trains. This is a stock example of the restraint of speed and flexibility of transportation by insisting that the old methods shall con- trol the new.

Arbitrary discrimination in tolls was in itself almost enough to drive steam carriages from English highways; their use decreased greatly after 1836. Britain deliberately had turned her back on progress in an art where she was once ascendant. It has been said that an English Rip Van Winkle, falling asleep in 1831, would have awakened sixty years later in a world little further advanced, as respects highway transport, than that in which he fell asleep. The price Britain paid for this unjust interference which exerted state influence in favor of stagecoaches and railroads has been enormous in loss of trade and prestige. Because of this interference France and America, where government and public opinion both favored the new idea in transport, forged ahead. The French Academy honored inventors, and the French public was favorable, though still limiting high- way speed for self-propelled vehicles to four miles an hour in the country and two miles in town.

America at the very beginning of power transport en- couraged transport improvements in the highway field, falling into the errors of repressive control much later than England. Maryland early gave Oliver Evans the right to use its roads in his experiments. One of the first American steam carriages of record, which Thomas Blanchard brought out on the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1825, so far commended itself to the Massachusetts legis- lature that Blanchard secured an official endorsement; but he could find no buyers. The Kentucky vehicle which Eng- land was eager to hear about in 1819 seems to have dis- appeared from history, and we have but a faint trace of another, which one T. W. Walker of Edgar County, Illi- nois, late of Vincennes, Indiana, is said to have made and operated in 1824 or 1825. William T. James of New York City produced one steam carriage in 1829 and another in 1830. But whatever these vehicles were, we can be sure that they were applauded and went their way without official interference, because such interference would be of record.

20 The Turning Wheel

These American vehicles, like Evans' early efforts, en- countered another sort of handicap which was effective in discouragement — bad roads. America was still in the pioneer stage of development; few city streets were paved; in the country the roads were wretched, and even in the long-settled East they remained almost impassable in wet weather. This country of magnificent distances turned to railroads as an easy escape from mud.

The race for public favor and use between the steam railroaders and the steam highway school of transport ended in victory for the former in both Great Britain and America. There remained France, blessed with a splendid system of highways, a fertile inventive genius, and a sport- ing element both in the aristocracy with means to finance experiments and in a public which relished thrills.

In England mechanical transport had been pushed into the fields. From Worby's tractor in 1841 clear through the 'seventies there is a steady development of the steam trac- tor under the encouragement of certain great English landlords. There were also some notable developments in the highway field, but since use of the highways was so restricted, these were restricted to private courses or back roads, or else their owners were compelled to a "boot- leg" traffic, eluding the authorities. As might have been expected, various enthusiasts outwitted the authorities by using the roads illegally. A vehicle which has received a good deal of attention because of its "bootleg" operations was the Fly-by-Nlght, a steam carriage weighing nearly seven tons, built by W. O. Carrett of Carrett & Marshall, Leeds. After it was publicly exhibited and found of no legal use, Carrett gave it to Frederick Hodges of the Lon- don Distillery, under whose ownership it acquired its gay reputation and name. Filled with sporting characters, it was run at night in defiance of the authorities and in this way is said to have traveled about eight hundred miles in Kent and Surrey. After being summoned for excessive speeds, the owners equipped it with fire hose and gave their passengers brass helmets to wear, escaping in this way arrest at the hands of village constables. At length it was necessary to convert the Fly-by-Night into a slower-moving vehicle.

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 21

The advance of the mechanical arts in England during these trying years may be briefly indicated by listing four quite startling innovations. In 1833 Richard Roberts of Manchester applied differential gearing to a steam car- riage, which solved, in accordance with modern practice, the turning of corners, thereby escaping the necessity of having one wheel running loose on the turn, which could hardly be considered safe.

Far ahead of its time was William Barnett's contribu- tion to the internal combustion engine. In 1838 he invented a double-acting gas engine. Its single cylinder was vertically placed, and explosions occurred on either side of the piston.

Another astonishing invention, considering the fact that the self-exciting dynamo was not invented until 1871, was the electric vehicle produced by Robert Anderson of Aber- deen, Scotland, in 1839, apparently the first electric vehicle in the world. His carriage was driven by a primitive electric motor consisting of bars of iron on a drum. These were drawn around by electro-magnets, "probably on the principle of some old toys which had a star wheel to pro- duce the necessary make-and-break." Gibson thinks it was dependent upon intermittent primary cells.

England pioneered also, in the development of pneumatic tires; at least, Robert William Thompson was the first to make a clear patent specification of the pneumatic principle.

In the field of the explosive engine France assumed the lead after 1860, when Lenoir of Paris made a gas engine more practical than Barnett's English effort of twenty-two years earlier. Lenoir made history by igniting his explosive mixture with a spark produced through the use of an electric battery and an inductive coil. His engine started easily and was fairly quiet. Used to drive lathes, printing presses, and water pumps, it was the first gas engine to come into commercial use. In 1862 Lenoir placed one of his gas engines in a vehicle and, using street gas for fuel, success- fully drove from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont but was always handicapped by low speed and a narrow range of action.

The British, clinging manfully to steam in spite of the legal restrictions which pressed upon them more and more, created some notable machines in the decade of the 'sixties,

22 The Turning Wheel

being encouraged somewhat by the hope of export trade and the fond expectation that the road restrictions would be eased in their favor. Instead, however, the restrictions were tightened.

American interest lagged through the middle period, but Richard Dudgeon of New York built a steam carriage

Richard Dudgeon's steam carriage, New York, 1860

which richly deserves notice because of its unusual span of life. Put into storage in 1866, it was resurrected in 1903 and even then ran at ten miles an hour.

The early evolution of the steam car has been traced, and notice taken of the creation, almost stillborn as far as its in- fluence on inventive activity is concerned, of the first electric vehicle. To these two grand divisions a third was destined to be added and eventually to triumph over the others in popular approval and use. This was the car using petroleum or one of its derivatives which, after many trials, developed into the gasoline car of the present.

Various steps in the evolution of the internal combustion engine have been cited. In 1866 Otto and Langen of

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 23

Germany opened wide the door to the evolution of the modern high-speed engine by inventing their famous gas engine, a comprehensive improvement on Lenoir's, since it used only one half the fuel of its predecessor. In 1867 Otto and Langen were granted United States patents on improvements on three kinds of combustion engines : a two- cycle non-compression engine, a two-cycle compression engine for which the mixture was compressed outside the cylinders, and a four-cycle compression engine. The last named is the one of historic importance, as its cycle of charging, compression, explosion, and expulsion is still adopted. It was carried along from gas to oil by Gottlieb Daimler, an associate of Otto and Langen, whose petrol motor was the first to be manufactured in quantity.3

Nearly twenty years were required for Daimler to evolve his 1885 petrol engine from Otto's gas engine of 1866 but in the meantime inventors elsewhere were busy in other directions. Todd of England built a small steam carriage for two passengers. In the same year Charles Ravel of Paris attempted to propel vehicles with gas motors, and in this country Austin constructed a small car in Massa- chusetts which was exhibited along the Atlantic seaboard.

A year later, in 1871, Dr. J. N. Carhart of Racine, Wis- consin, built a steam buggy, certified to by J. D. Donald, Secretary of State of Wisconsin, under date of December 14, 1914. Dr. Carhart was assisted by his brother, H. S. Carhart, Professor of Physics at Northwestern University and later at the University of Michigan. Compared with the foreign machines of the same period the Carhart vehicle must be rated as a rather crude product. In par- ticular, it revealed the curse destined to beset American inventors for many years to come — that of viewing the "horseless carriage" as the only escape from the horse itself. For at least twenty years more, American inventors in the self-propelled vehicle field would be trying to fit engines into carriages of the general type and style to which

3See Chap. Ill for a further discussion of the evolution of gas and oil engines.

24 » The Turning Wheel

their prospective buyers were accustomed, instead of evolving designs better suited to carry their power plants.

The Carhart experiments seem to have aroused great local interest, for in 1875 the Wisconsin Legislature passed an act appropriating $10,000 as a bounty for the invention of a steam road wagon which would meet certain tests as to performance and durability. This act was amended sev- eral times, but $5,000 was actually awarded in 1879.

In the 'seventies France began to move definitely toward assured leadership. In Paris Amadee Bollee built a number of steam omnibuses which enjoyed a long and profitable life. Other French achievements of the late 'sixties and early 'seventies are Tellier's ammonia engine, and the com- pression (not internal compression, however) motors of Brothier and Carre. Tellier received a United States patent on an ammonia engine for road work in 1871.

Siegfried Markus of Vienna, at an isolated point as re- spects the art in general, constructed a petrol car, but some doubts are expressed by Lavergne and others that it ever ran. Markus is sometimes credited with building the first automobile in 1869; elsewhere the date is given as 1877. Like so many other claims to first position, this one would seem to rest on a narrow definition of the word "automo- bile," yet even that word had not yet been invented. His experiments, however, no doubt stimulated the activities of men in more favorable locations.

In 1876 George B. Brayton, an Englishman living in Boston, exhibited a petrol engine at the Philadelphia Cen- tennial which attracted a good deal of attention, as it seemed to represent a distinct advance in American eyes. Described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the first engine to use "fuel oil under compression instead of gas," in the end it proved to be inferior to the four-cycle engine then being developed by Daimler in Germany. Its chief sig- nificance for us lies in the fact that George Baldwin Selden, a patent attorney and inventor of Rochester, New York, whose keen mind foresaw a demand for small self- propelled vehicles using oil fuel, also perceived in what way the basic difficulties involved could be solved. Selden sent an agent to Philadelphia to study Brayton's engine and, on the

Evolution of Self-propelled Vehicles 25

basis of using a similar engine as motive power, drew up the specifications which accompanied his application May 8, 1879, for the famous Selden patent which was finally granted to him in 1895.

The evolution of self-propelled vehicles has been traced from the first mention in history down to the year 1879, a dramatic date in the American automobile industry. Steam, the first motive power of artificial origin, came close to successful application on highways in England before being blocked by adverse legislation. The distant beginnings of the internal combustion engine and the beginnings of the evolution of the oil or gasoline engine by descent from the gas engine, have been noted. While it is impossible to allocate credit accurately, the names of the chief contribu- tors are here recorded.4

These individuals and many others worked in an atmos- phere beset by difficulties to an extent which moderns can scarcely comprehend. Under the circumstances, the wonder is not that it took centuries to master the art of propelling wheeled vehicles by power plants, but rather that the in- ventive spirit persevered in these men so strongly that the evolution of the motor car proceeded as swiftly as it did. Many of them sacrificed their fortunes as well as their lives to the great task of advancing in some degree man's mastery over space and time.

The inventors of the 'seventies could see that the rail- roads, despite their enormous gains in mileage, speed, and dependability, had not solved the transportation problem. Tied to tracks of steel, the railway lacked the flexibility necessary to make rapid transit available on the highways leading everywhere. Away from the rails, land transport was still geared to the horse, as it had been from the days of the Pharaohs. Goods moved swiftly by rail from depot to depot, but away from depots to consumer they were sub- ject to the ancient lag of the Dark Ages. In particular, rural America lay in a quagmire of mud at certain seasons, and even under good weather conditions its beauties could be ex- plored by few city dwellers. Vast regions where railroading

4For other significant dates and names in the evolution of self-propelled vehicles, see Appendix I.

26 The Turning Wheel

could not hope to pay a dividend remained in a backward condition, almost untouched by the forces of progress which steam locomotion had brought to the more favored areas.

The railroads also had created a serious social problem not foreseen in the early stages of their development. The advantages which they offered for residence and manufac- turing could be reaped only near their stations and par- ticularly at junction points. As a result, cities grew to enormous size, were densely overcrowded, and slum life became an appalling reality. To relieve the congestion which rail transport had created, other rail systems — first cable cars and later electric trolleys — were placed in opera- tion on city streets, but these were never entirely effective because they reproduced, in a small way, the same influences which the railroads brought into the situation in a larger way. Suburbs so served were strung out thinly along lines of transit with large open areas between them.

The man of 1879 could see, as the man of 1829 could not see, that humanity needed more than ever a mode of transportation more flexible than anything tied to rails and faster than the horse. The railroad had extended tremen- dously the range of the individual and the productivity of society, but clearly it did not satisfy completely the instinc- tive demand of mankind for greater freedom of action and a wider radius of effective toil, trade, travel, acquaintance- ship, and understanding.

In the Lynds's Middletown, the most complete picture of the evolution of an American community, an old man who had entered Indiana on an ox cart is quoted as saying that he can put the cause of social change in his day in four letters — "A-U-T-O." The gasoline automobile in 1879 made its first appearance in American history, not as a practical vehicle, but as a definite, compelling, and driving idea under the spell of which many men would labor shrewdly and de- votedly to compass its reality.

Chapter III THE FORMATIVE PERIOD: 1879-1899

A

I/THOUGH American inventors hopefully built steam carnages of strange design at intervals from 1800 on, it remained for George Baldwin Selden in 1879 to catch the first confused vision, on this side of the water, of the modern gasoline motor car. A shrewd lawyer, Selden kept his application alive from 1879 until 1895, when he secured a sweeping patent — under which millions were collected from automobile manufacturers until, in 1911, its broad scope was limited and held not infringed by the actual types of motor vehicles then in use. (Columbia Motor Car Com- pany vs. C. A. Duerr & Co., 184 Fed. 493.) All General Motors cars until then were manufactured under licenses from the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufac- turers having been formed to exploit the Selden Patent. The litigation ending this monopoly is the most famous in Ameri- can automobile history.

The period from Selden's application of 1879 to tne founding of Olds Motor Works in 1899 measures the birth pangs of the gasoline automobile in America. At the begin- ning of that period the French were leading the van of automotive progress; at its close America had caught up and was poised for adventure in quantity production.

Economic needs have a way of permeating society, so that it is a commonplace of the history of invention to find minds far distant from one another in time and space, wrestling with the same problems and independently pro- ducing results roughly identical. In the long and intricate

27

28 The Turning Wheel

evolution of the automobile this was many times the case. Advances in other mechanical arts had to be tried and tested by time before they could be adapted to transporta- tion. The older industrial countries necessarily provided the background for the beginning of the automobile's march to assured success.

Since the internal combustion engine is the heart of the modern automobile, its development is of prime interest. The chief American name is that of Drake, who in 1855 introduced incandescent metal as an ignition agent for gaseous mixtures. Lenoir's double-acting gas engine, fired by an electric spark, came into practical use. Four hundred of these engines were in use in Paris in 1865. They were quiet and smooth in action but expensive in fuel consump- tion. With the year 1867, when Otto and Langen intro- duced their free-piston engine at the Paris Exposition, the gas engine approached full utility. By 1876 Dr. Otto had applied the cycle of operations proposed earlier by de Rochas; this cycle, now known as the Otto cycle, was worked out independently because de Rochas never brought his ideas to execution, and in the meantime practical dif- ficulties in the way of completion along his lines had been overcome.

The affinity between gas and oil engines is, of course, close, the vapor being produced from oil in the latter in- stead of being present as constant gas as in the former. The first practical oil engine is credited to Hock of Vienna in 1870, but his product was not a commercial success. Bray- ton's oil engine, working on the constant pressure system without explosion, is said to have been the first of this type to use oil instead of gas.

It seems impossible to determine precisely who first used an oil fuel to drive a motor vehicle. Gibson, a considerable authority, says that Lawson of England invented an engine in 1880 which was driven by the explosion of gas prepared from gasoline stored in a receptacle carried on the vehicle, which was a tricycle. Worby-Beaumont is inclined to credit the priority, at least as far as actual propulsion of a vehicle by an oil motor is concerned, to Edward Butler, who in- vented a three-wheeled motor tricycle, the Petrocycle, using

The Formative Period

29

benzine or benzoline. This machine was invented in 1883, proved in 1884, and exhibited in 1885. The motor had double-acting cylinders coupled direct to a single power wheel, and burned vapor of benzoline, which was exploded electrically. A three-wheeled oil motor carriage by Knight is said by some English authorities to have been the first

First motorcycle — oil motor

oil motor carriage actually to run. At first benzoline was used as the fuel, but later the engine was adapted to ordi- nary lamp petroleum.

In France the early 'eighties saw the earnest efforts of a few petrol enthusiasts to enter a transportation field where steam-power vehicles were at their highest stage of development under the leadership of Comte de Dion and his associates, Bouton and Trepardoux, later manufactur- ing as De Dion, Bouton & Cie. The further progress of steam was assured when Leon Serpollet, in 1888—89, in- vented his "flash generator," the capillary water boiler known by his name. This improvement gave steam a new lease of life on highways, and led to the use of smaller

30 The Turning Wheel

steam cars of which, during the next decade, the White and Stanley were the first American examples.

