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

by Lawrence Goldstone

  * * *

  *1 Levassor was clearly negotiating for more than an engine license, for when Sazarin died the following year, Levassor soon afterward married his widow, Louise.

  *2 James Ward Packard of Warren, Ohio, brought one home from Paris and soon was inspired to form the establishment that became the Packard Motor Car Company.

  *3 De Dion denied striking anyone during the fracas. “He asserted that he had taken lessons in fencing, boxing, and kicking and that if he had hit anyone, the person struck would not have been capable of coming to court.” New York Times, June 16, 1899.

  *4 Chains, which tended to stretch and sometimes break, were also less efficient in preventing energy loss from the engine and crankshaft to the axles and wheels. Most of the improvements to motors and transmissions in the early days of automobile development were aimed toward losing the least amount of the energy created during the explosion within the cylinder as it was transferred along the various components, until it actually turned the wheels. The other area of development was attempting to create the most powerful explosion possible within the cylinder.

  CHAPTER 5

  As the nineteenth century moved into its final decade, the impact of industrialization on demographics in the United States and Western Europe—much of it engendered by the use of piston-driven machinery, steam or gas, either in factories or in railroad locomotives—was unmistakable. Across America, immigrants and erstwhile farm families streamed into cities. The population of Manhattan, for example, grew from 515,547 in 1850 to 1,515,301 in 1890; Brooklyn, then a separate city, from 96,838 to 806,343; Chicago from a puny 29,963 to a muscular 1,099,850; Detroit from 21,019 to 205,876. While in many cases city boundaries increased as well, territorial expansion was generally outpaced by the influx of new residents. Sometimes territory remained precisely the same, as in Manhattan, an island that was stuck with its 23 square miles.

  Logarithmic growth in population density caused any number of well-documented challenges. Strains on housing, educational facilities, sanitation, water, and even food supplies were inevitable. Often overlooked, however, is that with people cramming into living and working spaces, they were also forced to live in closer and closer proximity to the horse.

  Unlike on the farm or even in a town, where unpleasant equine by-products were an inconvenience that could generally be sidestepped, in the cities there was no escape. Horses moved everything—they carried individuals and pulled private carriages, hansom cabs, and liveries. The milkman had a horse, as did the vegetable man, the knife sharpener, the chimney sweep, the mason, the carpenter, and the local doctor. Policemen were on horseback and a team of horses pulled the fire truck. In New York, “each day these same horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2,500 tons of manure on its 250-plus miles of paved streets. It took a strong stomach and the skills of an acrobat to cross a street. On damp days, pedestrians contended with syrupy puddles of foul-smelling manure alive with flies. In dry weather, the germ-laden droppings were pulverized by the animals’ hooves into a fine powder carried everywhere by the wind, even into homes.”1 Revolting as these images are, the pollution did not stop there. “For a two-horse team to pull a fully loaded omnibus or streetcar designed for 40 passengers was strenuous work, especially since these were often overcrowded. Cruelty to animals was regarded as a necessary evil. Many horses died in the streets and their carcasses had to be hauled away.”

  Still, in the early days of automotive experimentation, the animal was considered “civilized” compared to noisy, smoky, bone-rattling motorcars, particularly among the wealthy—who were rarely forced to endure the worst of horses’ various pollutions at close range. Few, certainly, saw those primitive machines as one day supplanting horse-drawn vehicles. A small number of visionary entrepreneurs, however, grasped that the potential market in horseless transportation was enormous. As soon as such vehicles began to make inroads, the advantages became manifest. So, where the city-to-city steam omnibuses might not have borne up in comparison to the reliable old horse, the reaction within city borders was far different.

  Ironically, as industrialization had created a broader and deeper moneyed class, the very people who retained the most romantic image of the horse resided in the most obvious market for early horseless vehicles. Since early generation motorcars, like every new product, were certain to be more expensive than later models of the machine, persuading well-heeled buyers to abandon outmoded notions seemed to present an immense challenge. As it turned out, however, manufacturers needed little concern. The novelty of motorcars, coupled with the fact that no one else could afford them, made the wealthy and near-wealthy eager and ready outlets for the new products. A viable commercial entity seemed to be all that was required to transmute the horse-drawn carriage into a modern automobile.

  —

  While the Brayton Ready Motor might have piqued the interest of George Selden, another device exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia fair, neither mechanized nor industrial but rather an instrument of leisure and diversion, was to have a far more profound impact on American technology. The bicycle would spur a craze; tens of millions would be sold in the United States in the coming decade and prompt a revolution in the manner in which Americans viewed their own mobility. It would not only provide impetus to the search for a horseless carriage—as it had in Europe—but eventually provide inspiration for a different sort of transportation miracle: powered, controlled flight.

