Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age

by Lawrence Goldstone

  * * *

  *1 This would be termed a “single non-repeatable cycle.”

  *2 Papin worked a good deal with steam. He also invented the pressure cooker.

  *3 Savery built an actual steam pump, though it lacked sufficient power to draw water from anywhere but the shallowest depths and thus was never employed for its stated purpose.

  *4 Watt would have preferred a crank, but that device was under patent and he balked at paying licensing fees. The gear system he employed was called “planetary,” because the gear attached to the connecting rod revolved around a fixed gear attached to the driveshaft. As the driveshaft moves up and down, the movable gear will move around the fixed one—like a planet orbiting the sun—which turns the horizontal shaft to which it is attached. That device was actually invented by a Watt employee, William Murdoch, but Watt submitted the patent application under his own name in 1781. The linkage system, however, a brilliant and simple mechanism of three rods that moved in a figure-eight motion, was Watt’s own brainchild.

  *5 Boulton was one of a series of brilliant scientists and patrons of science who lived in Birmingham during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Some of them, including Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, William Small (Thomas Jefferson’s tutor), and Samuel Galton, met once a month at the time of the full moon to discuss issues of the day, and thus dubbed themselves the Lunar Society. Also in 1776, Adam Smith published his groundbreaking economics treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, so it well might be argued that three revolutions were initiated in that remarkable year.

  *6 Cugnot’s preserved wagon does, however, occupy a prominent place in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

  *7 Trevithick is best known for producing the first steam locomotive, but his invention of the high-pressure steam engine, which was far more efficient and therefore could produce more power at a smaller size, would prefigure the later development of the steam-powered automobile.

  *8 “Double-acting” means the piston moves back and forth, with gas entering on either side as the piston passes, a sort of mechanical tug-of-war. A flywheel is a large wheel attached to a rotating shaft that “stores rotational energy”—in other words, allows the shaft to rotate at constant speed even if the energy powering the shaft is intermittent.

  *9 “Horsepower,” a measure introduced by James Watt, is a rate of doing work, expressed as the fraction work/time. One horsepower is equal to 33,000 foot-pounds per minute.

  *10 Engines that are powered at every upstroke of the piston are called “two-stroke” and require a mixture of gas and oil in the cylinder. Both substances are burned off at ignition. Two-stroke motors are quite powerful in smaller machines but less efficient and more brittle than engines that are powered at every other upstroke, called “four-stroke.” Modern examples of devices that use two-stroke motors are leaf blowers, chain saws, snowblowers, and motor scooters.

  *11 Beau de Rochas was a man of brilliant ideas and no follow-through. Among his notions were a railroad tunnel under the English Channel, the incorporation of steel in high-pressure boilers, and a telegraph for submarines—which, of course, now exist—as well as more fanciful projects, such as driving canal boats by a chain on the canal bottom that stretched the length of the waterway. But he was also evidently an extreme eccentric who rarely made any money and could not save what little he did. When his four-stroke patents lapsed, he could not afford to renew them, so they entered the public domain, costing him millions. When he died in 1893, his widow reportedly was forced to sell household objects to pay for her mourning dress.

  CHAPTER 2

  Even as gas power found increased industrial application, few of the hundreds of inventors who sought to create powered locomotion imagined the internal combustion engine as anything but a monstrosity—large, noisy, smoke-belching, bolted to the floor, and suitable only for the factory. If a road carriage was to be built, it would be steam powered. On that point, nearly everyone agreed.

  Except George Selden. Even before the Otto engine pushed a piston, Selden was engaged in developing a gasoline-powered motor sufficiently small and light to be attached to a four-wheeled chassis. As noted, had the family connections with which he was later credited actually existed, Selden almost certainly would have built the world’s first motorcar. But those connections, along with virtually everything about his invention, proved to be an illusion.

  —

  Selden was born in 1846, son of abolitionist Henry Rogers Selden, a distinguished judge and the future lieutenant governor of New York. A founder of the Republican Party, the elder Selden turned down Abraham Lincoln’s offer of the vice presidency in 1864, feeling himself unqualified. His record as a defender of equal rights was without blemish. He refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, corresponded with Frederick Douglass, and when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for illegally voting in the November 1872 presidential election, he asserted, “I could not see a lady I respected put in jail.” Against her wishes, he posted Anthony’s bond. Anthony forgave Selden, who then defended her pro bono, basing his argument on the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection of the law. Such was his reputation that Anthony told friends, “I know I can win. I have Judge Selden as a lawyer.” For his part, Selden stated, “In my opinion, the idea that you can be charged with a crime on account of voting, or offering to vote, when you honestly believed yourself entitled to vote, is simply preposterous, whether your belief were right or wrong. However, the learned gentlemen engaged in this movement seem to suppose they can make a crime out of your honest deposit of your ballot, and perhaps they can find a respectable court or jury that will be of their opinion. If they do so, I shall be greatly disappointed.”1 Both defendant and lawyer turned out to be mistaken. The judge, Associate Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt, serving on circuit, took no chances on the sentiments of a jury by directing a verdict of guilty.*1

  In contrast to his progressive public persona, however, at home Henry Selden was a rigid, domineering father, subjecting his son to a steady stream of “hostility and ridicule.”2 In particular, he had little patience with his son’s penchant for tinkering.