In 1883, Delamare-DeBouteville, borrowing an idea from Lenoir, constructed a gas tricycle which used illu- minating gas. A year later DeBouteville joined with Malandin in building a petrol car which the French claim was the first to operate.

The year 1885 furnishes material for what is still a bitter controversy, with traces of nationalist feeling as be- tween France and Germany. In that year Gottlieb Daimler invented his famous petrol engine in which the vapor from oil was burned in the same cycle worked out by Otto for his gas engine.

With Gottlieb Daimler's appearance in the internal com- bustion field we approach the significant application of the internal combustion engine to the differentialized wheel- and-axle, which has given us the modern motor car. Until 1883, when Daimler conceived the construction of small high-speed engines with light moving parts, the various oil and gas engines were of heavy construction, rotating at 150 to 200 revolutions a minute. He attained 800 to 1,000 revolutions a minute without great sacrifice of durability and smoothness.

The French, however, have put forward the claim of Fernand Forest, a humble but excellent mechanic, who built a four-cylinder motor in 1885. The 1885 motors of both Daimler and Forest seem to have done excellent work, but Daimler's came into commercial use in 1890 when 350 were manufactured and, throughout, Daimler was far more influential than Forest. The latter deserves, however, an honorable niche in the annals of automobile invention, not only for the work he did on motors, but also for the im- provements which he made in carbureters. Apparently without question he should be credited with the first water jacket constructed to warm the carbureter.

In Germany, Daimler's chief rival was Carl Benz, who put out a gasoline tricycle in 1885 which, like all of Benz's work, was strongly built and satisfactory in use. He seems always to have been a little ahead of Daimler in putting the gasoline engine into road work, for in 1886 he matched

The Formative Period 31

Daimler's "bone-shaker" with a car containing several highly progressive features — a device allowing variable speeds and an automatic control of the gas supply through a clutch lever operating a stop-cock. This car developed fifteen miles per hour. The Benz car of 1886 is sometimes spoken of as the first gasoline motor car, but this can hardly be taken literally, although it was certainly a great advance on its predecessors in design and dependability. Daimler soon followed with a four-wheel motor car, but his first efforts in that direction were not as successful as those of Benz. There seems to be no clear warrant for the statement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Daimler "ran for the first time a motorcar propelled by a petrol engine." Daimler certainly had the correct motive means well in hand by 1883, even if he did not apply it to a motor car until 1886.

Daimler's light and fast engine thrust itself through the field of invention as an earthquake heaves a new mountain into view. M. Levassor, of Panhard & Levassor, secured the French patent right from Daimler and, in adapting it to highway use, fixed many of the trends which have made the automobile what it is today. The influence of cycle design on the French inventive mind freed French inventors from the obsession of carriage design which dominated early American and English efforts — the stagecoach in England, and the buggy in America. Levassor placed his engine in front, with the axis of the crankshaft parallel to the side members of the frame.

The drive was taken through a clutch to a set of reduction gears and thence to a differential gear on a countershaft from which the road wheels were driven by chains. With all recent modification of details, the combination of clutch, gear-box and transmission remains unaltered, so that to France, in the person of M. Levassor, must be given the honor of having led in the development of the motorcar.

This solemn verdict of Encyclopaedia Britannica seems en- tirely justified. America's early effort to use the Daimler engine in automobiles was made by William Steinway on

32 The Turning Wheel

Long Island in 1888. Steinway secured the American rights and spent large sums on mechanical equipment, but had little success.

To this preeminence of France in the history of effective motor-car design certain conditions which America at that period lacked were contributing factors:

1 I ) A magnificent system of highways which encouraged travel, especially cycling, which in turn led to an efficient machine-shop industry.

(2) An open and friendly attitude on the part of the French population and authorities which permitted those highways to be used without legal restrictions such as dis- couraged experiment and adaptation in England.

(3) The approval by wealthy French sportsmen and aristocrats, who from the beginning gave the automobile both financial and moral support.

In England the development of self-propelled vehicles had been greatly retarded by adverse legislation and the hostility of the population. Here in America it was re- tarded by wretched highways, the indifference of finan- ciers, and to some extent by the hostility of the public, particularly of the farmers who were later to become the chief beneficiaries of the flexible transportation. Also, the hard times of the early 'nineties introduced a discouraging economic factor into the American situation.

For these reasons and others, America lagged behind Europe during the important ten years following the French application of Daimler's engine to road transport, but nevertheless there had been substantial American prog- ress. Through the growing use of stationary internal com- bustion engines, and the design and manufacture of marine engines, both American inventors and a portion of the public worked slowly toward the predestined goal. The American vehicles which took the road were chiefly pro- pelled by steam, and down to the late 'eighties they showed little if any advance over English "steamers" of a much earlier day.

A direct result of English influence would seem to be the four-wheeled steam car produced by John Clegg, an excel- lent mechanic, English born and trained, and his son,

The Formative Period 33

Thomas J., in the village machine shop at Memphis, Michigan, which the younger Clegg still operates. Thomas Clegg describes this vehicle as driven by a single cylinder, steam being produced in a tubular boiler carried in the rear of the car. It had seating capacity for four persons, includ- ing driver and stoker. Cannel coal was the fuel. Leather belts were used to transmit power, and spring adjustments on them provided enough play to let the car negotiate corners.

R. E. Olds's first horseless carriage (steam) , constructed 1886—87

This machine is significant as the first self-propelled vehicle on record as being built in Michigan, now and for many years the leading state in the Union in the manu- facture of automobiles. The reasons for Michigan's rise in the automobile world will be examined later. The great drive of the Wolverine State to leadership in the industry presently would begin, but the Clegg "steamer" neverthe- less created hardly a ripple of excitement beyond a twenty- mile circle of rural countryside which it disturbed with its journeys through its short life of six months. Built in the winter of 1884-85, it ran perhaps five hundred miles in some thirty tests during the succeeding summer, its longest trip being to Emmet and return, a distance of fourteen miles.

34 The Turning Wheel

In 1887 Ransom E. Olds, who with his father Pliny Olds was engaged in manufacturing gasoline engines for farm use, drove on the streets of Lansing, Michigan, a three- wheeled steam vehicle. Two years later he brought out another "steamer" with a vertical boiler. The Olds steamers will be discussed later.

The three-cornered struggle between oil-and-gasoline, electricity, and steam was being waged all over the world and would not be settled for another fifteen years. No- where was it waged more hotly than in America. Each of the three types had its advantages and disadvantages. Steam gave smooth acceleration, but it carried the handicap of de- lay required for generation beside the difficulty of carry- ing enough fuel for a long trip. Electric propulsion meant quiet and ease of operation but had the disadvantages of extreme weight, limited radius of operation, and long waits for battery charging. Oil or gasoline as fuel meant a quick- starting vehicle and large reserve power in comparison to weight, yet the early vehicles of this type were noisier and more complicated in their operation than the others. While they possessed a wider range of action and more adapt- ability to road conditions, these could not always be realized on because of mechanical difficulties. They did possess, how- ever, two supreme advantages which tended, as design im- proved, to give them supremacy. The fuel they used was rather widely distributed from the start, and this distribu- tion could be and was easily expanded, so that nearly every country store could become a supply station for motor cars as soon as demand increased. And, secondly, they could be built at a price to fit a wide range of pocketbooks, a fact of supreme moment in those early years when the measure of transportation investment was the cost of buy- ing and maintaining a horse and carriage.

In 1890 the Olds Gasoline Engine Works, parent com- pany of the oldest unit of General Motors, was incorpo- rated at Lansing, Michigan, for $30,000. The experience of R. E. Olds in producing gasoline engines there would turn him soon toward automobiles so driven. For the present, however, Mr. Olds continued his experiments with steam power. In 1891 he produced the steam horseless

The Formative Period 35

carriage with a float boiler, which machine he sold to India, thereby consummating the first recorded sale of an Amer- ican self-propelled vehicle.

In spite of "hard times," or perhaps because of the adversities of those times, inventors in transport every- where were busily at work bringing out novelties which

R. E. Olds' s first factory, River Street, Lansing, Michigan

soon were recognized as significant. In 1891 Thomas B. Jeffrey patented the clincher rim. In the following year Charles E. Duryea and his brother Frank built and ran at Springfield, Massachusetts, the first successfully operated American gasoline car.

This car is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. The date given is 1892—93; apparently the car received pre- liminary road trials in 1892 but was not definitely intro- duced to the public until 1893. It weighs 700 pounds, is propelled by a 4 horsepower motor weighing 120 pounds and is fittingly described as a "horseless buggy." It set a style, as well as inaugurating an industry. America was so thoroughly a horse country, back from the railroads, that for years American manufacturers favored carriage styles. It is said that the first body delivered to Packard was equipped with a whip-socket.

Acutely aware that the American market did not want power cycles, American producers followed Duryea's ex- ample of the "horseless buggy," paying little heed to the

36 The Turning Wheel

lead given by Panhard & Levassor in Paris in creating a design fundamentally different from both cycle and car- riage. Levassor revealed the full possibilities of present- day automobile design in which a style carriage is moved by a power plant placed ahead of it on a chassis, but Amer- ican manufacturers for years to come would still be re- producing buggies as closely as possible and hiding their power plants in narrow spaces beneath the seats. Of course, Panhards were expensive; perhaps no country lacking a rich and sporting aristocracy such as that of France could have provided a broad enough market for them. In Amer- ica the inventors strove from the first for cheaper cars, and while their initial designs were faulty, their goal was one which has been realized so fully that the automobile is in possession of the common people here to an extent matched nowhere else in the world.

Elwood Haynes in 1894 and R. E. Olds in 1895 pro- duced gasoline-powered cars, the latter the forerunner of the famous curved-dash runabout which in a few years was destined to become the first American car produced in quan- tity. The two-seater Oldsmobile in the National Museum, while highly interesting as a specimen car of the times (1897), lacks commercial significance, as it was the only one of its kind produced.

Automobile interest the world over was tremendously stimulated by the first Paris— Rouen race for motor cars in June, 1894, and the Paris— Bordeaux race the following year. One result of these races was the filing of 500 appli- cations for patents on all varieties of self-propelled vehicles at the United States Patent Office. In the 1898 race, the winning Panhard covered 726 miles at an average speed of fifteen miles an hour.

America owes its initiation into automobile racing and red-hot automobile news to H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald, who offered prizes for the first motor vehicle contest ever held in America. After being postponed, the race was finally run at Chicago on Thanks- giving Day, 1895, under road conditions which provided a stern test for the entrants. Snow and slush filled the streets, which were soon churned into "a slough of mud"

The Formative Period

37

by the narrow tires of the competing vehicles. The storm gave the public excellent proof of the superiority of gaso- line-power over horses, steam, or electricity. The winning Duryea "horseless buggy" covered the 54.36 miles of the muddy course in seven and one half hours, despite stops and accidents which caused sixteen miles of extra travel.

The horseless buggy, one of Charles E. Duryea s first vehicles, l8g3

Noteworthy is the fact that although all three motive powers — steam, electricity, and gasoline — contested, the gasoline cars were most numerous and finished one, two, and three. Morris & Salom's famous Electrobat, though given a prize for the best showing in. preliminary tests, could not cope with the harsh weather and severe going. Duryea's victory and the good, showing of other gasoline-type cars helped to fix in the American mind the truth that the most flexible and dependable automobile, in all weathers and on all roads, was the gasoline car.

38 The Turning Wheel

So impressed was the race's sponsor by the achievements of the day that he declared his faith that, in five years more, Chicago streets would show five automobiles for every horse. Thanks to the Chicago race the American auto- mobile had been launched as "news," and it has continued to be news ever since.

In both the Times-Herald Chicago competition, and the French races of the 'nineties, gasoline cars had proved their superiority over both steam and electric automobiles in those qualities most suitable to the American scene. They started more quickly than steam cars and could deliver more power per pound than the electrics. Since the fuel they consumed could be found at almost any country store, their cruising radius was limited only by the condition of the roads, and the difficulty of making repairs when wear and tear proved too much for their mechanisms. All in all, the "horseless buggies" of the 'nineties were seen to be rough- and-ready performers capable of meeting the severe tests of wretched American roads well enough to augur their future ascendency.

In England, Wallis-Tayler might say that steam would eventually carry the day against gasoline and electricity,1 but America even then was engaged in a fury of develop- ment destined to overturn his solemn verdict. Between 1895 and 1900 top speed for gasoline cars rose from fifteen miles an hour to nearly fifty, and problems of supply and repair were being solved. Many companies had sprung up, searching for the key to market success.

Looking backward, it is easy to see the main outlines of their merchandising problem, but to the pioneer companies the situation no doubt had its puzzles. There was an avid public interest in the new means of transport, but the country was still depressed as a result of the bitterly hard times of the early 'nineties. As cars one by one appeared, they were bought by rich folk of a sporting and adventurous

1<(There can be little doubt that the vast majority of people would prefer a smooth-running, reliable steam engine for use as the propelling medium of a pleasure or light business carriage, to the evil smelling, dangerous, wasteful, and at best uncertain and unreliable engine heretofore chiefly em- ployed for that purpose in motors of recent construction." A. J. Wallis- Tayler in Motor Cars or Power Carriages for Common Roads, 1897.

The Formative Period

39

turn of mind who sometimes used them ruthlessly on the highways, rousing the opposition of pedestrians and horse drivers, whose steeds were affrighted by the noisy novelty of the few cars they met. Unless automobiles could come into common use, so that an individual of average means could look forward to possessing one in the future, there was danger that the small boy's "Get a horse" would be translated into restrictions of the sort which had blasted English enterprise two generations before.

"Horsey* Horseless Carriage" designed by Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Michigan, to keep Dobbin from shying on the road

The extent of this hostility against automobiles in the late 'nineties, especially marked in the rural sections, can be indicated by relating the fate of the first motorcar introduced into South Dakota. This was a "home-made" horseless wagon planned and assembled by Louis Green- ough and Harry Adams of Pierre, using a two-cylinder Wolverine gasoline motor and a special Elkhart wagon, in which the engine was housed under the rear seat and power transmitted by chains to the rear axle. It could carry eight persons and altogether was a competent vehicle, which that then frontier state might well have been proud to wel- come as a home product. But such was the public opposition that Greenough and Adams were refused the right to carry passengers for hire at county fairs, which was their only

40 The Turning Wheel

prospect of securing prompt returns on their investment. At Mitchell they were refused permission even to bring their machine inside the town limits. The Press and Dakotan voiced the public verdict when it said: "It is a dead moral certainty that that infernal machine will frighten horses and endanger the lives of men, women, and chil- dren. "2 So the checkmated pioneers of motoring gave up their efforts at a time when it was painfully clear to them that motor cars would be an unmixed blessing in that state of vast distances. Like hostility manifested itself in many other parts of the country.

Obviously, this popular distrust of the motor car had to be overcome, and the way to break it down was to make automobiles so common that thousands could drive them and more thousands ride in them daily; then horses and humans alike would grow accustomed to their passage; then the farmer and the working-man alike would learn to look upon the automobile, not as a rich man's toy, but as a convenience which he might hope some day to possess. The conversion of the populace would begin as soon as any con- siderable number of car owners started taking their neigh- bors for rides. After even one ride the small boy would be on fire to own a car when he grew to be a man.

Quantity production, it is now clear, was the key not only to the financial success of the industry but also to winning the public mind away from its traditional enmity. Only through quantity production of a single model would costs be reduced sufficiently to bring the automobile within reach of the average American. A car so produced had to be small and strong and simple. The first manufacturer who could bring a car of that kind to the public "at a price" would score an immediate financial advantage and at the same time clear the way for the whole industry to surge toward large proportions.

The first company to take that most important step was the Olds Motor Works, the oldest unit of the General Motors Corporation, with its curved-dash runabout. The evolution of that car and of the company which produced it appears in the next chapter.

^Encyclopedia of South Dakota.

