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

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But after he obtained his patent…nothing happened. Three years later, Selden’s motor, which had never been completed, lay rusting in the basement of the family home. With the caliber of both engines and the carriages that held them by that time making Selden’s construction look childlike, none of the scores of manufacturers of genuine automobiles offered him licensing fees, and Selden lacked the resources to demand any. So obscure had Selden’s patent become that when researchers for automobile manufacturers went hunting through the registry to protect themselves against potential infringement suits, they never even noticed it. Selden remained in Rochester, eking out the same insubstantial living as he had since entering the law. Sixteen years of clever manipulation, it seemed, had yielded him nothing.

  * * *

  *1 He took no chances on Anthony either, refusing to admit her testimony and writing his opinion before the proceedings commenced. Hunt was an “associate” of powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling, “the champion of partisanship,” and was appointed to the high court by Ulysses Grant at Conkling’s behest. Hunt served for six lackluster years before suffering a major stroke that left him unable to speak or attend court sessions. He refused to retire because in order to receive his pension, he was required to be a member of the court for ten years. To get him off the bench, Congress passed a provision granting Hunt his pension if he retired immediately, an opportunity Hunt did not pass up. Conkling himself was nominated to fill Hunt’s seat and was quickly confirmed, but declined the post because he would not accept a diminution of influence.

  *2 “Carburetion” is simply the mixing of air and fuel to enable combustion.

  CHAPTER 3

  George Selden may have been the first person in the United States to conclude that petroleum distillates might hold the key to horseless travel, but he was not the first altogether. In Austria, a decade before Selden cobbled together his three-cylinder motor, a prominent engineer named Siegfried Marcus had not only hypothesized that gasoline might be precisely what was needed to power an internal combustion-driven motorcar, but he had also actually built one.

  When he began tinkering with motor transport, Marcus, a native German, had already produced a string of inventions that made him a wealthy man and left him uniquely prepared to take on the task at hand. One of these was “a hand-powered magneto-electric device useful for a military field telegraph without batteries. This led him to an electric ignition device for explosive mines, which was adopted by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies. By the 1880s, he had a reliable magneto-electric ignition system for gas engines that could be driven by the engine itself.”1 Marcus also invented the T plunger for explosives, which was soon standard for both military and civilian applications. He was sufficiently acclaimed that Empress Elisabeth, wife of Franz Joseph I, engaged him to install a system of electric bells in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. From a steady stream of royalties—Marcus would eventually hold more than 150 patents—he was thus able to finance a workshop equipped with all the tools and instruments that might be needed to produce a motorized vehicle.

  Marcus was not seeking profits. Something of a throwback to Huygens’s era, he was drawn to problems as intellectual challenges. He particularly enjoyed the complex and the seemingly insoluble. But luck plays a role in scientific inquiry, and Marcus more or less stumbled onto gasoline as a power source. Austria-Hungary possessed some of the richest petroleum reserves in Europe—it had established the world’s first oil refinery in 1858—and so petroleum products were an important component of the national economy. As in the United States, kerosene was the prized distillate, with gasoline considered useful only as a solvent. After some experimentation, however, Marcus, like Selden, determined that gasoline held great potential as a fuel; unlike Selden, he realized that the liquid must be either atomized or rendered into a vapor for it to combust. For a conveyable, self-contained engine, as would be needed in a motorcar, a small, efficient device would be necessary to disperse the liquid and then mix it with air so that it might be ignited in the cylinder.