  Selden would later claim to have begun thinking about “road locomotion” when, as “a boy of fourteen, he chanced to hear a conversation between his father and a manufacturer of farm implements, about [a] self-propelled steam carriage for public roads.”3 Both expressed the opinion that such vehicles were not feasible. The “steam carriages” that had been present on the landscape for decades were little more than portable power plants that could not be moved faster than 5 miles per hour. No one, the judge and his visitor agreed, would succeed in overcoming the standard inhibitions of size and weight. Even at fourteen, Selden insisted later, he was already convinced that steam had no future. “This conversation was to Mr. Selden what the spoon over the tea kettle was to James Watt—it started him thinking upon the subject that was to be the main theme of his life.” Although this entire account may well be apocryphal—most of the available material describing Selden’s early life is taken either from interviews he gave when he was a figure of extreme controversy or from his testimony in the patent suit—that George Selden’s interests were in mechanical devices and not legal statutes is without question.

  But Henry Selden would brook no dissent in his determination that George should take up the law. When the younger Selden returned home after a brief stint in the Union Army hospital corps, his father insisted he begin a course of study at Yale that would prepare him for a law practice.4 But a Yale education was not going to aid George Selden in developing a motor that could be mounted on a wheelbase and carry passengers, so George, exhibiting rare defiance, left Yale and instead enrolled in a “scientific school.” There, in addition to his studies, he was free to experiment with a variety of mechanical devices.

  In 1869, his father put an end to such frivolity and Selden returned home to enter the family profess
ion. Not surprisingly for a man who wished to be an inventor, he chose to specialize in patent law. That had been Henry Selden’s specialty as well—“one of our greatest patent lawyers, one of our greatest judges, and the greatest scholar of the law I have ever known,” as one admirer put it. George Selden apprenticed for two years; then, while continuing to live in his father’s home, he joined the bar in 1871. Whenever he found himself with free time, he padded off to a basement workshop. Selden developed one or two minor devices he wanted to patent, but during the precise period when Henry Selden was defending Susan B. Anthony’s freedoms without pay, the father refused to offer his son either moral or monetary support.

  As the 1870s drew on, Selden’s basement experiments resulted in one or two minor patents, which he licensed to local firms, but his main focus remained the design for a workable motorcar. His epiphany occurred in 1876, when he traveled to Philadelphia to visit the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, the first official World’s Fair ever hosted within the United States, mounted as a centennial exposition to trumpet America’s growing industrial might. Among the mechanical, agricultural, scientific, and cultural marvels exhibited in Philadelphia were the bicycle, the typewriter, Heinz ketchup, and Hires root beer. Also on display were the giant Corliss steam engine, the steam locomotive John Bull, and a new sort of engine, called the Ready Motor by its creator, George Brayton, an English inventor living in Boston. As reported in Scientific American, “The distinguishing features of this engine are that it can be started in a very short time, that it is economical in its consumption of fuel, and that, owing to the constant maintenance of carburetion, it is claimed, the danger of explosion of the hydrocarbon vapor is as greatly reduced as to be practically obviated.”5

  The most important word in Scientific American’s description was “hydrocarbon”; Brayton’s Ready Motor ran on petroleum. Although petroleum had been used as a crude lighting fuel for centuries, the vast industrial potential of oil and its distillates was only then coming to be understood. The first modern refinery had been built less than twenty years earlier, and America’s first oil well had not been sunk until 1859 (with a drill powered by a steam engine). At first, petroleum was considered only as a source of kerosene, with other distillates either of limited utility or considered waste products. Brayton’s engine was the first to be powered by petroleum and the first to use any form of liquid fuel.

  The Ready Motor was an odd combination of the impractical and the prescient. The engine utilized compression, but not in the cylinder. Brayton pressurized the air in its own chamber and then passed it through vaporized fuel for carburetion.*2 The mixture was then passed into an “expansion chamber,” where it was ignited by a steady flame—as opposed to the spark used as ignition in the Otto. In this second chamber, the “injected” fuel burned rather than exploded and drove a piston. The engine was two-stroke and reciprocal, meaning that the piston was driven back and forth by alternating expansions on either side. Each thrust allowed the spent fuel from the previous thrust to be expelled. The “constant-pressure” principle was later called the “Brayton cycle” and found application in gas turbines, which are now employed to power jet engines.6

  Although the Brayton engine exhibited at the centennial exposition was immense—more than eight feet high—as soon as Selden saw it, he was convinced that he had found his model. The constant-pressure principle was perfect, he was certain, for “road locomotion”—and Selden, before anyone else in America, realized that a petroleum-powered motor could be made substantially smaller and lighter.