Chapter IV OLDSMOBILE: FIRST "QUANTITY" CAR

A

s THE twentieth century drew near, the prospect of high fortune for those manufacturers who could build automobiles in quantity rode scores of ambitious men like a witch, stirring them to extraordinary efforts, sleepless nights, ceaseless planning. Their customers, the devoted "automobiliers" as the phrase of the day ran, were scarcely less excited. They had endured the jibes of a prejudiced populace; many of them had. been denied the use of streets and highways and had cheerfully braved arrest to win freedom of movement for their fellows, as Dave Hennen Morris and Augustus Post had. done in Central Park, New York City. Bold citizens who caught a glimpse of the future not only braved the clutches of the law and the wrath of mobs; they also did volunteer publicity work for the cause of motordom. Mr. Post was one of the leaders in. this field, assisting in organizing and publicizing many historic con- tests, including the famous Glidden tours, carefully planned long-distance endurance runs, annually featured from 1905 to 1911, for a trophy presented by C. J. Glidden of Boston. Foreign observers returned to praise American initiative. In London, John Munro describes the encouragement given to motor-car manufacturers in France and concludes that the French army will soon be motorized. With clairvoyant sense, he foresees the "tank": "We are in a measurable distance of the ironclad on shore." England was awakening from lethargy caused by earlier legal restraints; London,

41

42

The Turning Wheel

he observes, has an Automobile Club, to match those of the United States, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Italy; while an American, James Gordon Bennett, has pre- sented a cup to the Automobile Club of France, to be com- peted for yearly by cars representing clubs from both sides

The Glldden Trophy

•

of the ocean, the first race to be held in France in mid- summer, 1900, over a course of 550 to 650 kilometers, in 150 kilometer stages. The French Academy had even in- vented an enduring name for the self-propelled vehicle — "automobile."

American developments might be praised by foreign writers but the American reporters on the state of the art were a little apologetic. Writes Ray Stannard Baker in McClure's for July, 1899:

Never before has Yankee genius and enterprise created an important business interest in so short a time. And yet the motor vehicle in

Oldsmobile 43

America is in its babyhood. . . . Here it has hardly passed the stage of promotion and promise.

Notwithstanding this modesty, the achievements re- corded in the same article might be considered excuse for letting the eagle scream:

Five years ago there were not thirty self-propelled carriages in prac- tical use anywhere in the world. A year ago there were not thirty in America. And yet between the first of January and the first of May, 1899, companies with the enormous aggregate capital of $388,000,000 have been organized in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia for the sole purpose of manufacturing these new vehicles.

At least eighty establishments . . . 200 types of vehicles, with nearly half as many methods of propulsion.

A motor ambulance is in operation in Chicago ; motor trucks are at work in several cities; a motor gun carriage will be ready for army use in the summer.

The Santa Fe railroad has ordered a number of horseless coaches for an Arizona mountain route.

A trip of 720 miles has actually been made in a gasoline carriage (Cleveland to New York), and an enthusiastic automobile traveler is now on his way from New England to San Francisco.

Through most of the articles of the time runs the horse motif. Some might lament his passing, as Chauncey M. Depew did in Horseless Age, 1899: "As to the ordinary, everyday horse, he is certainly doomed." Of course Mr. Depew put no time limit on his prophecy and it may yet come to pass, but on the record Dobbin has outlived the magazine containing his sentence of doom. Other writers rejoiced in the prospect of clean, horseless streets. The statisticians of the new industry worked out the compara- tive costs of hay and gasoline, harness and tires. Their general conclusions, that motors were as economical as horses, seem a little over-optimistic when one observes their neglect of depreciation and replacement, which was then even more of an item than at present.

The truth that here was a new transportation tool and not merely an improvement on the horse, had not dawned

44 The Turning Wheel

even on the industry itself. Its leaders thought of the auto- mobile as making headway only through putting horses out of work, whereas the fact is that the number of auto- mobiles increased many times before the horse population showed signs of falling off. What happened was this: a more efficient use of human time lifted the productivity of the country, bettered man's economic life, and increased the wealth of the nation, so that the new means of transport more than paid its way without prematurely displacing the equipment already available.

Even the motor poets were obsessed by the horse; a popular verse in praise of the motor-car, declared:

It doesn't shy at papers as they blow along the street; It cuts no silly capers on the dashboard with its feet; It doesn't paw the sod up all around the hitching post; It doesn't scare at shadows as a man would at a ghost; It doesn't gnaw the manger and it doesn't waste the hay. Nor put you into danger when the brass bands play.

These are virtues, but after all they are negative virtues. The qualities which gave the automobile a chance to enter quantity production, after its long experimental evolution, were positive virtues — power to carry persons and goods faster than they had ever been carried on highways since the dawn of time, ability to overcome bad highways until better ones could be built, resistance to shock and stress, high mobility in rural areas where speed had never been applied before, saving precious time, widening the individual radius of action, making groups more effective and co- hesive, life more various, thrilling, and productive. These advantages were destined not only to substitute the auto- mobile for the horse on highways, but also to change Amer- ica into a nation of travelers moving on ever improving highways at an ever increasing tempo toward wider and wider horizons, higher and higher standards of living.

Public interest was rising: how could it be maintained, exploited, brought to bank? Through lower prices, obvi- ously. Yet costs and prices could only be reduced by increas- ing volume. But who dared to commit himself to a quantity

Oldsmobile

45

production program which would absorb all one's capital and wreck its originator if the goods could not be sold? There seemed no escape from that circle except gradual enlargement of volume, an opinion expressed by one of the most ardent automobile advocates, W. H. Maxwell, Jr., in Metropolitan Magazine for November, 1900. To grasp

R. E. OLDS

Father of the Oldsmobile

the opportunity required high courage; to win the leader- ship required shrewdness as well. There was only one man in America who, in 1899, refused to wait any longer for the "gradual enlargement of the volume of business." While others pushed on bit by bit, Olds Motor Works made the leap into the dark.

Their take-off for the great leap was Detroit. Various explanations have been given for Detroit's position in the automobile world, but the one that seems conclusive is this : In Detroit, the Oldsmobile early proved a money-maker;

46 The Turning Wheel

hence, the pioneer manufacturer could find capital support there easier than elsewhere.

To accomplish quantity production under reasonably good management was to reap profits. Nothing else serves to commend an industry to a community as swiftly as a good earning record. Detroit early became automobile- minded, and for that the City of the Straits has the Olds Motor Works to thank, since it was the Oldsmobile which demonstrated before any other American car that auto- mobiles could be made and sold in quantity, and fortunes reaped from their manufacture. Once that demonstration had been made, Detroit put its money on the automobile, and in so doing began its population climb from the eleventh city in the United States in 1900 to the fourth city in 1930.

Another factor in Michigan's development as an auto- mobile center was its location on navigable water. Olds, Buick, and Leland — three pioneers of the industry — made gasoline engines for marine use before turning to produc- tion of motor cars.

Bringing Oldsmobile to Detroit was in itself the result of capital investment built upon an astonishing faith in the new vehicle of transportation, and in a wealthy old man's confidence in a young man, poor in purse, but rich in ambi- tion and practical ideas.

The young man was Ransom E. Olds, born in Geneva, Ohio, in 1864. With his father, Pliny S. Olds, a competent mechanic, he came to Lansing, Michigan, and though little more than a lad worked in his father's machine shop in River Street, where among other products was developed a gasoline engine for farm and marine use. By the time he was twenty-one R. E. Olds had saved $300, and putting that into the business, along with a note for $800 at 8 per- cent interest, he became a half-owner of his father's busi- ness. In 1892 he bought out the balance of his father's interest and incorporated the Olds Gasoline Engine Works for $30,000, S. L. Smith being a considerable stockholder.

Two ideas possessed Olds. One was to improve the gaso- line engine : to that end he invented a new type which drew gasoline directly into the cylinder. It has since been dis- carded in favor of engines using air-and-gasoline mixtures.

Oldsmobile 47

No matter: Olds was on his way. The other idea was that of putting power behind wheels. In 1887 he had produced and driven down the streets of Lansing a three-wheeled steam-power horseless carriage, arising early to avoid shocking the citizens and scaring the horses. Lansing was then the quiet capital of an agricultural state. The city's population was only 2,000; there were no paved streets, and there were those in the community who objected to having their roads used by horseless carriages.

Olds went on from his three-wheeler to other steamers of the more practical four-wheel type, reaching depend- ability in that field in 1893. One of his steamers, equipped with a flash boiler of Olds's designing, became known all over the world through an article in the Scientific American, so that its fame reached even to India, resulting in its sale to the Francis Times Company of Bombay, India — cer- tainly the first sale of an American self-propelled vehicle for export and perhaps the first American-made passenger car usold for value." This transaction antedates by at least five years the Winton sale usually listed as the first Amer- ican sale of an American motor car, and in the meantime, Duryea had probably sold some of his "horseless buggies." As we have seen, a number of steam cars had been pro- duced in the United States earlier, but no authentic record of a bona fide earlier sale than this one is available.

A Lansing lad, by name Roy Chapin, later a notable figure in the automobile world and Secretary of the United States Department of Commerce, running after one of Olds's vehicles then and there decided that he wanted to be an automobile man. The same decision was being made by thousands of the most progressive youths of his generation. A little later they would be found energizing the young industry with their superb vitality, until the "automobile game" became the phrase describing the business in its most energetic and resourceful stride.

But after all, young R. E. Olds's experiences with steam were a side issue. His livelihood and his dearest dreams were centered in gasoline engines. After four years of struggle with debt, he finally stood clear with enough work- ing capital to feel safe. The business prospered enough to

48

The Turning Wheel

First Oldsmobile, 1897, now on display at Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.

afford a margin to finance experiments. While these ran chiefly to steam, it was inevitable that a manufacturer of gasoline engines would eventually abandon steam cars for gasoline cars. In actually selling a steam car to India, Olds foresaw market possibilities; but concluded that the future belonged to gasoline rather than steam. As he said years later, "The gasoline engines were our bread-and-butter business, and most people thought the car was just a toy, but I knew that the car was the big venture."

This reasoning was built on hard experience with steam cars. He knew that boiler troubles would eliminate the "steamer" as a popular favorite, as soon as gasoline cars could be simplified. While inexperienced in electrics, he realized they could not cope with the wretched roads of the American countryside; and, hence, could not capture the market which arose in his imagination. So he set to work to apply the gasoline engine to road transportation, as sev- eral others were doing in other parts of the country.

Oldsmobile

49

Facsimile of minutes of directors' meeting, August 21, 1897, authorizing construction of first Oldsmobile

Olds worked hard to get a car ready for the Chicago race, but failed to complete it in time. However, he states that it was finished before the end of 1895, and adds these details: "This car had high wheels with one-and-one-half inch rubber tires. The engine formed the reach and was carried on the running gear."

The work of putting Michigan on the automobile map as the first quantity producer of gasoline cars began in 1895 with Mr. Olds as the chief figure, somewhat assisted by Frank G. Clark, whose father owned a Lansing carriage factory. Mr. Clark, interviewed in 1922, states that he and Mr. Olds worked together on the first Oldsmobile which appeared in 1897 and is now in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. This car was the fruit of two years of ex- periments conducted chiefly after their regular hours of labor. Mr. Clark claims to have built the body, and testifies that the front axle was made in the carriage shop and that he and Mr. Olds worked together on the spring suspension and drive. The correctness of this narration at all points

50 The Turning Wheel

is questioned by Mr. Olds, but the appearance of Mr. Clark's name as the owner of 127 shares in the company which Mr. Olds soon formed to promote the new car, in- dicates that there was collaboration of a fruitful kind. However, Mr. Clark soon left the venture, and to Mr. Olds goes the credit of making a commercial success of the enter- prise, as well as for the mechanical excellence of the early product, with the financial assistance of S. L. Smith.

Once the experiment gave assurance of success, Olds organized, with the assistance of bankers whose good-will he had earned by his all around dependability, the Olds Motor Vehicle Company, Inc., with a capital of $50,000 divided into 5,000 $10 shares. Ten thousand dollars had been paid in when the papers, dated August 21, 1897, were filed on September 9, following. The purpose of the com- pany was stated to be "to manufacture and sell motor vehicles." At the first meeting of the board of directors, as recorded in the minutes, Olds was empowered to "build one carriage in as nearly perfect a manner as possible."

The 1897 Oldsmobile on display in Washington is the oldest General Motors car in existence. It carried four persons, on two seats, both facing forward. The famous curved-dash had yet to make its appearance, the dash on the 1897 model being angular and clearly of buggy origin. This car is the only one of that model and year, as Olds Motor Vehicle never reached a production basis. However, the car ran, and ran remarkably well considering the handi- caps its young inventors labored under, more than thirty- five years ago.

Among the stockholders of Olds Motor Vehicle was S. L. Smith, a copper magnate of Detroit. Mr. Smith de- serves to be remembered as the first man of large means to peer into the future of Michigan automobile production, catch a glimpse of its possibilities, and finance a new venture in a large, vital way. When the Olds Motor Vehicle Com- pany was later united with the Olds Gasoline Engine Works to form the Olds Motor Works, S. L. Smith's name led all the rest in capital contributed, and he remained a power in the company until his death. The Olds Motor Works came into being as a result of his backing.

Oldsmobile 51

For some time Mr. Olds had realized that Lansing, as it stood in the late 'nineties, was not a practical location for a large manufacturing establishment. There were not enough skilled machinists and not enough houses to accom- modate an influx of new inhabitants. The Lansing bankers already interested in Oldsmobile pulled wires in the East, and sites were considered as far away as Newark, N. J. But when it came down to cases, Eastern capital still fought shy of automobiles. On the way home, therefore, Mr. Olds stopped in Detroit to discuss the situation with Mr. Smith, already one of his stockholders. The old but vigorous mil- lionaire, desirous of entering his sons, Frederic L. and Angus S. Smith, in business careers, advised locating in Detroit and backed his advice with enough cash to settle the issue.

The Olds Motor Works was promptly incorporated for $500,000 on May 8, 1899, "for the manufacture and sale of all kinds of machinery, engines, motors, carriages and all kinds of appliances therewith." The place of operation was designated as Wayne County, Michigan, with offices in Detroit. The capital stock was $500,000; 50,000 shares at $10 par. The record shows that S. L. Smith held 19,960 shares of the 20,000 originally issued and paid in, the other four shareholders, Olds and Sparrow of Lansing, James Seager of Hancock, Michigan, and F. L. Smith of Detroit, holding ten shares each. The new company acquired all the assets of Olds Motor Vehicle and the original Olds Gaso- line Engine Works of Lansing, Olds Motor Vehicle being discontinued February 29, 1900.

In some sources the capitalization of 1899 is placed at $350,000 with $150,000 paid in, but the records of the Secretary of State must be accepted. The difference may be that between shares authorized and shares sold, a residue of $150,000 being then unissued. Later distributions of stock to the shareholders of the original company gave Mr. Olds and his associates substantial holdings.

Mr. Smith's wealth and reputation drew in other influen- tial Detroiters. The Company gained the assistance of Henry Russel, one of Detroit's most famous attorneys, who became a large stockholder. The company built on

52 The Turning Wheel

Jefferson Avenue East, near Belle Isle Bridge, where the Morgan & Wright plant of U. S. Rubber is now located,

First factory erected in United States for automobile manufacture. Olds Motor Works plant, Detroit, Michigan, begun 1899

the first American factory especially designed for auto- mobile production. Of his early trials in Detroit, let Mr. Olds testify :

It was our plan at that time to put out a model that would sell for $1,250. I had fitted it up with some very up-to-the-minute improve- ments— pneumatic clutch, cushion tires, and electric push-button starter. We thought we had quite a car, but we soon found that it was too complicated for the public. That first year we ran behind about $80,000.

The prospects of the industry were not very bright. Winton was making some cars down at Cleveland, Ohio, and Duryea, Haynes, and Apperson were all in the market. But the public persisted in the idea that it was not a practical proposition and would be a thing of the past within a year or two.

Finally, after a long sleepless night, I decided to discard all my former plans and build a little one-cylinder runabout, for I was convinced that if success came it must be through a more simple machine.

It was my idea to build a machine which would weigh about 500 pounds and would sell for around $500. The result was the curved- dash "Oldsmobile," weighing 700 pounds and selling at $65O.1 My

*First priced at $600; soon raised to $650. Five electric cars were built and sold in 1899 and 1900.

Oldsmobile 53

whole idea in building it was to have the operation so simple that anyone could run it and the construction such that it could be repaired at any local shop. We rushed a few of them out as fast as possible, and they tested out so well I decided to put them on the market immediately.