  To create a workable mixture of fuel and air, which Marcus called “carburetion,” he filled a vessel with gasoline over which a brush rotated, sending minute droplets into the air above the pool. Suction created by the piston’s downstroke drew the mixture into the cylinder, where it was condensed during the upstroke—momentum provided by a flywheel—and detonated by a spark, thus beginning the cycle once more. The “rotating brush carburetor,” as it was termed, was highly inefficient—it utilized droplets rather than vapor, and there was no way to control the amount or richness of the mixture fed into the cylinder—but for the first time, the internal combustion engine had been freed from the factory floor and adapted for potential use in a vehicle. Even if he had never chosen to build a vehicle himself, “with his carburetor and his electric ignition, Marcus had made liquid fuel practical so that his engines could be used anywhere.”2

  Sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s, Marcus mounted a two-stroke engine on a handcart and took it out for a spin. The machine could neither steer nor brake, but since it also could not tackle even the mildest grade, there was little danger of a runaway. Nor, with a range estimated at one-tenth of a mile, could it threaten havoc much beyond the door to Marcus’s shop. Still, the sight of a motor-powered carriage ambling along the streets of Vienna elicited gasps, and word of Marcus’s achievement spread across Europe.

  Marcus returned to his workshop, and by the time George Selden was preparing his patent application, Marcus was well on the way to a second prototype. He had improved on the first version immensely, moving up to the more efficient four-stroke engine, installing brakes and steering, and developing a magneto starter to replace the assistants who had been required to lift the back wheels of the first incarnation off the ground and spin them to get the motor started.*1

  But Marcus chose not to publicly exhibit his machine until 1888, by which time two younger men had claimed the lead in the race to develop the horseless carriage.

  —

  Karl Benz was thirteen years Marcus’s junior, born out of wedlock in Karlsruhe in 1844. His father drove a locomotive—and married Karl’s mother soon after the boy’s birth—but was killed in a railroad accident when his son was only two. Although Benz’s mother had almost no money, she was determined that Karl receive a quality education, a task made easier when the boy demonstrated almost preternatural scientific aptitude from the moment he began school. Young Benz was sent to a prestigious scientific academy at age nine, a polytechnical secondary school soon after, and then was admitted to the University of Karlsruhe at age fifteen to study mechanical engineering. He was granted a degree four years later and, not yet twenty, went out into the world to make his living.

  Benz was one of the plethora of automobile and aviation pioneers who began with bicycles. Both a rider and a mechanic, Benz, while still a student, had begun considering the means to adapt the basic bicycle design to a motor-driven carriage. Soon afterward, he took to sketching ideas for a high-speed motor in his spare time.

  Despite his obvious talents, Benz had difficulty holding a job, drifting from one firm to another as either he or those for whom he worked became impatient and frustrated with the other. By his mid-twenties, he had come to understand that he was one of those people who could not work for anyone else, yet he lacked the wherewithal to strike out on his own.

  Benz thought he had the problem solved when he took what little money he had been able to save and partnered with August Ritter to design and build machines to fabricate sheet metal. But choosing a business partner is a skill in itself, and Benz didn’t have it. Ritter proved lazy and unreliable, and the new firm foundered. At one point, its tools were impounded and bankruptcy seemed inevitable.

  But if Karl Benz was inept in choosing one sort of partner, he was utterly ingenious in another. Henry Ford would later call his wife, Clara, “the believer,” for her unflagging support of his ideas and ambition, but it is difficult to imagine
a wife more invaluable to her husband’s success than Berthe Benz. She was a combination of cheerleader, mother, strategic planner, investment banker, and CEO. Not yet having married Karl, Berthe used her dowry to buy Ritter out and then pay off the firm’s debts sufficiently to get her fiancé’s factory up and running.

  Their business brought in sufficient revenue to keep them operating, but Berthe was adamant that their future success lay in Karl’s experiments with engine design and ultimately a motor-driven vehicle. To provide the wherewithal to continue the research, Berthe encouraged her husband to fabricate components that could be patented, thus bringing in licensing fees as well as providing elements of the final product. Over the course of the next decade, Benz obtained patents on either new or improved versions of a battery-powered ignition system, water-filled radiator, carburetor, spark plug, gearshift, and clutch. Ironically, the least advanced of Benz’s components was his two-stroke engine. In 1883, Benz set up a production facility in—not surprisingly—a bicycle shop and set to incorporating these disparate elements into what would be the world’s first automobile designed to generate its own power using an internal combustion engine.