  The bicycle exhibited in Philadelphia was not even the kind we recognize today—the “safety bicycle,” with both wheels of equal size—but rather the high-wheeled “ordinary” that contemporary Americans associate mainly with circus performers. At the time, not only were there virtually no bicycles in the United States but there were also virtually no roads on which to ride them. But to the successful entrepreneur, dearth represents opportunity, and that was precisely what another visitor to the fair, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, recognized in that awkward high-wheeler.

  Pope, born in Massachusetts in 1843, had been forced to become something of an opportunist after his father lost all the family’s money in land speculation when Albert was ten years old. He began by hiring himself out plowing fields, graduated to selling fruits and vegetables, and then at age fifteen started his own produce business at Boston’s Quincy Market. At the onset of the Civil War, Pope, still a teenager, had become sufficiently successful to be appointed a second lieutenant. He fought with Grant at Vicksburg and Petersburg, with Sherman at Jackson, and with Burnside at Fredericksburg, always receiving high commendations. By the war’s end, Pope was a twenty-two-year-old colonel with command of his own regiment. He mustered out and began a shoe-supply business in Boston with $900 he had saved from his army pay. With a deft hand for finance and some clever marketing, he grew his business rapidly, and in three years it was the largest of its kind in the nation. Pope, who would go by “Colonel” for the rest of his life, had made himself a rich man.

  After his visit to the fair, Pope, then in his early thirties, sailed for Europe to learn about bicycle manufacture and there solicited British fabricators to license imports into the United States. But relying on imports would eventually leave him vulnerable to competition. So, only months after he had acquired the American rights to some English patents, Pope approached the Weed Sewing Machine Company in Hartford, Connecticut, with an offer to lease the excess floor space in its factory to produce high-wheelers. His first runs sold out instantly, and Pope increased production, eventually buying the Weed Company and converting the factory solely to bicycle manufacture. He then initiated a program of horizontal expansion, unusual for its day, buying a rubber company, a steel company, and the largest nickel-plating factory in the world. Finally, he instituted a program of “integrated manufacturing operations,” a rudimentary assembly line approach, which “prefigured the concentration of resources in the modern automobile plant.”2

  But for all his business acumen, Pope’s greatest skill remained marketing. Clearly,
sales of bicycles would be limited unless there were places to ride them, and American roads at that time, especially outside the centers of the largest cities, were dirt and gravel nightmares. In 1880, Pope hosted a conclave of manufacturers, bicycle enthusiasts, and shippers in Newport, Rhode Island, and there founded the League of American Wheelmen. The league’s first act was to officially launch the Good Roads Movement, specifically to prod state, local, and even national officials to build improved roads.

  In what would have been a surprise only to those unfamiliar with Pope’s persuasive powers, the movement became an unprecedented success, and within five years, Good Roads had become a national obsession. The league eventually published pamphlets, such as The Gospel of Good Roads, and even Good Roads Magazine, whose circulation topped one million. Local groups demonstrated, held conventions, and lobbied legislators. As one wag put it, “In politics, machinery and economics the Colonel’s tenets were simple. He believed in the Republican party, the bicycle, and good roads.”3

  With clever misdirection, Pope ensured that good roads were promoted not as a surface for bicycles but as the soul of a nation and the infrastructure that any modern industrial and agrarian country required. As he wrote in a widely disseminated pamphlet:

  The people everywhere throughout the country are awakening to the vast importance of better highways. They more fully realize not only the great commercial advantages of good roads but they see more clearly that the material highways of the country are highways in a spiritual sense as well; that the growth of society, education, and Christianity depend largely upon good means of communication between home, school, and church, and that no nation can advance in civilization which does not make a corresponding advance in the betterment of its highways.4

  Although not at all constructed for this purpose, thousands of miles of improved roads would therefore be in place, waiting, when automobiles began to become fixtures on the landscape.*1

  The high-wheeler’s design was obviously of limited utility to all but the nimble, so, to create the widest possible market base, Pope almost totally redesigned the product he had seen in Philadelphia, replacing the ordinary with the safety bicycle. In addition to lowering the profile and making both wheels the same diameter to provide greater stability, he used hollow tubing in the frame, and employed pneumatic rather than solid rubber tires. The result, the Columbia Chainless, “unexcelled by any domestic manufacturer,” was lighter and easier to mount, dismount, and maneuver, and bore less friction on the wheels.5 It opened marketing possibilities to older men, children, and especially women. Not only did bicycling become an appealing new way for gentlemen and ladies to spend time together, but women seized on the freedom of movement that cycling implied as a symbol of political freedom. One prominent ad for the Columbia Chainless featured a beautiful young woman in a flowing dress holding a wreath while standing next to two bicycles set on a platform. By the mid-1880s, a woman on a bicycle became a badge of liberation. Henry Selden’s client Susan B. Anthony gushed, “The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything in the world.”*2

  But bicycles, like any fad, eventually ran their course. With a saturated market and a growing fascination with motorized transportation, bicycle sales had dropped precipitously by the mid-1890s. But Colonel Pope was prepared. As many of his competitors began to close up shop, Pope was retooling his factory to house a new division of his company that would produce automobiles.