We sold 400 the first year, which, was considered a wonderful achievement for that period. Having felt our way carefully, I decided that the only plan to recover from the slump we had had the first year would be to come out with an announcement that the following year we would build 4,000 machines. I thought this would restore confidence in the industry and I staked all on the success of my plan.2

There is an element of luck in most successes, and what seems bad fortune at one time may become the basis of later triumph. Something like that came to pass in the fire which destroyed the Olds plant on March 9, 1901. One of the workmen at the new factory pulled his forge underneath a gas bag; the gas caught fire, and in an hour the plant was in ruins. But Fate, in the person of James J. Brady, a young timekeeper who was later to become one of Detroit's lead- ing citizens, rushed in and rescued the only curved-dash run- about that had been built. It was the one tangible asset left. There was no good in going on with the other models; they vanished from the Olds list overnight. Most of the patterns for the new runabout had been burned, but new patterns were made from the rescued car. Just a month after the fire the Olds force had constructed a new runabout and drove it to the hospital where Mr. Olds lay ill. Before the end of the year, more than 400 of the famous runabouts had been built and sold.

The fire crisis in Oldsmobile history had another effect on General Motors history. To hasten the resumption of pro- duction Oldsmobile contracted with the Leland-Faulconer Company to make 2,000 motors for the runabout, thus in- troducing the Lelands into the automobile business and turning their thoughts in a channel which led directly to the creation of the Cadillac.

2Sketch of R. E. Olds by O. D. Foster in Automotive Giants of America. B. C. Forbes Publishing Co., New York, 1926.

54

The Turning Wheel

The production figures of Oldsmobile one-cylinder curved-dash runabouts are, in round numbers: 1901, 425; 1902, 2,500; 1903, 4,000; 1904, 5,ooo.3

In addition, 6,500 one-cylinder straight-dash runabouts were built in 1905. No other automobile production record

Detroit to New York in seven and one half days ROY D. CHAPIN in Oldsmobile, igoi

of the period approached this one, in its early achievement of quantity production. In 1902 when Olds was building and selling 3,299 cars, and when he could have sold 4,000 if suppliers had been able to fill his orders, less than 1,000 automobiles were registered in New York, the richest and most populous state in the Union. Among the leaders in the New York list were Oldsmobile, Locomobile, Mobile, Winton, de Dion, Columbia, and Gasmobile. No Fords, no Buicks, no Cadillacs, and no Oaklands as yet.

figures are agreed upon by Messrs. F. L. Smith and Roy D. Chapin. For 1901 and 1902 they differ somewhat from figures on unit sales as fur- nished by Olds Motor Works, perhaps because marine and farm engines, made in both Lansing and Detroit, may have been included as "pieces" in unit sales. \

Oldsmobile 55

Oldsmobile sales in New York City took a great surge forward after the second New York automobile show in the autumn of 1901, to which Roy D. Chapin, then a tester for Olds (he would presently be sales manager), drove a curved-dash runabout from Detroit. This was the first Detroit-New York trip made by a light car.

Well equipped with spare parts when he left Detroit, Chapin needed most of them before he reached his destina- tion, as the wretched roads he traveled almost shook his light car apart. He was forced to leave the muddy high- ways, and drive along the towpath of the Erie Canal, con- testing with mule teams for the right-of-way. His night stops were Leamington and St. Catharines in Ontario, Ro- chester, St. Johnsville, Hudson, and Peekskill, New York. He lay up for major repairs at Peekskill, and drove into New York seven and one half days after leaving Detroit. On his way down Fifth Avenue the runabout skidded into the curb, damaging one of the wire wheels, in spite of which he made his haven at the hotel where Mr. Olds was anx- iously waiting. The doorman would not admit the young man in his greasy garments, and Chapin had to find his way around the building and sneak in unobserved through the servants' entrance to find his employer.

A good deal of social history is compressed in that in- cident— the contrast between the formal East and the free- and-easy Middle West, the tremendous urge and surge of young America — typified in a youth of twenty-one attempt- ing something that had never been done and being trusted by his elders to "put it over."

As a commercial venture the drive was a decisive success, achieving wide publicity which enabled Mr. Olds to make a contract with Ray M. Owen to sell 1,000 cars in New York City. Detroit's sales drive on the rich New York market had begun.

Detroit occupied no prominence in the industry until the Olds Motor Works announced a production of 4,000 cars in 1902. In that year, Detroit's first automobile and sport- ing goods show was held. Olds displayed a car already

56 The Turning Wheel

popular while the Henry Ford Automobile Company dis- played a Ford-Tom Cooper racer never successfully brought into production.

Mr. Ford, years afterward, stated that he had been ex- tremely lucky in his competitors — they had left him prac- tically alone in the field under a thousand dollars.

"Within a few years," said Mr. Ford, "Olds, Hupp, Buick, and E.M.F. got out of my way, one by one, in something like that order. All of them went into larger cars after making a success of small ones. I recall looking at Bobby Hupp's roadster at the first show where it was exhibited and wondering whether we could ever build as good a small car for as little money."

The trend of early manufacturers toward large cars can be explained as due partly to the desire for more power and easier riding on the abominable roads of the period and partly to the desire of manufacturers to be represented in the market by something dignified, costly and well designed. At any rate, Oldsmobile production in 1903, the year in which the Ford Motor Company was organized, was 4,000 cars, by far the largest production schedule of any American manufacturer. A clear priority on quantity production belongs to Oldsmobile.

This outstanding achievement by no means reflected merely good fortune. Partly, of course, it was due to the fact that, underneath the hostility of many persons and sections, there existed real need for automobiles and an intense interest in them. Still, the business had to be pushed through sales and advertising pressure, and there were grave manufacturing difficulties to be overcome owing to the imperfections of materials and the haphazard processes of that day. Mr. Olds was a fortunate combination of commercial sense and general mechanical ability, but he was not a precisian when judged by latter-day standards. His big job was to get goods to market; the whole success of his venture depended on that, and he took what would now be considered a rather rough-and-ready view of en- gineering research. He told Roy Chapin once that it was time to correct a fault when the fault made itself evident on the road. There was no time in those hectic days to set

Oldsmobile 57

up an engineering system which would refine the car in advance of need or consumer interest.

Even on this dot-and-go schedule, extraordinary strength and durability marked the Oldsmobile curved-dash run- about. We have seen that in 1901 Oldsmobile was the first light car to make the rough passage from Detroit to New York. In that same year Milford M. Weigle and F. L. Faurote introduced into the United States postal service a wire-wheeled Oldsmobile runabout which is said to be the first gasoline car used in any postal service in the world. It carried mail on contract under tests so success- fully that a fleet of Oldsmobiles was soon being used for that purpose. Credit for initiating this idea of the auto- mobile in postal delivery belongs to H. H. Windsor, editor of Popular Mechanics and the R. F. D. News, who invited F. L. Faurote, then advertising manager of the Oldsmobile works, to address the annual convention of rural letter carriers at Indianapolis in 1906.

Mr. Weigle's reminiscences are one of the best records of early Oldsmobile achievements on track and road. In 1902 he won the blue ribbon for piloting an Oldsmobile in the first hundred-mile non-stop endurance race staged in this country. Between 1902 and 1904 he won three gold medals and twelve silver cups, and hung up in succession several world's records for light cars on dirt tracks. He recalls being arrested three times for driving sixteen miles an hour on Broadway, New York City, when the speed limit was fifteen miles an hour. In the endurance race of 1902 at Chicago, any driver who made a speed greater than fifteen miles an hour was disqualified.

In 1903 the Oldsmobile Pirate established a world's straight-away record for making five miles in six and one half minutes. A little later, H. T. Thomas drove the same car to a new mile record — the first American car and driver to cover a mile of space in less than a minute. In that year Oldsmobile won the Tour de France.

Perhaps the most successful of Oldsmobile's efforts to make America automobile-minded was the cross country race of 1905 from New York to the Lewis and Clark

58 The Turning Wheel

Exposition at Portland, Oregon, where the good roads con- vention in the United States was also to be held. The drivers contested for the honor of performing the first transcon- tinental journey across America in a light car and for a prize of $1,000 offered by the company. The story of that adventurous journey is one of the liveliest in American motoring records.

The cars left New York City May 8, 1905, driven by Dwight B. Huss and T. R. McGargle. Each car carried a mechanic who assisted in the driving, Huss' assistant being Weigle, an Oldsmobile driver and inspector for many years. His log book shows Old Scout pulling into Portland on June 21, after forty-four days on the road for a total of 4,400 miles and an average of one hundred miles a day. Some 350,000 persons witnessed the triumphant arrival of the victorious car which had not only traversed rain-soaked stretches of gumbo and stormy mountain passes, but had also ploughed through trail-less wastes. When Old Steady, delayed by even worse conditions on another route, ap- peared a few days later, the staunchness of Oldsmobile was demonstrated beyond all doubt.

In the same car, equipped precisely as before, Mr. Huss repeated his New York to Portland journey twenty-six years later, in 1931, this time continuing on down the Pacific Coast. On Old Scout's second expedition across the continent he found hard-surfaced highways in place of mud and cattle trails, supply and service stations every- where along the line, and a rousing welcome. Ten million persons, it is estimated, inspected the ancient Oldsmobile, which was displayed under the auspices of every major automobile club along the route. Old Scout continues in service. A feature of the opening of the building erected by General Motors for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago was the appearance of Mr. Huss once more at the tiller of this famous runabout, which he drove from Lansing to Chicago, carrying a letter from the Governor of Michigan to the Governor of Illinois.

From overseas comes the tale of an even more ancient Oldsmobile owned by the famous Krupp family of Ger- many and still in service. Efforts to secure this veteran for

Oldsmobile 59

exhibition purposes in Europe have failed; Krupps keep it "on the job." Other distinguished patronage came as soon as it was seen that a quantity production and low price were not incompatible with quality. Among early buyers were the Queen of England, the Queen of Italy, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mark Twain, Chauncey M. Depew, Maude Adams, and other celebrities in all walks of life. But even more important was the certainty that the common people were being initiated into the idea that the automobile was here to stay. The country doctor drove an Oldsmobile on his rounds, giving more prompt service and extending his effec- tive range. The more progressive country merchant went to call upon his scattered customers in an Oldsmobile, and kept a barrel of gasoline handy to sell to other motorists. Farmers began to lose their hostility to the new mode of transportation as they saw more cars, and rode in them occasionally. When a single company could make and sell more than five thousand cars in a year, as Olds Motor Works did in 1904, it was clear that America was on its way to becoming the motorized country in which a pedes- trian came to be defined as a person on his way from one motor car to another.

Under the conditions of the period, the infant industry might very well have come to grief financially, since banks were cautious, and some even hostile, toward the new in- dustry. Olds Motor Works survived by putting the first quantity trade in automobiles on a cash or C.O.D. basis. Of its firm stand on credits, John K. Barnes says:

. . . the industry profited greatly by it. [Olds] explained to his agents that it was also to their advantage to get their money when they delivered the cars. Then the purchasers, he pointed out, would be more careful how they used the cars ; they would not run them into the ditch when something went wrong and telephone the agent to go get the car. That is one of the reasons why the in- dustry as a whole has come through past periods of business de- pression with little difficulty.

The Company had a care, too, for the consumer, not merely as a prospect but also as a user after the sale had been made, a point of view then new to business but one

60 The Turning Wheel

that has been followed consistently by the whole automobile industry, with an emphasis on "service" conditioning the whole relationship of the manufacturer and the market. One of the first of these service efforts was the famous Oldsmobile "Don'ts."

Finding it necessary to instruct the uninitiated, Olds- mobile issued these "Don'ts," the mere recital of which indicates the abysmal ignorance of the 1900 public on things motor-wise :

Don't take anybody's word for it that your tanks have plenty of gasoline and water and your oil cup plenty of oil. They may be guessing.

Don't do anything to your motor without a good reason or with- out knowing just what you are doing.

Don't imagine that your motor runs well on equal parts of water and gasoline. It's a mistake.

Don't make "improvements" without writing the factory. We know all about many of those improvements and can advise you.

Don't think your motor is losing power when clutch bands need tightening or something is out of adjustment.

Don't drive your "Oldsmobile" 100 miles the first day. You wouldn't drive a green horse 10 miles till you were acquainted with him. Do you know more about a gasoline motor than you do about a horse ?

Don't delude yourself into thinking we are building these motors like a barber's razor — "just to sell." We couldn't have sold one in a thousand years, and much less 5,000 in one year, if it hadn't been demonstrated to be a practical success.

Don't confess you are less intelligent than thousands of people who are driving Oldsmobiles. We make the only motor that

Early Oldsmobile advertising reflected the manufacturer's natural desire to convince a nation of horse drivers that his product could be used as cheaply and generally as the older means of transportation. Illustrations frequently showed automobiles passing horses on hills, and elaborate tables of figures were presented to prove that automobiles would not reduce to insolvency a buyer accustomed to the upkeep of horses and carriages. Gradually the automobile men

Oldsmobile 61

forgot the horse. Oldsmobile advertising began confidently to sound the message of the automobile for its own sake.

Oldsmobile "firsts" include:

The first steps in modern assembly line development by improved system of routing materials in process.

The first automobile manufacturer's house organ — Motor Talk.

The first automobile dealers' house organ — The Olds- mobile News Letter.

The first national convention of dealers gathered by an automobile manufacturer, held at Lansing, 1907.

The first comprehensive instruction books to users.

The first sales manual to dealers.

Among the newspaper and publicity men often at the Olds plant, and helpful in getting the Oldsmobile firmly entrenched in the public mind were Alfred Reeves, now general manager of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, John P. Wetmore, then automobile editor of the New York Mail, Joe E. G. Ryan of the Chicago Inter- Ocean, Edward Westlake of the Chicago Evening Post and C. G. Sinsabaugh, then editor of Motor Age, and later of Motor, Motor Life, American Motorist and Auto- motive Daily News. These and other automobile editors and advertising men organized "The Goops," an informal organization whose publication Goop-Talk was financed by the Smith brothers of Olds Motor Works. Oldsmobile al- ways enjoyed a good press. Several famous advertising men took the Oldsmobile's message to the public, among them A. D. Lasker, later head of the Shipping Board, George Batten, Charles Brownell, and E. H. Humphrey.

In the first automobile copy to appear in the Ladies Home Journal — a one-column Oldsmobile advertisement — Olds- mobile is described as "The Best Thing on Wheels":

The ideal vehicle for shopping and calling — equally suitable for a pleasant afternoon drive or an extended tour. It is built to run and does it.

Operated entirely from the seat by a single lever — always under instant control. The mechanism is simple — no complicated ma- chinery— no multiplicity of parts.

62 The Turning Wheel

A turn of the starting crank and the Oldsmobile "goes" with nothing to watch but the road.

Price Including

Mudguards $650.00

Each part of the mechanical marvel is made from thoroughly tested materials of the highest grade. Built in the largest Automobile factory in the world by the most skilled motor specialists and guaranteed by a firm whose twenty-three years in Gasoline Motor and Automobile Construction stand as the very highest guarantee of mechanical perfection.

While the story is well known in the automobile trade, the general reader may wonder why Oldsmobile forsook its position as the outstanding leader in quantity production to enter into the manufacture of larger and finer auto- mobiles. Several versions are available, but the true one seems to be this: R. E. Olds never possessed control of the company bearing his name. As he explains it, the younger Smiths, lacking in the experience gained from hard knocks, wearied of making cars for the masses. They desired to branch out in the direction of larger and more luxurious cars, forsaking the humble curved-dash runabout with its established market, for a more ambitious program. It is only fair to state, however, that the Messrs. Smith foresaw strong competition in that field from the rising Ford enter- prise and also anticipated some of the trends toward the more elaborate engineering of the future which would soon render the simple Oldsmobile of the Detroit era a thing of the past. At any rate, a division of opinion arose as a result of which Mr. Olds retired. He had made "his million" with almost unparalleled speed once he got under way. Only forty-one years of age when the break came, the prospect of a little leisure appealed to him after twenty years of intense effort, and he retired gracefully in 1903, being suc- ceeded as general manager by Frederic L. Smith, also an aggressive leader.

However, Olds's reputation had reached such heights that presently, merely for the use of his initials — R E O — he re- ceived a large stock interest in the newly organized com- pany of that name.

Oldsmobile

63

The Olds Motor Works returned to the place of its birth — Lansing. Following the fire of 1901, a Lansing plant had been set up to assist the Detroit operations. This be- came the chief seat of activity in 1905 and the nucleus of subsequent developments in which Oldsmobile has since eclipsed its earlier records. Production of the famous run- about continued but experiments in other directions indi- cated the new management's interest in larger cars. From 1904 on Olds Motor Works pushed export trade, doing business in Russia, England, France and Germany, and becoming the first American automobile company to do a quantity export business through regular dealers and direct sales representatives.

The trend away from the one-cylinder engine of runabout fame began promptly in 1905, with the launching of the "double-action" Oldsmobile with a two-cylinder engine,

Famous Oldsmobile curved-dash runabout — America's first quantity car

which instituted a steady climb toward engineering perfec- tion. In 1906 Olds Motor Works exhibited the first medium priced four-cylinder car offered to the public. It brought out its first six-cylinder model in 1907 and marketed it in 1908, but the "four" remained the mainstay of production.