  For the next three years, Selden experimented with various designs and configurations. Although he was still living at his father’s house and was a practicing attorney, Selden never had a great deal of money—he was plowing virtually all of his earnings into materials for his experiments. As he put it, the pursuit was with “unremitting ardor interrupted by pecuniary embarrassments.” Eventually he hired a mechanic—or “mechanician,” as they were then called—to help him fabricate the compact, lightweight Brayton engine that his road carriage would require. His principal problem was fuel—he had settled on petroleum over the obviously impractical street gas, but, as many Brayton users had discovered, crude was smoky and fouled an engine as much as powered it. So Selden, again before anyone else, turned to petroleum distillates.

  Other than kerosene, the distillates—including gasoline, whose main utility seemed to be as a stain remover—continued to be viewed essentially as waste. But Selden wasn’t so certain, so he and his mechanic, William Gomm, devised a test. They put a match to kerosene spread on an iron plate; it wouldn’t burn. Then to benzene, which burned slowly with a good deal of smoke. And finally to gasoline, which “went off like a flash” and left no residue.

  With that flash, Selden had his power source. Gomm then built a three-cylinder engine—to generate sufficient momentum to allow the engine to be run without a flywheel. That plan turned out to be moot, however, since only one of the cylinders became operational. But while the engine coughed and sputtered, it started up and ran. Although Gomm could not keep it going for more than a few seconds, a problem Selden intended to solve in his next round of experiments, George Selden was the first American attempting to build a gasoline automobile, and the first to conceive of a multicylinder motor to power it.

  But Selden’s time and money problems would not go away. During this period of experimentation and even when the patent application was first filed, he had every intention of pursuing production. But with his father unyielding in his refusal to help with either capital or introductions, Selden was forced to solicit financing on his own—or, more accurately, to beg for it. Without his father’s endorsement, he was rejected everywhere and often laughed at. All the while, he was barely meeting expenses.

  So, unable to raise the funds to build a prototype, embittered by the jeers of the local gentry, and realizing that competitors would at some point come to the same conclusions as had he, in 1879 George Selden decided to ensure that he at least made some money. He filed for a patent for an “improved road-engine” based on a gasoline-powered modified Brayton engine. “The object of my invention,” he wrote in the patent application, “is the production of a safe, simple, and cheap road-locomotive, light in weight and easy to control, and possessed of sufficient power to overcome any ordinary inclination.” He had avoided the impediments to steam locomotion, “the great weight of the boiler, engine, water, and water tanks, the complicated apparatus necessary to adapt the machine to the roughness of the roads which it must traverse, the necessity of the attendance of a skilled engineer to prevent accidents, and the unsightly appearance of the locomotives built on this plan,” he claimed, by the “construction of a road-locomotive propelled by a liquid-hydrocarbon engine of the compression type.” The goal, remarkably farsighted for its day, was to “employ the most condensed type of fuel, to produce a power road-wagon which differs but little in appearance from and is not materially heavier than the carriages in common use, [and] is capable of being managed by persons of ordinary skill at a minimum of trouble and expense.” Since he had yet to develop an engine that could run for any length of time, he avoided specifics by simply asserting that “a given quantity of liquid hydrocarbon [would be] injected by pump into the combustion chamber.”

  While this and other references to a machine that had already been built were false, the lack of an actual prototype had no bearing on whether or not Selden would receive his patent. But it had great bearing on whether or not George Selden wanted to receive his patent, at least at any time proximate to when the application was filed. Without an actual automobile to sell and no prospects for acquiring sufficient capital to build one, Selden could profit from his invention only by licensing it. But even that route was problematic. Perfecting a working model was a good deal more complex than rendering a set of drawings. With an idea so ahead of its time, few manufacturers were apt to take on the costs and risks of per
fecting a product for which no previous industrial process had been developed. Even his motor was nowhere near the stage at which it could be mounted on a carriage. The last thing he would have wanted was to be issued a patent whose seventeen-year life might well expire before there was any chance to profit from it.

  Selden may or may not have been one of history’s great innovators, but he was definitely a talented patent lawyer. If he couldn’t control when the technology was ready for his idea, he would control when his idea was ready for the technology. The patent system was a jerry-built labyrinth, ripe to be manipulated in any number of ways, and George Selden knew them all. In this case, the most propitious strategy was revision and delay, to keep the application pending until opportunities to profit from the idea had manifested themselves.

  So for the next sixteen years Selden made fully one hundred alterations to his original application, in some cases adding specifics, in others taking them out, and in still others performing ludicrous secretarial chores, such as flattening out wrinkles in the paper. In each of these, he took the maximum time allotted by the examiner, often two years, all to ensure that his application was not approved until motorcars had become a reality.

  With the filing of the patent application, Selden’s life as an inventor came to an end. He was from then on nothing more than a lawyer with himself as a client. His gamesmanship was brilliant, and by the time he ended his long march, automotive technology had leapt into the practical. By deft management, Selden’s approved 1895 patent—which reverted to the 1879 filing date but had an expiration date of 1912—bore only passing resemblance to his original application and incorporated many of the features of the automobiles that were by then selling in increasing numbers. On that paper product alone, Selden expected to become one of the richest men in America.