  He fell back on the old standby, the high-wheeler, for the design. The machine, which Benz would christen the Benz Patent Motorwagen, featured three bicycle-type spoked wheels (the front one smaller in diameter), a tubular steel frame, and a chain drive. Steering was by a tiller, and bench seating was provided for two. Benz had improved the motor considerably, employing a horizontally mounted one-cylinder, four-stroke engine, which could be water-cooled using Benz’s patented radiator. Although his Motorwagen could generate only 0.9 horsepower, it could be started, run continuously, and attain a speed of just under 10 miles per hour. On January 29, 1886, Benz was granted the world’s first-ever patent for a motorcar. In June, he drove the vehicle publicly through the streets of Mannheim.

  As had the operators of the steam-powered bus services, however, Benz found that the public, while fascinated with his device, were not inclined to use it themselves, and certainly not to purchase it. During one of its first test runs, the tiller steering mechanism proved inadequate to prevent the Motorwagen from crashing into a wall, which did not help Benz gain popular acceptance. Nor could Benz’s transmission, with one forward gear and one for reverse, allow the machine to negotiate anything but flat road or a coast downhill. Benz himself was not convinced that the Motorwagen could stand up to the rigors of an extended journey on the open road, leaving it suitable only for short trips within cities. Why, then, should consumers consider replacing the tried-and-true horse-drawn carriage, except for pure novelty? Sales were minuscule and the entire enterprise was threatened with collapse.

  Once again, Berthe Benz stepped—or in this case rode—into the breach. Early one morning in August 1888, before Karl was awake, Berthe wrote him a note. Then she gathered up their two sons and absconded with the Benz car. She drove some 65 miles on narrow, unpaved, bumpy roads from Mannheim to her mother’s home in Pforzheim. It was the world’s first automobile road trip. She purchased fuel from a pharmacy along the way—gasoline was at that time sold as a cleaning agent—and, in addition to one stop at a blacksmith’s shop to straighten a bent axle, made two on-the-fly repairs herself. In one, she used her hatpin to clear a blocked fuel line, and in the other, she gained lasting fame with lingerie makers by employing her garter to insulate a short-circuit in the ignition system. Berthe solved the gearing problem by climbing hills in reverse. When she arrived at Pforzheim later that day, word of her jaunt was already making its way across Germany. She immediately telegraphed Karl, who must have been relieved that both his family and his automobile were safe. When Berthe returned home three days later, by then renowned across Europe, she gave her husband a list of improvements that the Motorwagen would need, including brake linings and an additional low forward gear, all of which Karl installed.*2

  Benz Patent Motorwagen

  Berthe’s combination test drive and publicity stunt lifted both Benz and his company from near-oblivion to celebrity. The following year, he and Berthe took twenty-five improved Model 3 Motorwagens to Paris to exhibit at the Exposition Universelle. Held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the exposition was set on 240 acres of what is now the Champ de Mars. To ensure that this event would be the most opulent—and the most French—world’s fair ever held, the organizers commissioned a specially built entrance arch that was guaranteed to announce to visitors just how unique their experience on the grounds promised to be. Despite furious criticism by a committee of three hundred famed artists, including Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod, and Jules Massenet, who denounced the structure as ugly and an affront to taste, the Eiffel Tower was nonetheless built and would prove to be the fair’s most popular and enduring attraction.

  Paris was the world’s cultural center, and the five-month exposition drew luminaries from as far away as Argentina and Australia. One of the centerpieces was the Galerie des Machines, one hundred yards long, whose ceiling was supported not with pillars but with a series of parallel hinged arches, giving the space the feel of an inverted ship’s hull. With the themes of the fair being modernization and progress, mechanical and industrial advances drew a steady stream of visitors, and no exhibit garnered more interest than the automobile. Aspiring automakers from Europe and the United States would return home determined to create such vehicles of their own, and others would decide that the motorized carriage was not such a quixotic notion after all. By the time Karl and Berthe Benz returned to Mannheim, their future was secured.