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The Turning Wheel

In 1908, when the newly organized General Motors Com- pany of New Jersey bought the Olds Motor Works, the production was 1,055 cars> °f which 1,000 were "fours." Clearly, Olds Motor Works during the years following the move to Lansing had not operated as profitably as at Detroit. Production fell from 5,000 units in 1904 to 1,055

Chauncey M. Depew, at wheel of Olds runabout, 1904

in 1908. The company owed S. L. Smith more than a mil- lion dollars and was otherwise not in healthy condition. When it came time to sell, General Motors is said to have paid a million dollars for some road signs. But, of course, the names on the road signs made the value, as the buyers very well knew. Oldsmobile still had prestige with the pub- lic, almost as much in 1908 as in 1905 when Gus Edwards was moved to write his famous song — the only automobile song which has come down to us in full flavor from those distant days, uln My Merry Oldsmobile." A few bad years, in which difficulties of new designs and change of location had to be overcome, could not destroy the reputation Olds- mobile had won for itself. The new models were intrinsi- cally sound in design and the Olds plant was in excellent condition. All that Oldsmobile needed, at the lowest turn in its fortunes, seemed to be the magic touch of a salesman.

Oldsmobile 65

Oldsmobile soon speeded up to the General Motors tempo.

Olds Motor Works was the first unit purchased by Gen- eral Motors after W. C. Durant formed his new holding company around Buick. Official negotiations began on Octo- ber 10, 1908, though the leaders had been talking "deal" for some time.4 Mr. Durant's first proposal to F. L. Smith, the Olds representative, set a price of $5 a share on Olds stock, payable four fifths in General Motors Preferred and one fifth in General Motors Common, other obligations of Olds held by stockholders to be paid off in General Motors Common at par. Olds Motor Works was to have two seats on the General Motors directorate, and General Motors was to name a majority of Olds Motor Works directors. This was not accepted, but a counter proposal by F. L. Smith on November I2th, which called for $100,000 more than the original offer, clinched the big deal. This settle- ment provided for the delivery of 152,530 shares of Olds Motor Works and the claims of S. L. Smith for $1,044,- 173.89, in exchange for $1,654,293.89 in Preferred stock of the General Motors Company of New Jersey and $i,- 152,530 in its Common stock. Three of the five Olds Motor Works directors were to be designated by General Motors which agreed to protect endorsers of Olds paper against loss and to provide working capital. General Motors ac- quired all Oldsmobile patents, chief of which were those on tires, carbureters, and engines, the latter specified under the names of Sintz, Richards, and Scavenger.

In the final settlement, more Olds Motor Works' shares "having been turned over than the number specified, the Olds Motor Works' stockholders received $1,827,694 in General Motors Preferred, $1,195,880 in General Motors Common, and $17,279 in cash, a total of more than $3,000,000.

The leadership which Olds Motor Works in its early days gave to the whole automobile industry may be meas- ured not only in the production figures of the company itself, but also in the school which it provided for the budding talents of men who since have arrived at positions of influence and power. Names once on the Oldsmobile pay

4F. L. Smith: Motoring Down a Quarter of a Century, p. 36.

66 The Turning Wheel

roll recall the romance of the motor car's early history in Detroit and Michigan. A list of graduates from the Olds Motor Works "would read like a roll call of the captains of the automobile industry." In addition to those already named, the early Oldsmobile circle included as employees or suppliers :

Roy D. Chapin, president, Hudson Motor Car Co.

Charles B. King, said to have been the first man to drive a gasoline car on the streets of Detroit.

John D. Maxwell, who later pioneered the Maxwell car.

Howard E. Coffin of the Hudson Motor Car Company and the "idea father" of the War Industries Board with his Council of National Preparedness.

H. T. Thomas, later chief engineer of Reo.

Carl Fisher, builder of the Indianapolis Speedway; de- veloper of Prest-O-Lite Company.

B. F. Everitt, body manufacturer, and William E. Metzger, master salesman, both later in the Everitt- Metzger-Flanders Company.

George and Earl Holley, developers of Holley car- bureter.

Benjamin Briscoe, founder of the short-lived United States Motor Company.

Charles B. Wilson, Olds factory manager, organizer and president of the Wilson Foundry Company of Pontiac, at one time the world's largest producer of automobile castings. Also his brother, David Wilson.

Frederick O. Bezner, R. B. Jackson and James J. Brady who left OldsmoBile with Chapin and Coffin to found Chalmers-Detroit, later Hudson.

Charles B. Rose, president, American La France and Foamite Industries, Inc., New York City.

Charles D. Hastings, chairman of the Board of the Hupp Motor Company.

John F. and Horace Dodge (Dodge Brothers).

A complete list of the Olds pioneers who now occupy prominent places in the automobile industry would include at least 150 names.

Oldsmobile 67

Olds Motor Works was a training school for men whose later activities resulted in such companies as Reo, Hudson, Chalmers, Hupp, King, Columbia, Owen Magneto, Perfec- tion Springs, and others. Furthermore, Oldsmobile orders for material, spread through the machine shops, body works and supply houses, set hundreds of wideawake Detroiters to thinking how they could supply those wants, improve on their merchandise, and gather part of the golden stream of profits which Oldsmobile had started in their direction. Detroit rode to wealth and large population down a path in the direction which Oldsmobile had indicated.

This determining influence of the oldest General Motors unit on the geography of motordom and the industrial his- tory of America is now clearly acknowledged. As John K. Barnes wrote in the Motor World of April, 1921, "It was Olds's success in Detroit that fixed the center of the auto- mobile industry in that city." In less than three years Olds Motor Works paid 105 percent in cash dividends and its capital stock had risen to $2,000,000. It is equally true that Olds Motor Works was the first to reach quantity produc- tion by applying the progressive principle of assembly to the manufacture of a single model gasoline-engine-driven vehicle, and the first to popularize the automobile with the American people, taking it from the classification of rich man's toy to that of everyman's servant.

Chapter V

BUICK: THE FOUNDATION STONE OF GENERAL MOTORS

HILE Oldsmobile was the acquisition by which Gen- eral Motors first challenged the attention of the country, Buick was the nucleus around which W. C. Durant, Buick' s chief and one of the dramatic figures in the history of the industry, built up the far-flung structure destined to become known the world over as the "G. M." How he acquired control of Buick and made it a leader is an absorbing story which begins with David D. Buick, man of many talents.

David Dunbar Buick, whose name already had adorned the front of more than two million motor cars when he died in 1929, completely realized the traditional picture of the American inventor. He was a man of brilliantly progressive ideas, native mechanical ability, and little business caution. Time and again, he sacrificed the certainty of present profits to experiment expensively with new ideas. One vic- tory gained, he was always ready to rush on to another without consolidating the ground already carried, with the result that his finances were usually strained and his backers often in distress.

Men of the lovable and creative type, who sowed more benefits than they could reap for themselves, bulk large in the history of mechanical progress. They were scouts on the frontier of invention in the early days of the auto- mobile industry; they penetrated little known territory, pointed out trails which others followed to their profit, but not infrequently they were unable to win wealth for

68

Buick 69

themselves. Life to them was chiefly an opportunity to ex- periment. Many men of this sort made their contributions and were forgotten, but Buick remains fixed in the public mind.

Mr. Buick already had one substantial achievement to his credit when he entered the automobile field. A member of the firm of Buick & Sherwood, manufacturers of plumbers' supplies in Detroit, he had developed a method of fixing porcelain on metal, which is the key to the low- priced modern bathroom. A steady-going business man would have realized on this manufacturing advantage by sticking to bathtubs, but to David Buick a bathtub must have seemed a dead and inconsequential thing in contrast with the gasoline engines which had long engaged his eager and inquisitive mind and which he began to manufacture in 1900. His partner Charles Sherwood was also of an ad- venturous turn. When Buick Auto-Vim & Power Com- pany was established in Detroit in 1901, it soon absorbed the resources of Buick & Sherwood in experimentation and sales efforts.

"Auto-Vim," in the name, had significance, as David Buick hoped to adapt an L-head gasoline marine motor of his design to a carriage. The company made these L-head engines for boat and farm use with some success, but their slender profits were spent as fast as earned. Need for new capital brought about the organization of the Buick Man- ufacturing Company in 1902, with Mr. Buick as president, and it was under this name that the first steps were taken in the development of the "valve-in-head" motor. The L-head motor was soon scrapped. in favor of the new motor.

Several excellent engineering minds seem to have con- tributed to the early development of this famous motor, but documentary evidence indicates that the first steps were taken by Eugene C. Richard, an engineer born in France, trained in Philadelphia, and connected with the various Buick organizations for more than a quarter of a century. A contract is in existence between Buick Manufacturing Company and Eugene C. Richard, dated May 23, 1903, covering his employment as "designer and inventor and head of the 3rafting department." Under the Richard

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The Turning Wheel

patent No. 771095 issued to the Buick Manufacturing Company as his assignee, one of the allowed claims covered

In an explosion engine, the combination of the cylinder-head, of in- duction and deduction valves, having their stems extending through said head. . . .

The "valve-in-head" engine is usually associated with the name of Walter L. Marr, who entered the Buick circle a little later than Mr. Richard, and who rose through many years of service to become the chief of the Buick Manu-

First Buick, Detroit, 1902

facturing Company and one of America's leading auto- motive engineers. He it was who gave this superior motor its distinctive name. Mr. Marr was born in Lexington, Sanilac County, Michigan. Six years after he went to work as an apprentice, he completed a one-cylinder gasoline engine on the Otto cycle. He continued his experiments in his spare time through many years, producing six different types of motors. With this background he built in 1898 a vehicle successfully driven by a four-cylinder gasoline engine of his own design. It is described as having some very novel electric ignition fixtures, including a jump spark attachment. This first car of Marr's was built at Cleveland, then the oil center of the country, and in it he traveled to various

Buick 71

nearby manufacturing cities to visit other designers of gaso- line engines, chiefly of the marine type. He was developing a car of his own when he met and became associated with David D. Buick.

In the early part of 1903 Buick put a single cylinder 5 x 6" horizontal engine, designed by Mr. Richard, into a chassis of his own design. A little later a two-cylinder op- posed engine was substituted for the one-cylinder type. This was the car that became the famous Model F Buick, after certain changes were made in the crank case. The engine was 4-l/2 x 5" and had its valves mounted in removable cages in the cylinder head.

These early trials and tests took place in and around the small factory on Holmes Avenue, Detroit, and apparently both Mr. Marr and Mr. Richard were present. Mr. Richard was engrossed in the power unit; Mr. Marr, in consultation with David D. Buick on chassis and body construction and adaptations, made many alterations preceding the trial. Walter Marr was an extremely ingenious man in solving last-minute problems. By the time he came to Buick he had a .grasp on the practical difficulties involved in making a staunch and dependable self-propelled vehicle. He had worked diligently over the uncertain fuels of that period, distilling his own alcohol and petrol spirits. He had designed and made many ingenious tools by hand, and from raw material had constructed all the engine and chassis parts for several cars.

Mr. Richard was Marr's technical superior under his contract, but it is unlikely that Richard could meet as well as Marr did the problems presented by the rough-and-ready assembly methods made necessary by the imperfect mate- rials and workmanship of the period. At any rate, it was not long before the positions were reversed and Marr be- came chief engineer. In that position he clung so steadfastly to the "valve-in-head" principles that he became the chief figure in its future development.

Bringing the Buick car this far along had strained the resources of Buick & Sherwood, and they had borrowed con- siderable sums from the Briscoe Brothers, Frank and Ben- jamin, Jr., then manufacturing sheet metal. The Briscoes

72 The Turning Wheel

took an interest in the Buick Manufacturing Company and, assuming charge of its finances, changed the name to the Buick Motor Car Company, in which the Briscoe holding was $99,700 out of $100,000, as the Briscoes felt com- pelled to assume control of all Mr. Buick's various interests in order to protect themselves. Unable to carry the load any longer, the Briscoes determined to sell the Buick.

The Buick Company was on the market. Who would buy it? Remember that in 1903 the American automobile indus- try represented chiefly hopes and dreams. A great many persons had lost money in.it, and few had profited. Olds was the only quantity producer and money-maker in the gaso- line field. Leland & Faulconer had prospered, but the Cadillac Motor Car Company was still unborn. Henry Ford was just getting the Ford Motor Company started. Bankers looked askance upon the industry, and there was no reason why the investing public should risk capital on new enter- prises of such grave uncertainty.

In the end the sale of Buick was effected largely by acci- dent, and a freakish chain of circumstances resulted in a startling change in the way of life for a whole section of Michigan. Visiting relatives in Flint, Frank Briscoe heard from Mr. Dwight T. Stone, a local real-estate man and son of one of Flint's early industrialists, of a prospect named James H. Whiting, who might be interested in the white elephant that Mr. Briscoe had on his hands.

Flint was then a city of less than 14,000 inhabitants, a pleasant county seat, located on a flat plain where two railroads, the Grand Trunk and the Pere Marquette, hap- pened to cross. From the standpoint of physical geography, it held no advantages over the other county seats similarly located in central and southern Michigan. To this day Flint is a city whose rise to world-wide fame confounds the economic geographers, but to one who knows its history, the causes of that rise are evident. Flint was located at the ford, or, as the French explorers and trappers called it, the Grand Traverse of the Flint River, whose upper reaches extended for many miles through one of the best stretches of Michigan's superb pine forests. It was therefore a

Buick 73

natural site for the location of lumber mills. For a genera- tion its river banks resounded with the whirr of buzz saws and the stream was filled for miles with boom impounded logs. Fortunes were made, Eastern capital was attracted, and the citizens of Flint became accustomed to certain ideas of which they never afterward lost sight. They saw that big business had its advantages; they developed an extraor- dinary pride in their community and the success of their industries, and they stood ready to follow daring leadership.

Before lumber vanished from the scene through the de- struction of the forests, there came to Flint a young Canadian, William A. Paterson, to establish in 1869 the city's first vehicle-manufacturing plant. At first Mr. Pater- son worked at his forge as a carriage blacksmith, but one day he threw down his sledge and decided to be a business man instead. The carriage industry which he introduced there grew to large proportions, as one firm after another was founded and gradually expanded, until Flint became one of the great centers of the country for the manufac- ture of popular-priced vehicles. Assembly methods were worked out which have quite a modern ring; as competition increased in intensity, these methods were refined, until it is possible that the Flint of 1895 led the country in the efficiency of factory assembly. Though the frontier receded westward and raw materials near at hand were used up, Flint carriage companies were nevertheless able to main- tain themselves down to the time when the automobile ended the Horse Age.

All these vehicle manufacturers, however, saw the hand- writing on the wall: the automobile would drive out the horse. One of the first to recognize this was James H. Whit- ing, president of the Flint Wagon Works, whose plant, extensive for those days, covered part of the present Chevrolet site in West Flint. Mr. Whiting was a cautious man in most respects, but, foreseeing the eventual throttling of the carriage trade, he acted with what must now be reckoned a quite remarkable boldness. He began to look about for a car which might become the basis for an indus- try which would use part of his plant.

74 The Turning Wheel

Thus far Flint had had no luck whatever with automo- biles in a commercial sense. Two of its more enterprising citizens, Judge Charles Wisner and Dr. H. H. Bardwell, had built experimental cars for themselves, but neither of these gentlemen ever let business interfere with science, and their cumbersome vehicles merely amused a populace which thought in terms of wheels and hoped against hope for practical results. It looked to many as if young Alexander B. C. Hardy, who will appear in this tale later, had "hit it" with the dashing Flint roadster, all red paint and shining brass, which he had begun to make in a little factory down by the Grand Trunk tracks, a factory once devoted to the manufacture of the now almost extinct whip-socket. Mr. Hardy had been nerved to this great adventure by a visit to the Paris Exposition, where he saw how far French cars were ahead of American cars. Returning home he mus- tered a small capital and soon had a smart roadster ready for the market. In the end, however, Hardy was forced to liquidate, largely through the opposition he encountered from the owners of the Selden patent. While he was oper- ating, a frequent visitor at his shop was James H. Whiting, and undeterred by the young man's lack of success, Whiting kept looking longingly for an automobile to manufacture.