  The colonel’s dilemma was that with no experience in the field, he could not be certain what kind of automobile to produce. Steam carriages at that point remained the most popular, but gasoline power seemed to be fast overtaking steam as a preferable technology. Then there were electric vehicles, which had recently been developed by a pair of Philadelphia engineers; they were lacking in range but were fast and quiet. Even compressed air had been toyed with as a power source and showed some promise, although it would still require a good deal of work before it could be adapted to a commercial vehicle.

  The problem seemed solved when Pope got word of a young graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had built a gasoline-powered prototype that had been successful in test runs. The engineer had an excellent pedigree. His father, Hiram Stevens Maxim, had developed the first portable, fully automatic machine gun; built machines that some claimed had successfully attained powered flight; and invented the inhaler, the curling iron for hair, and a mousetrap that reset itself.

  Pope summoned Hiram Percy Maxim to Hartford, watched a test run of what Maxim later called his “explosive tricycle,” and hired him on the spot. Maxim, who would later pen Horseless Carriage Days, the most insightful and witty memoir ever written about the early automobile, was given a free hand in a refreshingly ad hoc effort to come up with something that Pope could sell.

  Without informing either the boss or the local citizenry, Maxim, accompanied only by one or two close associates, often took his creations out on the streets of Hartford for tests late at night. More than a few times, the engine stalled and the machine had to be pushed to a downhill slope, coasted home, and secreted in a shed so Colonel Pope would be none the wiser.

  Eventually Maxim’s designs progressed sufficiently that he wanted to try for a “record run,” north to Springfield, Massachusetts, and back, a distance of slightly more than 50 miles. The Good Roads movement had yet to visit this stretch, and soon after they’d left Hartford, Maxim and his companion were shining their lanterns on a narrow, rock-strewn path, barely wide enough for the car. Maxim provided perhaps the best description of what it meant to ride in an early version of “this throbbing, noisy, complicated, greasy accumulation of mechanical odds and ends.”6 Describing his own prototype, he wrote, “It was a real horseless carriage, even to the whip socket on the dash. It shook and trembled and rattled and clattered, spat oil, fire, smoke, and smell, and to a person who disliked machinery naturally, and who had been brought up to the shiny elegance and perfection of fine horse carriages, it was revolting.”

  The war between horse and machine cannot be appreciated by a population for whom the automobile is as common as the front door of a house. Maxim, however, described an encounter when his motorized vehicle came upon an equine-powered one, while traveling at night on a country road north of Hartford, that resembled a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

  Hiram Percy Maxim

  This junk dealer, bringing a load of junk to Windsor Locks in the silent night, was blissfully ignorant of the existence of such a thing as a motor-vehicle. As he wended his way along the lonely country road, up from the distance came a strange and unearthly noise, the like of which he had never heard in his entire life. This weird noise became a din. The din grew louder and signified that whatever was making the awful sound was approaching. A little flickering light appeared ahead, but before he could judge its distance in the dark, the monstrous thing was upon him and about to run him and his horse down. And the poor horse…just as he was about to be attacked and devoured by the terrible thing, he reared up and wheeled.7

  Despite terrifying passersby both animal and human, Maxim persevered. On his third try, he finally succeeded in his Springfield run, and soon afterward made an even more arduous journey to Long Island Sound. By 1897, Maxim had progressed sufficiently that Colonel Pope saw commercial application within reach. It would turn out, however, to be a very different application from the one Maxim had struggled over all those bone-jarring miles to perfect.

  * * *

  *1 As will be seen, Pope’s roads would barely scratch the surface of what would be required to convert a horse-borne society to a motorized one, but they would nonetheless be sufficient to give automobilism a solid start.

  *2 And, of course, bicycles were to inspire an entire generation of innovators, both on the ground and in the air. Wilbur Wright, Glenn Curtiss, Alexander Winton, Hiram Percy Maxim, and many others took the bicycle as the starting point for their experiments.

  CHAPTER 6

>   While Albert Pope may have been the most sophisticated of the late nineteenth-century American entrepreneurs seeking to transform the bicycle into the automobile, he was not the only one, nor even the first. That honor went to two farm boys from Illinois, Charles and Frank Duryea, who in 1895 built and sold thirteen identical motor carriages, “the first automobiles to be regularly manufactured for sale in the United States.”1

  The Duryea brothers, eight years apart in age, got started when Charles, the elder of the two—born in 1861, only two years before Henry Ford—was a teenager. Charles had been fascinated with both motor vehicles and human flight since he was a boy, and for years had been visiting the local library and reading everything he could find on the subject, particularly in Scientific American. After the family visited the Philadelphia fair and he saw the high-wheeler exhibit, he set to building a bicycle from scrap and spare parts that lay about on his father’s farm. Frank, still a boy, turned out to have a flair for mechanics and was an able assistant.