  But Benz was not the only person exhibiting an automobile at the fair. Another man, from Germany as well, had also succeeded in creating a motorized carriage. Each machine was precisely engineered and equally groundbreaking; each would have elements that survived into the next phase of automaking and others that were supplanted by superior technology. There are no reports that the two men ever met, either in Paris or subsequently, but their fortunes, and even their names, remain intertwined to this day.

  —

  Gottlieb Daimler was a baker’s son, ten years older than Benz and only three years younger than Siegfried Marcus. Like Benz, he exhibited prodigious mechanical ability while still a boy.*3 As a student in his late teens, Daimler had already become known for his obsessive approach to work. He did not receive an engineering degree but at nineteen was hired out of the Advanced Polytechnic Institute in Stuttgart by the Karlsruhe Machine Works. Three years later, he was offered a promotion to supervisor, overseeing the building of steam locomotives. Instead, he returned to the Polytechnic to learn more about steam power. The more he learned, the more he became convinced that steam was a fatally flawed technology, doomed to be superseded by a fuel that could provide power more efficiently. He spent two years in England, working at engineering companies, and then returned to Germany, where—again like Benz—he was hired and then dismissed by a series of employers.

  Daimler’s movement from firm to firm also had nothing to do with competence; he was considered a master technician. But he was notoriously difficult to work with, a perfectionist who seemed to have no need for time off. Only those equally committed and oblivious to the lure of leisure could thrive in his company.*4 In 1863, while working as the superintendent in another factory that produced steam locomotives, he found a kindred spirit in nineteen-year-old Wilhelm Maybach. An orphan whose education had been funded by patrons who noticed his aptitude for mechanics, Maybach would transition from Daimler’s protégé to his partner, and the two would work so closely that it is impossible to discern which man had more input in the innovations that today bear only Daimler’s name.

  Maybach shared Daimler’s determination to create an engine that could power locomotion and also recognized that steam power, while at that point the most advanced option, would not provide the long-term solution. Nor, he believed, would electricity. When Nikolaus Otto hired Daimler as technical director at his and Langen’s Gas
Engine Works at Deutz in 1872, Daimler brought Maybach on board as well, making the twenty-six-year-old chief designer. Both men had by that time come to believe that the four-stroke internal combustion engine could provide the breakthrough they sought and that gasoline was the fuel that would give the motor the widest range of application. But Otto, after his abortive attempt to build a compression motor, had decided to return to atmospheric engines; with that, the fissures that would eventually create an irreparable breach between the two men were formed.

  Under Daimler’s direction, Otto’s company expanded and thrived. In the ten years Daimler worked in Deutz, he would not take a single vacation. But even as they were helping Otto attain prosperity, Daimler and Maybach were working privately on designs for the motor they were certain would supplant his. The most significant problem was in reducing the massive dimensions of the Otto so that it could be mounted on a vehicle. Unlike Benz, they were not at this point thinking solely of a motorcar, but rather of any conveyance that could be motor powered. They “soon realized that if its relative size and weight were to be materially reduced, the running speed must be greatly increased, this being the most obvious method of increasing the power without increasing the weight.”3 When they began, motors could barely achieve 100 revolutions per minute, thereby limiting both their efficiency and the power they could generate. Daimler wanted a motor that could achieve at least ten times the revolutions while producing equal or greater horsepower.

  The first component they attacked was the Otto’s flame ignition, in which, as Paul Daimler described it, “the compressed charge in the cylinder was put into brief connection with a burning gas jet by means of a moving slide, the flame being blown out by the explosion and relighted from a fixed gas jet. This method of ignition limited the speed of the engine to a comparatively low number of revolutions.”