All through the history of American automobile manu- facturing in its early stages, will be seen shining examples of the courage of ignorance. Here was James H. Whiting already well along in years, with no engineering experience and no clear conception of the problems involved in making, selling, and marketing automobiles. He thought that cars could be sold by the same salesmen who went out to sell buggies, road carts, and farm wagons. As for manufac- turing, he would buy what was necessary, put it together, paint and upholster the job — which was practically the pro- cedure in carriage manufacturing. Other concerns no better equipped than the Flint Wagon Works were building cars in just that way, so why shouldn't the Wagon Works? In due course, carnage firms discovered that building and selling motor cars was an entirely different business from making and selling carriages. The automobile business required far

Buick

75

more capital and called for standards of mechanical pre- cision beyond anything required in the carriage tracfe, but all that remained to be learned. By the time Frank Briscoe wanted to unload the Buick, James H. Whiting was in a frame of mind to consider negotiating for it. Brought to- gether by Mr. Stone, Whiting and Briscoe quickly made a deal whereby the Buick concern sent its car over the roads

Original Buick factory at Flint, Michigan, 1903—04

to Flint. These roads were so bad that, in order to nego- tiate the 65 miles between Detroit and Flint, Buick and Marr, who drove the car, had to cover 115 miles, with every mile a test. Machinery, patterns, and dies were brought to Flint and housed in a small, one-story building adjoining the Wagon Works. The two concerns then formed the Buick Motor Company.

To bind the bargain quickly, $10,000 was borrowed from Flint banks on the endorsement of a number of prominent citizens. Though of small proportion, this deal was a strik- ing example of community morale in a small town. Larger banks and endorsers elsewhere would have been more

76 The Turning Wheel

cautious, but Flint took the game with a rugged confidence.

Benjamin Briscoe, Jr., will be remembered as one of the colorful and energetic figures in the early days of the indus- try, and the daring promoter of the United States Motor Company. This company was put forward as an automo- bile merger planned to become the chief rival of General Motors. When United States Motor Company collapsed, Mr. Briscoe must have regretted his sale of Buick for a song, since the Buick in the meantime had become the key- stone of General Motors.

The original capitalization of $75,000 in Buick was financed by the Flint Wagon Works' declaring a dividend of $75,000 which was paid into the treasury of the Buick Motor Company, which in return issued stock to the Flint Wagon Works stockholders and also* to the Buick interest. David D. Buick and his son Thomas received 1,500 shares between them.1 The other large stockholders were James H. Whiting with 1,505 shares, Charles M. Begole with 1,000 shares, George L. Walker, 725 shares, William S. Ballenger with 707 shares. Mr. Begole and Mr. Ballenger were active in the Flint Wagon Works and later in Chev- rolet.

Buick now had a home and business management whose caution would be likely to restrain the optimism of David D. Buick himself. The skeleton of an organization was put together. A three-story brick building was begun, which at first housed all of the company's activities, but later was used only for motor and transmission manufacture. Old Buick No. i — sometime later called No. 2 — still has a sen- timental attraction for now aging employees who began their careers there. Greatly enlarged, the building has be- come part of the Chevrolet motor plant. Sixteen cars were built in 1903, 37 in 1904, priced at $1,200. These first Buicks were equipped with a storm front curtain, with a large celluloid window in it, to protect the driver.

The $37,500 set aside for development had been ex- hausted, and loans had been made to carry on the work. Mr. Whiting felt that a younger man was needed to master

aMr. Buick left the Buick Motor Company in 1906, two years before Gen- eral Motors was founded.

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77

this new business, with its insatiable appetite for capital and its crying need for quick decision. By this time he perceived clearly that the Buicks, father and son, were neither of them business men and that their chief associates were likewise more interested in mechanics than in profits. The need of the moment was for a man full of energy and vision who also possessed a keen sense of market possibilities and the courage to think in large figures.

First Buick car built at Flint, Michigan, igos. Model A

At a meeting of carriage manufacturers in Chicago, in 1904, Mr. Whiting told F. A. Aldrich, representing the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, of the difficulties he faced getting the Buick Motor Company swinging market- wise. Mr. Aldrich advised him that the man he should interest, the one man who fitted the specifications and was immediately available, was William Crapo Durant. "Billy"

78 The Turning Wheel

Durant was already a leader among his associates and in the opinion of Flint. Born in Boston, December 8, 1861, he was the grandson of one of Michigan's war governors, Henry H. Crapo, who had brought to Flint part of the capital amassed by his thrifty ancestors in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they had followed the sea as mariners and shipbuilders to good purpose for some generations. Originally of French stock, the Crapos of New Bedford and Flint alike were rich, prosperous, and able.

From boyhood. uBilly" Durant's chief interest was busi- ness. He might have gone East to college, but instead went to work early in his grandfather's lumber business, one of the largest of the many large lumber mills in Flint. Then, to get more action, he branched out before the age of twenty-one into insurance with an agency of his own. That suited him, because insurance was something you could go out and sell. No waiting- around for customers to come to you, as in. the- store. An almost feverish activity possessed him. "Billy" Durant above everything needed action. While possessed of a notable faculty for remaining calm in the midst of alarms, he seemed to require dramatic tension in business. Yet he had also the power of concen- trating intently on work.

All this both Mr. Whiting and Mr. Aldrich knew, for W. C. Durant at forty-two was already the most talked of man in Flint. As they discussed his availability for the automobile business, they recalled the dramatic entry Mr. Durant had made into the vehicle field some fifteen years before, when he had pioneered the road-cart business which provided Flint with its initiation into quantity pro- duction and salesmanship. The young insurance hustler had bought, while in Coldwater, Michigan, for $50 the patent rights for a road cart which carried a good selling point in its improved suspension. He took into partnership Josiah Dallas Dort, a young hardware clerk, and the new firm con- tracted with W. A. Paterson for 10,000 carts at $8 each.

This was an unheard-of quantity, calling upon the manu- facturer to adjust his plant and workers to a new system of assembly for such a large operation. But "Billy" went

Buick 79

out and made sales rapidly at $12.50. The success-, of this flyer in road carts induced other manufacturers to follow in that field and to bring to it and other fields large-scale re- peat operations. Durant and Dort used their earnings to finance the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, which swiftly advanced to a position of acknowledged leadership in the trade with an annual production of 50,000 "Blue Ribbon" vehicles, high earnings, and a strong cash position, which, as we shall see, has its bearing on the story of the Buick and General Motors. His success in the carriage business made Mr. Durant a millionaire before his fortieth year, placing him in a position where an average man might have been satisfied with both his fortune and his prestige. But W. C. Durant was no average man; when the carriage busi- ness settled down into stodgy matter-of-f actness, he looked for other fields to conquer.

Thus far his natural bent toward commercial adventure had found expression in the sharp competitive building and selling of styled carriages, a trade wide open to the risks of fashion. If the popular note could be struck with a buggy, if its lines attracted rural swains or a town's social leaders, the manufacturer drove a thriving trade. By the turn of the century the fun was out of the carriage business. Mr. Durant went to New York City and was studying Wall Street and the Stock Exchange at close range about the time that Mr. Whiting was beginning to think that the Buick Motor Company needed a new management.

Mr. Durant came back to Flint the next summer to see just what there was to this Buick car which the Flint Wagon Works and James Whiting had brought to Flint. With no technical experience of his own to guide him, Mr. Durant applied the only test he could make, but he did so with a thoroughness which to this day is recalled in Michigan. He drove that two-cylinder Buick back and forth over a wide range of territory devoid of good roads save for a few gravel turnpikes built by toll companies. He put it through swamps, mud and sand, and pitch-holes for almost two months, bringing it in for repairs and consultations and then taking it out again for another strenuous cross-country run.

80 The Turning Wheel

He had every sort of mischance chronic in the motoring of the period, often, of course, being stalled in out-of-the-way hamlets for lack of repair parts or fuel and oil. During these enforced waits, perhaps in a country blacksmith shop which some day would be a garage, this impetuous and eager mind wrestled with the future of transportation.

The central idea of the motor car must have appealed to his temperament, for it emphasized qualities and powers like some of his own: speed, novelty, flexibility, the ability to "get there." Its possibilities for salesmanship and show- manship would also appeal to one who had proved himself already a most successful distributor of vehicles. The motor car, he could see, fitted the progressive American spirit like a glove. In addition, here was a piece of merchandise that could not be hid; the motor car would advertise itself on the street and at the curb. Probably Mr. Durant concluded early in these tests that if Buick was not the medium by which he would enter the automobile trade, he would get into that business in another way before long. But after the car had met his severe tests, Mr. Durant looked no further : Buick would do.

By November i, 1904, the deal between Buick Motor Company and W. C. Durant was complete; on that day the capital was increased from $75,000 to $300,000, repre- sented by 3,000 shares of $100 each. Holders of the old stock agreed to accept Preferred stock paying 7 percent with a 25 percent bonus of Common stock. The contract covering this agreement was drawn by John J. Carton of Flint, for many years attorney for the Buick Motor Com- pany. The Wagon Works stockholders agreed to accept Preferred stock for their holdings. It was agreed that later Buick capitalization should be increased to $500,000 and that the Wagon Works' interest should receive $175,000. This was done. On September u, 1905, Buick's stock was increased to $1,500,000 — $900,000 Common and $600,000 Preferred. Mr. Carton relates that while the Buick business was sound and there was a legitimate need for this large capitalization, he had some difficulty finding enough assets to justify the increase. He says:

Buick 81

In the application presented to the Secretary of State, I listed all the assets quite generously up to the legal requirements, but neverthe- less we were still $60,000 short, and this was taken up by the fol- lowing item:

"Ownership of invention of combustion engine construction not patented for business reasons — $60,000."

This schedule went through, but later attracted little attention so that at the next meeting of the state legislature a law was passed prohibiting the listing in such cases of any items intangible and not subject to execution. However, it was quite important that the company have the full amount of the stock to issue at that time, as Common was usually given as a 25 percent bonus with sales of Preferred. The fact that I was very well acquainted at Lansing, the state capital, may have been beneficial in getting such a hazy item passed.

Mr. Durant himself sold most of the stock. It is related that at the outset he sold $500,000 worth in a single day to his Flint neighbors. There can be no doubt that Mr. Durant was a most persuasive salesman. An aura of success hung around him. For more than twenty years all his undertak- ings had profited; early in his selling campaign he had indisputable proof that Buick was making money. Produc- tion was steadily increasing, and he could sell every car he produced for cash, F.O.B. factory. So keen was the demand that his problem was not so much selling cars as finding capital with which to erect buildings, install machinery, and create a distributing organization so that more cars could be built and delivered. However loyally Flint might buy stock, it was too small a city to finance the expanding enter- prise; Mr. Durant had to go out into the highways and byways of Michigan for capital. In this search he was tire- less. He saw an immense fortune, tremendous power, and a lofty reputation as an industrial pioneer almost in his grasp if he could only find the necessary capital.

Of course, it goes without saying that, in representing the golden prospects of his venture to investors, faith and sincerity accounted for his extraordinary success in getting promotion money from individuals. He would have been saved a tremendous amount of time and energy if he had

82 The Turning Wheel

been able to secure the services of a strong investment banking house to dispose of his securities systematically, but this was out of the question in that time and locality. Local bankers helped him all they could, and his persuasive per- sonality drew temporary aid from larger banks outside of Flint, but what he needed was a large fixed capital invested for a long pull, and this he could secure only through fur- ther personal effort.

Meantime, as the builder and leader of Buick, he found a host of problems other than financial demanding solu- tion. Since it was early apparent that Buick's facilities in the western end of Flint would be inadequate, offices and assembly operations were transferred to a factory in Jack- son which had been used by the Imperial Wheel Company. Imperial Wheel was part of the Durant-Dort family, as were the Flint Varnish Works and the Flint Axle Works. The three companies had already been located in the north end of Flint, where, with a view to future expan- sion of these and other companies, Mr. Durant had pur- chased the 22O-acre Hamilton farm for $22,000. Thus he had in hand an excellent site for the expansion of Buick it- self with adequate trackage on the Pere Marquette rail- road, and good location as respects drainage, water supply, and general accessibility. He planned to sell part of this area as building lots, laying out for that purpose Oak Park Subdivision. But of course an immense amount of organiz- ing work had to be done on the tract and its approaches, as well as in plant construction, before Buicks could be pro- duced there. In the meantime the Jackson plant held the fort while Buick motors continued to be made in West Flint. Jackson, indeed, might have continued as the chief seat of Buick if capital could have been found there as easily as in Flint.

This geographic division of the business increased the labors of the leader. We can picture Mr. Durant at this time as a man desperately hurried, spurred by ambition and responsibility to feats of almost superhuman endurance, driving at breakneck speed over wretched roads between his two plants, holding conferences, making quick decisions, seeking out and encouraging new dealers, scouring the

WILLIAM C. DURANT

Founder of General Motors

84 The Turning Wheel

country for supplies and building plants, subduing raw land to industrial and residential uses and feverishly seeking new capital. This spare, small man seemed to draw upon irresistible sources of energy. He worked more hours than any of his employees, did with little sleep, yet came to his labors fresh and smiling every morning. There was a gaiety and resilience in him which overcame all obstacles. The press began to speak of him as the "Little Giant." His wor- shipful associates might call him "Billy," but among them- selves they fell into the habit of calling him "the Man." "The Man says," was the common preface as they passed his orders along from one to the other. Sometimes "He says" would be a sufficient indication of authority. Both forms were proof of the loyal and willing acceptance of that authority. He was the first among equals rather than the autocrat, and no captain has ever been followed by more devoted troops. The camp followers, the local public, and the business men alike hung on his words.

One factor in developing this amazing and truly affec- tionate loyalty was his lack of concern for individual gain, the natural ease and buoyancy with which he played the prince in distributing bounties. There are innumerable evi- dences that he cared little for money for its own sake. His own tastes were simple, he had no time to spend money; already well off, he had serene confidence that he would always be successful and that nothing could stop him from amassing an immense fortune in the automobile game. I use the word "game" advisedly: if he was not the man who invented that adventurous expression to describe the early activities of what has since become a most precise and responsible business, he at least played that great game most completely as an adventure of the human spirit.

As an example of his lavish disregard of personal gain and his willingness to share profits with those whose back- ing had braced him in the past, Mr. Durant is said to have turned in to the Durant-Dort treasury at one time some $300,000 worth of Buick stock, voted to him personally in return for his work in promoting the company. In com- pleting his layout for the approaches to the Buick indus- trial site, he paid $4,000 for land offered at $1,800 simply

Buick 85

because he knew that this land as part of his grand objective was worth that much and more. The instances of his largesse could be multiplied indefinitely. He explained his generosity toward Durant-Dort stockholders by saying that he had been on the Durant-Dort pay roll during the period in which he was organizing Buick, though the fact is that he was drawing a merely nominal sum from his old company. Of course, the essential fact is that he enjoyed doing these things, and the power to do them was his compensation.

With a swift expansion program in hand and no banking connections equal to the situation, there were times when the good-will built up so generously brought important re- turns in timely assistance. Mr. F. A. Aldrich, secretary of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company for many years, shows from his records that Durant-Dort furnished Buick with capital in its early stages. Mr. Aldrich says :

Owing to a decreased trade in horse-drawn vehicles Durant-Dort Carriage Company needed less capital; both our treasury and credit were in excellent shape, while Buick needed assistance. Hence in the spirit of "team-work" proverbial as applied to Durant- Dort and under full recommendation of Mr. Dort, president, we made in one way or another large investments in Buick stocks and also later in General Motors stock. At first these stocks were held in our treasury but later on legal advice they were placed in my name as trustee. We made several disbursements of this stock to Durant-Dort stockholders as dividends.

The records show numerous instances of our helpfulness. We in- dorsed Buick paper in Chicago on one occasion, and the loan fall- ing due at an unfortunate time, Durant-Dort had to sell Buick stock at distress prices to pay it off. On June 4, 1906, Durant- Dort bought $100,000 worth of Buick stock. There was a close financial relationship between the two companies then, and it con- tinued after General Motors was formed. On Feb. 20, 1909, while General Motors was still in its infancy, I was authorized to buy and hold 10,000 shares of its Preferred and Common stock. Later, when Mr. Durant took on Chevrolet as an independent venture, the Durant-Dort treasury furnished him funds. In fact, within reason, our resources were always at his disposal.

The Flint Wagon Works also helped Buick get on its feet. Five of its directors loaned the Buick Motor Company

86 The Turning Wheel

at one time $20,000 each to match an equal sum loaned to Buick at the same time by the Durant-Dort Carriage Com- pany. Thus in one way or another, with occasional rescue loans and a vigorous search outside of Flint for capital, Buick expansion was financed.

Even when allowances are made for the newness of the automobile business and the suspicion in which it was held by the banking world in general in those early days, it does not appear that Mr. Durant ever quite deserved the repu- tation for financial genius which at one time clung to his name. Certainly, in the formative years, finance was his weak side. While he could make money in his operations, and raise a good deal of money by his personal force and the confidence which he inspired, he never seemed able to budget his operations accurately in advance and build up reserves. His vision was always running far ahead of his treasury, so that there was always the possibility that his affairs would approach the ragged edge of necessity if a turn came with an unfavorable market for his goods, or the well-springs of capital suddenly ran dry. His inven- tories and commitments were usually in excess of his present power to pay, but he had an immense faith that by the time he had to pay for them he would find the money somewhere. Either the market would provide it or stock would be sold; in a pinch he could go to friendly corpora- tions or individuals. He kept the golden ball in the air by sheer dexterity and courage through six straining years of exceedingly rapid expansion. Looking backward upon the activities of a quarter of a century ago it can be seen that the notable human qualities behind this triumph also had their defects, which eventually caused Mr. Durant's retire- ment from the vast business which he originated. But it can also be appreciated that his qualities were precisely those needed to get a foundation laid with whatever tools and materials were ready at hand. Probably no other man could have built up Buick in four years to a point where, as an acknowledged leader in the industry, Buick became the rock on which General Motors was founded.

Courage is the key-word for this Buick surge to market leadership. Buick dared to produce in large quantities when

Buick 87

most of its competitors were proceeding cautiously on re- stricted schedules. It pioneered in the development of attractive retail stores in large centers, and drew able, ambitious men into both wholesale and retail selling. There, perhaps, was Mr. Durant's greatest contribution to the technique of automobile administration.

For a man so vastly daring it was inevitable that as Buick production rose, further expansion should seem not only desirable but indeed necessary. Vital supplies had to be safeguarded both as to volume and prompt delivery. Com- petition was then less of a wrestle for markets and more of a race against time. The public would take Buicks as fast as they could be turned out; delay in delivery of even a minor part might cost a tremendous sum. Even to this day, no automobile manufacturer controls the production chain of all supplies from their primary forms to their incor- poration in a completed automobile ready for the road; yet in this industry utter dependence on certain forms of goods was so essential that practically all the survivors in the stern battle for existence waged during the past thirty years are those who have been working toward self-determination, seeking positions where their operations could not be shut off by shrinkage of those essential supplies.

For instance, consider engines. In the early days of the industry many automobile manufacturers bought all or part of their power units. While these units may have been entirely satisfactory in price and quality, nevertheless, the automobile manufacturer soon realized that his produc- tion schedule was at the mercy of circumstances beyond his control. A stoppage in his supplier's plant, arising from any one of a number of causes, tied up his own plant. This risk being too heavy, the tendency has been for car manufac- turers to take over engine manufacture. Some have gone a considerable distance toward controlling supplies from raw materials to the finished product, yet no manufacturer has been able as yet to process all the materials used in auto- mobiles, because of the wide range of those materials and the special skill and large capital required to bring them into economic use. The drift has been toward self-sufficiency, yet complete self-sufficiency has not been attained and probably

88

The Turning Wheel

never will be. But in this evolution nearly all those manu- facturers who depended altogether on assembling the prod- ucts of other enterprises have either perished or have been absorbed. The survivors are those firms which accepted the responsibility of making for themselves goods which others would have been glad to make for them, but which for various substantial reasons it seemed vital to control throughout the entire process of production and assembly. Mr. Durant realized the value of broad organization be- fore he entered the automobile field. The Durant-Dort Car-

1904 Buick, priced at $1,250, top and lights, $125 extra

riage Company had gone further than any of its competitors in organizing subsidiary, or at least dependent, companies. It had fathered companies for the production of wheels, paint, varnish, and axles; through others it owned in whole or in part extensive timber holdings in distant states. It was natural that, faced with the market possibilities of the automobile and the difficulty of securing supplies of the right sort as required in his hot haste for action, Mr. Durant should leap to the conclusion that he needed bmader organ- ization than Buick, big enough to include not only other motor-car producers but also makers of essential parts.

Buick 89

The need to control supplies was keenly felt in 1907, when Buick, which had concentrated successfully on two- cylinder cars, added four-cylinder models to the line. In 1908 diversification was carried even further, with two two- cylinder models, and four four-cylinder models. One of the latter — the famous Model Ten — started Buick on the heaviest production it had yet known, and its success was no doubt one of the elements encouraging W. C. Durant to envision a General Motors. Frederic L. Smith's remi- niscences— Motoring Down a Quarter of a Century — indi- cate that his first talks were with Mr. Smith at Lansing, and that the very name, General Motors, was thus early discussed.

Flint meantime was booming as Buick drew labor from all directions. Responding to the pull of high wages, men hurried there from all quarters of the compass, from other industrial cities, from the farms of southern Michigan and the forest areas further north. Tool makers came from Providence and Hartford. The population of the city doubled in five years. House-building could not keep pace with the flood of arrivals. While Buick factory No. 10, then the largest industrial building in the world, was under con- struction, the neighborhood resembled a mining camp. Liv- ing quarters were at a premium; the same bed would be rented to a night-worker by day and a day-worker by night. Shacks, hastily thrown together to provide some sort of shelter, housed families who were having their first taste of prosperity. Farms were subdivided right and left, townspeople built houses as fast as they could, spurred by rising values as well as by public spirit. One could see all the evidences of rapid municipal growth, the difficulties of absorbing a large, new population swiftly into an old one. Persons of foreign blood congregated in colonies — Polish, Hungarian, Serbian.

What one could not see as readily, unless he knew the Buick shops, was the terrific task which faced the Buick organization in molding this medley of raw and transient labor into an efficient working force, its members well dis- posed toward one another and toward management. Flint was an open-shop town, and that tradition, bolstered by

90 The Turning Wheel

high wages and the opportunities for advancement offered by a new industry, held firm against the few and withal rather weak efforts to unionize the plants. A dynamic and dramatic leadership helped to maintain that tradition until employee morale could be built up to a quite remarkable peak, until men began to see that Buick, springing from the soil of the Hamilton farm, would be an enduring institution in whose plants they could find steady and profitable em- ployment during normal times and which in fact proved for years more resistant to business depression than the aver- age manufacturing plant.

Buick in 1908 manufactured 8,487 cars, occupied the largest automobile plant in the world, and had a net worth of $3,417,142. It had never missed a dividend on its Pre- ferred stock.

General Motors, immediately after its organization in September, 1908, took over Buick Motor Company for $1,500 cash, Common stock of $1,249,250, and Preferred stock of $2,499,500 — a total of $3,750,250, a conserva- tive valuation to which Buick had grown from $75,000 within the remarkably short space of four years.

Although its manufacturing processes would be consid- ered haphazard and inefficient in the light of modern tech- nology, they were abreast of the best practice of the day. Buick possessed a spirit in its personnel and a reputa- tion with the public which made it a tower of strength from which its bold organizer, after surveying wider fields, could advance toward his great objective — the formation of the General Motors Company.

Chapter VI OAKLAND AND PONTIAC: OLD AND NEW

ONTIAC, another great seat of General Motors manufac- turing, began its industrial development as Flint did, with the building of horse-drawn vehicles. The first Pontiac bug- gies and wagons were built by a blacksmith named King on the site of the present Fisher plant near Bagley Avenue. W. F. Stewart, who later went to Flint and rose to emi- nence there as a body-builder, bought King out and started his career in Pontiac, later selling his site to O. J. Beau- dette who sold in turn to Fisher Brothers. The site has a continuous history of vehicle manufacture for more than half a century.

Another Pontiac pioneer was R. D. Scott, a Canadian from Guelph, Ontario, who established himself near the Grand Trunk tracks. W. A. Paterson, pioneer in the vehicle industry of Flint, learned his trade in Scott's shop in Guelph, followed him to Pontiac and then went "up country" to Flint. At first Scott's trade was altogether local, but in 1889 or thereabout, he began to branch out with road-carts.

Lee Dunlap, who went to work for Scott in 1889 and continued to be a factor in Pontiac industry well into the automobile days, explains the swing from small production to large in the Michigan carriage field, as follows:

Until that time, carriages and wagons had been manufactured by hand, a few at a time and a few in a place, with the result that the costs were relatively high. In various parts of the country, it

92 The Turning Wheel

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was discovered that through division of labor and quantity pro- duction, costs could be greatly reduced, with the result that within four or five years there was a considerable boom in the trade and an almost complete stopping of custom building throughout the country districts. An incident will serve to illustrate the trend to larger marketing. I sold to Sears-Roebuck, shortly after they organized in Minneapolis, the first buggy they sold by direct mail, and within a few years, at the height of the carriage industry, every mail brought large orders from them.

Under the encouragement of prosperity, the entire industry pro- ceeded to overbuild. By the early years of the twentieth century, it was quite apparent that the buggy business had seen its best days, especially as far as Michigan was concerned. When automo- biles were still few and far between there were other parts of the country nearer the raw materials, which seemed to hav^ an ad- vantage over the Michigan factories. Practically every carriage manufacturer began to look around for some new development. The nearest one at hand seemed to be the automobile.

Of course you and I know that there is no striking similarity be- tween the carriage and the automobile except that both of them travel on wheels. We had worked out a system for progressive assembly and a quite efficient division of labor, but none of us knew anything about machine operations, except in a very limited way. We seldom used blue prints and close measurements were unnecessary. Nevertheless, the automobile industry located in Pon- tiac, entirely because Pontiac had been a city which manufactured horsedrawn vehicles. In Jackson, Flint, and many other cities the same tendency was in evidence. That the similarity in the two lines was more apparent than real is proved by the fact that the car- riage men are not now the factors in the automobile trade that they were in the beginning, their places having been taken by men of more engineering experience.

The largest of the Pontiac carriage factories was the Pontiac Buggy Company, which Edward M. Murphy, S. E. Beach, and Francis Emmendorf had incorporated in November, 1893. Although incorporated for only $25,000 paid in, it built a factory then reckoned large on Oakland Avenue, where the Pontiac, Oxford & Northern tracks crossed that thoroughfare, on land now occupied by the Pontiac Motor division.

All his old associates ascribe to "Ed" Murphy extraor- dinary powers of organization and business drive. Born in

Oakland and Pontiac: Old and New 93

Wayne, Michigan, he climbed the ladders of success largely by his own efforts and came early into business authority. In 1898, after the Pontiac Buggy Company had enjoyed its share of the boom, he brought Lee Dunlap into his orbit by establishing the Dunlap Vehicle Company, to manufacture a somewhat lighter grade of buggies than Pontiac had built. Mr. Dunlap came over from the C. V. Taylor organization. Pontiac Buggy also formed the Crescent Carriage Company in 1903. In 1904 Mr. Beach sold his interest to Mr. Murphy and bought the latter's interest in the Crescent and Dunlap plants, but later went back into the Pontiac organization, remaining until the change from carnage to automobile production. When this change came Mr. Murphy was sole owner of Pontiac Buggy Company, but his associates had interests in the allied carriage plants.

Not only was the carriage trade falling but also pro- duction costs were rising, owing to the automobile manu- facturers in Flint and Detroit drawing Pontiac's skilled workmen away. From its beginning the automobile trade paid practically double the wage rates customary in car- riage production. A carriage trimmer might get two dollars a day, an automobile trimmer four dollars for work roughly similar. Naturally, the automobile business drew the best workers, and the new wage standards dealt the declining carriage trade a heavy blow.

Facing decreased production and increased cost for car- riages, Mr. Murphy began looking around for an auto- mobile to manufacture, or, to be more exact, to assemble from purchased parts. He had heard of a two-cylinder car designed for Cadillac in which the latter did not seem to be particularly interested. Tests proving satisfactory, on August 28, 1907, Mr. Murphy organized the Oakland Motor Car Company for $200,000; 20,000 shares of Com- mon stock, par $10. New money was furnished by James Dempsey of Manistee, Michigan, a wealthy retired lumber- man. The Murphy carriage plants were acquired by Oak- land at various times. On September 25, 1908, the capital stock was increased to $300,000 by the addition of $100,000 in Preferred stock.

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The two-cylinder design not proving highly successful, the company brought out in 1908 Model K, a four-cylinder car powerful for its time and underselling all competitors. It became a hill-climbing champion, winning the Giants Despair Climb at Wilkes-Barre and other contests at Balti- more, Maryland; Paris, Illinois; and Jefferson Hill, Long Island, New York. The capital outlay being larger than anticipated, the close of 1908 saw the new venture peril- ously close to disaster. Mr. Dunlap speaks of Oakland as "broke" when W. C. Durant bought it early in 1909 for his new General Motors Company, but perhaps this is merely relative to commitments. Another source says that the cash position of Oakland was good, capital being doubled in a year. The production figures are 278 cars for 1908, 1035 f°r 1909^

Mr. Murphy explained to his group, some of whom objected to. the sale, that he was selling obsolete buildings. From Mr. Durant's side, one of the advantages was Oak- land's organization. Like everyone else in the Michigan carriage trade, he had a great liking for "Ed" Murphy and probably expected that Mr. Murphy, who was still a young man of great vigor, would become a leader in the new "automobile game." This prospect was defeated by the latter's early death. Other members of the Oakland group were men who have since become important figures.

On January 20, 1909, General Motors directors author- ized the acquisition of a half interest in the Oakland Motor Car Company. By February 23d, Mr. Durant reported the acquisition of 15,000 Oakland shares, also that he expected to acquire up to 21,000 shares at $11 a share. Mr. Murphy took stock and notes for his interest, but others had to be paid off in cash and by June 5th the treasurer reported that he had paid out $200,856 in cash for 18,783 shares. Hardly was the purchase completed than Mr. Murphy passed away and Lee Dunlap became general manager. Production advanced to 4,000 cars for 1910, which required a heavy plant expansion program, not without its bearing on the financial difficulty which General Motors experienced in the latter year.

figures furnished by National Automobile Chamber of Commerce.

Oakland and Pontiac: Old and New 95

Mr. Dunlap's narrative shows the speed at wltich any- one who followed Mr. Durant in those days was forced to travel :

When Mr. Durant visited one of his plants it was like the visita- tion of a cyclone. He would lead his staff in, take off his coat, be- gin issuing orders, dictating letters, and calling the ends of the continent on the telephone-, talking in his rapid easy way to New York, Chicago, San Francisco. That sort of thing was less com- mon than it is now: it put most of us in awe of him. Only the most phenomenal memory could keep his deals straight ; he worked so fast that the records were always behind.

On this visit of which I am thinking, early in IQIO, I expected he would stay several days as we were to discuss the whole matter of plant expansion. But after a few hours, Mr. Durant said, "Well, we're off to Flint." In despair I led him on a quick inspection of the plant. Instantly he agreed that we would have to build, and asked me to bring the expansion plan with me to Flint the next day. There wasn't any plan, and none could be drawn on such short notice, but his will being law and our need great, something had to be done.

So I called in a couple of our draftsmen to help me and that night we made a toy factory layout — existing buildings in one color, de- sired buildings in another. We drew a map of the whole property, showing streets and railway sidings, and then glued the existing buildings to it in their exact locations. Feeling like a small boy with a new toy, I took this lay-out to Flint and rather fearfully placed it before the chief. I needn't have been alarmed at our ama- teur lay-out. He was pleased pink. We had a grand time fitting our new buildings into the picture as it was spread on his desk. We placed those new buildings first here, then there, debating the situation. When we agreed as to where they should go, he said, "Glue them down and call W. E. Wood."

Mr. Wood came in after a few minutes and received an order for their construction. In the whole history of America, up to that time, buildings had never arisen as swiftly as those did. Con- tractor Wood had men, materials, and machines moving toward Pontiac within twenty-four hours, and we were installing ma- chinery in part of the structures within three weeks. But, of course, we could not be equally swift in paying for them. That was some- thing else. But for the time being none of us worried too much over that; we figured the "Little Fellow" would find the money somewhere. Which he did, in the end, though we know there was plenty of trouble before the bills were receipted.

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These early years in the automobile business were marked by tre- mendous personal activity and a very grave shortage of capital. Anyone going direct from the carriage manufacture to automo- bile manufacture could have little conception of the large use of capital required in the new field ... I was with Oakland all through the 1910 "pinch" when the plant was frequently visited by members of the Creditors* Committee.

Mr. Dunlap was succeeded as general manager of Oak- land by George E. Daniels, one of the earliest associates of W. C. Durant in the automobile business and the first president of the General Motors Company of New Jer- sey, holding office for a short time directly after incorpora- tion. After resigning the presidency, which he occupied merely as an. interim officer, Mr. Daniels remained with General Motors having charge of Cartercar. The bankers' reorganization placed him at the head of Oakland where he remained until 1914.

Production rose in 1913 to a new peak of 8,618 because of two advanced models — a fast, light "four" with an electric self-starter, and a "six" — Oakland's first — priced at $2,450, a moderate figure.

As part of the change wrought by W. C. Durant's return to power in 1916, Mr. Fred W. Warner, who had succeeded Mr. Daniels as general manager, became a vice-president of General Motors. Under him price reductions and improve- ments in design brought Oakland into a swift run of pros- perity as reflected by these unit sales figures :

1916 — 27,000 cars. The v-8 introduced

1917 — 35,000 cars. The "light six" sold at $795

1918 — 30,000 "light sixes." First offering of closed cars

1919 — 52,000 "light sixes" sold on a rising market

Automobile prices reached a peak in 1920, owing to scarcity of materials caused by war. Pioneering in the light car field with closed bodies, was so much of a marketing experiment for Oakland that dealers were required to take one closed car with each carload shipped from the factory. Now the closed car is standard and the open car the excep- tion.

Oakland and Pontiac: Old and New 97

The post-war boom brought prosperity to Oakland, as it did to other manufacturers. In General Motors at that time lack of central coordination, allowing great latitude in in- ventories and production programs, created difficulties which as they multiplied brought the second Durant admin- istration of General Motors to an end and a change of management to Oakland.

After Mr. Warner resigned in 1920, George H. Hannum served as president and general manager for six years, to be succeeded by Alfred R. Glancy who continued in the saddle until 1931. These were years of remarkable expansion in the Pontiac area, the General Motors plants spreading northward along the railway and an entire new factory lay- out being built beyond Harris Lake in what had been open country a few years before. During the 1920—1930 decade Pontiac grew faster than any other industrial city in its census classification. The acute shortage of houses, from 1919 on, led the Corporation into an extensive housing de- velopment through the Modern Housing Corporation.

The Oakland line, after a highly successful record with "fours," entered the usix" field in 1915, the "eight" field in 1916, and remained a leader in quantity production down to 1931, when it was discontinued. The Pontiac car, introduced as a light, low-priced "six" in 1926, received such a warm market welcome in the next few years that under the man- agement of I. J. Reuter, who took hold in 1931, the huge Oakland plant was concentrated on Pontiac production. Pontiac appeared in 1932 with an eight-cylinder motor. Its manufacturing operations were under the direction of W. S. Knudsen, president of Chevrolet, from May, 1932, to October, 1933. Mr. Knudsen at that time became executive vice-president of General Motors in charge of car and body manufacturing in the United States and Canada. H. J. Klinger, vice-president and general sales manager of Chev- rolet, was then advanced to general manager of Pontiac.

Among the innovations which Oakland-Pontiac takes pride in originating or early adopting are oil and fuel filters, air cleaner, crankcase ventilation, automatic spark control, interchangeable bronze-backed main bearings, harmonic

98 The Turning Wheel

balancer, oil-tight universal joints, honed cylinders, full pressure lubrication, and rubber spring shackle bushings. Oakland was the first division to bring Duco-finished cars to quantity production; the year, 1924.

The Pontiac Motor division, in succession to Oakland, now occupies 231 acres within the corporate limits. The experimental unit fronts on Oakland Avenue. The main division, to the north just inside the city limits, is one of the most advanced industrial lay-outs in the world, and entirely new since 1927. This huge grouping is in startling contrast to the modest factory building in which Oakland started to manufacture motor cars in 1908, when only 50,000 square feet of space housed its initial activities.

A breezy description of how some of the burning ques- tions connected with new car models are threshed out and what a new model — in this case the Pontiac for 1932 — in- volves financially is given in Fortune for December, 1931. Perhaps the account is sufficiently accurate to give one a general impression of what is involved in a change of models.

The scene is a luncheon club in the Fisher Building, De- troit, where half a hundred General Motors executives are reported as present. The reader is supposed to be accom- panying Mr. Richard H. Grant :

Mr. Grant's sales problem will begin with the oldest thing in auto- mobile salesmanship: namely, the automobile. Should the 1932 Pontiac have free-wheeling? Ride control? Should the foot throt- tle be changed at the cost of 35 cents per car ($35,000 added to production costs) ? The Pontiac engineers have been maintaining forty experimental cars on the road to prove these things, some of them embodying features that will not appear until 1933 or 1934. In the end, during the coming ten months, Mr. Reuter will have spent $1,000,000 for research on the 1932 car, to which should be added Pontiac's share of the research done by General Motors Research Laboratories, by Fisher Body, by Delco-Remy (ignition) by Harrison Radiator, by New Departure (ball bearings), by AC (spark plugs, gauges, etc.) by Kelsey-Hayes Wheel, and by head- light, shock-absorber, tool, and die manufacturers throughout the land : a total research bill of $2,000,000 spent by the industry for this car alone. After the tireless engineers have estimated the cost

Oakland and Pontiac: Old and New 99

of every one of the 15,000 Pontiac parts, and after theyliave sub- mitted blue prints to George Christopher, in charge of Pontiac manufacture, Mr. Reuter will find it necessary to spend $1,400,000 in retooling for this model, and the retooling of Fisher Body will cost that unit $1,000,000 more. New machinery will cost Pontiac $300,000 and to revamp the floor plan will add $150,000.

All through General Motors history, groups of vigorous men have been making similar decisions of great import which affect the Corporation, its products, and the world. Change the names to those of other cars and persons, place them in other scenes, and you have a fair idea of the group planning which has been going on in General Motors for twenty-five years. All over the broad geographic range of the Corporation, both in the United States and abroad, plants have been growing, as the Pontiac plant grew, be- cause men who knew what they wanted could agree on programs and carry them through.

Chapter VII CADILLAC: THE TRIUMPH OF PRECISION

.HE two most vital trends in American machine indus- try— Middle West daring and New England craftsman- ship— met in the founding of Cadillac, an enterprise whose success has had a profound effect on the whole automobile trade and through it upon American industrial history. The first of these influences has been discussed in the chapters on Oldsmobile and Buick; the second entered the scene with Cadillac, whose roots reach back into the New England scene of traditionally competent workmanship and native mechanical ingenuity.

New England's early eminence in American industry pro- duced an imposing array of inventors and an army of able mechanics. Indeed, until almost the turn of the present cen- tury, New England dominated the American machine in- dustry, and for a time it seemed likely to capture first place in the rising automobile trade. The state of Massachusetts recognized the importance of Blanchard's steam carriage, built in 1825, by legislative enactment giving that vehicle the right to use the roads. The first gasoline "horseless buggy" of the modern era was also built in Springfield by the Duryeas. The Pope interests in Hartford came early to the support of the automobile, and both as manufacturers of vehicles and part owners of the Selden patent, wielded great influence through the infant years of the industry.

With this early start, the wonder is that the automobile business slipped away from New England to the Middle

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West. There were several reasons for this shift, and one is this: New England inventors and mechanics went West themselves. New England was always a seed-bed of talent in the industrial arts; as the young men of New England marched West they took its best traditions with them.

HENRY M. LELAND

The career of Henry Martyn Leland, founder of the Cadillac Motor Car Company, is an outstanding example of the influence of New England machine shop practice upon the Middle West. Mr. Leland was born at Danville, Ver- mont, February 16, 1843. He was early apprenticed in the Crompton-Knowles Works at Worcester, Massachusetts. As a skilled mechanic he was taken into the Federal Arsenal, at Springfield, Massachusetts, and later worked in the Colt revolver factory. The New England arms factories were the first to apply fully the practice of assembling inter- changeable parts, the great Eli Whitney establishing this principle. By the time of the Civil War the machining and assembly of arms parts had been highly refined, with the result that Leland early became accustomed to a high de- gree of precision, laying the foundation for an ideal of

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accurate machine work which later distinguished the out- put of his Detroit factories.

After a stay of twenty years with the famous Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company at Providence, Rhode Island, Mr. Leland went "on the road" in the Middle West where the company desired to introduce their machine tools to the growing mechanical industries of that section. It was in this way that he became acquainted with Detroit, its industrial leaders and possibilities.

Moving to Detroit in 1890, he established the Leland, Faulconer & Norton Company which made machine tools, grinders, gear cutters, etc., and also did custom work along those lines. In 1895 the firm became the Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company, with Charles A. Strelinger as secretary. Mr. Strelinger was a leading hard- ware merchant whose immense trade in bicycles led him to take a keen interest in every type of rapid transport. The year 1896 is notable in Leland annals for the establishment of a grey iron foundry which scored a remarkable success by introducing more closely machined castings than could be had at that time elsewhere, so that its products commanded premium prices, sometimes as much as thrice the usual price.

In its plant on Trombly Avenue the company added gears for chainless bicycles to its other lines, working out a process for grinding these case-hardened gears to closer standards. Another activity embraced the manufacture of gasoline motors of five, ten, and fifteen horsepower for marine uses, a line of production which inevitably brought the company into the newly developing automobile business. His experience with marine motors began in the East, and all through his early days in Detroit Mr. Leland was an en- thusiastic prophet of the almost unlimited future of internal combustion engines.

Although it had made machinery and parts for other automobile companies earlier, Leland & Faulconer did not enter quantity production of automotive material until it began manufacturing transmission gears for the one- cylinder motor car designed by R. E. Olds — the famous curved-dash runabout. After the Oldsmobile factory had been destroyed by fire, need to restore production quickly

Cadillac 103

led Mr. Olds to turn over to Leland & Faulconer part of his motor manufacture. This was seized upon as an oppor- tunity to show the world to what close standards a gasoline engine could be built. An associate of Henry M. Leland says in this connection:

At the first automobile show in Detroit, the Olds display contained two cars, one powered by Olds, the other by Leland. I recall that Henry Ford pointed out to us as a curiosity the fact that the Leland motor was operating under brakes in order to bring it to the same pace as the Olds motor. Our motor developed 3.7 horse- power as against 3 for the Olds-built motor. This superiority was due entirely to closer machining. H. M. Leland went seriously to work on the Olds motor and by introducing larger valves and improved timing system we were able to build this one cylinder up from 3.7 horsepower to 10.25. On taking the improved article to the Olds Company, we were dismayed by the refusal to use it. Mr. Olds was getting all the business he could handle and I sup- pose such a radical change in power plant would have necessitated alterations in many directions. The point is significant however as a key to a future of accuracy methods in manufacturing.

While Olds was rushing rapidly into quantity production and Leland & Faulconer were gaining their reputation for precision, a third group of Detroit men, with ample capital at their disposal, formed the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899, in an endeavor to pioneer a merchantable pas- senger car. These men were William H. Murphy, Lem W. Bowen, Clarence A. Black, and A. F. White, all citi- zens of the first rank, who had as their chief guide and mainstay in the mechanical department no less a person than Henry Ford. Mr. Ford's ideas then ran more to speed than to comfort, and after he had produced two racing cars which made quite exceptional records but were not at all what his backers visualized as meeting the market demand, the Detroit Automobile Company group came to Leland & Faulconer and agreed to use the latter's improved motor which the Oldsmobile organization had not seen fit to adopt. With their assistance the Cadillac Automobile Com- pany was organized on August 22, 1902, with a capital of $300,000. Thus Cadillac became established at Cass &

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Amsterdam avenues, Detroit, a site it continued to occupy for many years.

The selection of that name was a logical one for men versed in Detroit history. Antoine Sieur de la Mothe de Cadillac was the leader of the French expedition which made its first settlement at Detroit in 1702, just two

Cadillac "one-lunger" 1902 From Duncan s World on Wheels

hundred years before the founding of the new automobile company. In his high courage, enterprise, and ability the founders saw the very qualities which they hoped to bring to their fledgling corporation. His coat-of-arms became the emblem of the new company.

Work on the first Cadillac automobile had been begun in September, 1902 — a one-cylinder car known as Model A, of which two units were completed in March, 1903. In the following twelve months Cadillac built and shipped 1,895 finished automobiles. From the completion of that first car the future of Cadillac has never been in doubt.

Cadillac 105

This famous "one-lunger" was then the last word in superior workmanship. The engine was located under the front seat; a hand crank at the side served as a starter. The driver sat to the right; a real steering wheel offered an advanced feature, nearly all the other cars of the day steering by tiller control. The car had no running board, but patent-leather fenders imparted an air of distinction. Four passengers might ride, two in front and two in the rear. Heavy brass kerosene lamps and a hand-operated bulb horn cost extra.

A situation then arose which was not uncommon in those days. While Leland motors were giving excellent satisfac- tion, the Cadillac Automobile Company was unable to do equally well as regards chassis and body manufacture. It brought its troubles to the Leland organization. As the lat- ter could not afford to see art outlet for their motors closed, they accepted, with a good deal of misgiving, the proposition to undertake the general management of Cadillac. The consolidation of Cadillac Automobile Company and Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company into the Cad- illac Motor Car Company was completed on December 27, 1904. Henry M. Leland became general manager.

In 1904 the company introduced the Model B one- cylinder Cadillac. In all, 16,126 one-cylinder Cadillacs were manufactured on the two models. The one-cylinder cars formed the bulk of early output demand continuing after the "30" of four cylinders was introduced in 1905. A spec- tacular proof of the long life of these one-cylinder cars was given in 1922 when on the twentieth anniversary of the company, Lucien R. Burns, who had been with Cadillac since its organization, drove one of the first cars it had ever built from Detroit to New York where he had long before unloaded the first Cadillac shipped into the city. More than 67,000 of the "305" were manufactured. Both the one- cylinder and the "30" had the notable feature of inter- changeability of parts.

The proudest achievement of early Cadillac history, the winning of the Dewar trophy, awarded by the Royal Auto- mobile Club of London, England, for the greatest advance by any motorcar during the year, flowed directly from this

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achievement of parts interchangeability. Until the London demonstration, the world believed that English, French, and German workmanship stood superior to American and that the rise of the automobile industry in this country re- ceived its impetus from other factors than those involved design and manufacture — such factors as the vast

in

Cadillac cars drawn up in London, 1907, for tests which won the 1908 award of the Dewar Trophy

distances of America, its large population and the broad dis- tribution of wealth. Cadillac, practising the highest stand- ards of close workmanship, now revealed that automobiles could be made of interchangeable parts just as effectively as firearms could be.

A graphic picture of that triumph and explanation of what it meant to the reputation of American cars abroad is contained in a letter in the Automobile Trade Journal of December, 1924, from F. S. Bennett of F. S. Bennett, Ltd., 24 Orchard Street, London, W. I., the pioneer agent of Cadillac in the British Isles. A half-page Cadillac adver- tisement in that trade organ in 1903 led Mr. Bennett into correspondence with the company, which resulted in the setting up of an agency. He writes :

I would not like to say just how many million dollars have changed hands as the direct result of this advertisement, and it goes much

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&.~ .4

further than this, as it can be rightly claimed to have been the birth of the industry of American cars in Europe.

The early history of American cars over here might be said to be the early history of the Cadillac car. In the very early days a few American cars came over here but did not make good. The Cadil- lac was the first to establish itself and in doing so established the American-made automobile in this market. For several years I plowed a lonely furrow, being the only man who did not falter in his belief in the American car.

It was not until what is now known as "the famous Cadillac standardization test" that the prejudice, still surviving, of dumped American bicycles and a certain number of poorly made cars, was successfully overcome.

This test in 1906 consisted of three Cadillac cars being assembled in an open shed at Brooklands track from a medley of parts rep- resenting the dismembered components of three Cadillacs taken from the dockside by the Royal Automobile Club officials as they arrived from America and taken to pieces by them and jumbled in the shed mentioned.

Then the Cadillac mechanics assembled the cars from the heap with no other tools than wrench, hammer, screw driver and ply- ers. The three cars were immediately put into the hands of the Royal Automobile Club official observers and went through a 5OO-mile test on the Brooklands track, finishing with a perfect score.

That was the first demonstration here in the art of motor car standardization and it created a profound impression. For this, the Sir Thomas Dewar trophy — awarded for the most meritorious performance of the year — was awarded by the Royal Automobile Club to Cadillac. The Cadillac is the only automobile company that has won this trophy twice.

The effect of this test on the public mind makes it stand out as historic and unique, and even this morning, as I write this, I re- ceived a press clipping with reference to this test carried out eighteen years ago. I can truthfully say that during the eighteen years, no week has passed in which a clipping from some news- paper in some part of the world has not arrived referring to this test.

It had the effect of giving the Cadillac car in particular, and the American-made car in general, a place in the sun in this country. On this side of the water it answered completely the adverse criticisms against the American-made car and