The experiment was successful, so the brothers stayed at it. Like thousands of other Americans, the Duryeas graduated from building bicycles for themselves and their friends to running a makeshift manufacturing operation, learning by trial and error how to build a workable machine, and then selling their product locally. In the mid-1880s, the two were making a decent living, but both thought they could go further. They visited Washington, D.C., and “agreed that an engine driven vehicle would be equally practical on the road.”2 The brothers left Illinois and moved to Chicopee, Massachusetts, where Charles continued in the bicycle trade and Frank found work as a toolmaker.
For two years Charles pored over the volumes of material detailing the developments in automaking in Germany and France. He drew up preliminary plans, got a local backer to put up $1,000, and “bought an old phaeton buggy into which his proposed structure was to be built.”3 In April 1892, he hired Frank away from the Ames Manufacturing Company and put him in charge of construction of a gasoline-powered automobile. Their first efforts were disasters. Frank later attributed the failures to Charles’s primitive engine design, which included hot-tube ignition, by then already nearing obsolescence, and required that the motor be started by the manual rotation of a flywheel. Charles’s engine also lacked a water jacket—because he “believed that since it was to operate in the open air, it would not overheat”—and had inadequate carburetion and no muffling system, which upset the engine timing.
After those first failed attempts, Charles returned to Peoria to continue in the bicycle business, but Frank remained in Massachusetts, working to improve the design. In September 1893, Frank successfully tested a one-cylinder automobile, attaining a top speed of 5 miles per hour. Four months later, Frank had completed a vastly improved model, and Charles returned from Illinois. The following year, Frank, again working alone, produced what might well be considered the first modern automobile built in the United States. Although Frank’s machine steered with a tiller and its braking system was uncertain, Charles later wrote that “it was a real auto because it combined for the first time the auto essentials like spray-carburetor, electric ignition, throttle control, hand brake, anti-friction bearings, artillery wheels, air tires, live rear axle and engine shaft lengthways of the car.”4 He also took credit for the design.
Duryea’s 1892 gas buggy
The brothers incorporated the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in 1895, with Frank the designer and chief engineer and Charles handling the business side. To increase exposure, they entered their motorcars in races—which they generally won—and loaned one to the Barnum and Bailey circus, where it was exhibited daily and driven in street parades.
The Duryeas, however, found that success could be as thorny to navigate as country roads. As might be deduced by Frank’s need to later pen an account of the events, the brothers had a falling out. Charles sold his majority interest in the company and again moved to Peoria, which he liked for “its resourcefulness and its industry and the friendliness of its people,” and began an automobile company of his own, the Duryea Manufacturing Company of Peoria, Illinois.5 When Charles’s venture was incorporated on February 19, 1898, the Duryea brothers had founded the first two automobile manufacturing companies in the United States.
Charles’s automobiles contained some novel improvements—they were the first to employ a planetary transmission—but he nonetheless found it impossible to attract capital. He later wrote, “Few believed autos were anything but a passing fad, a plaything the rich would quickly tire of and discard. Carriage makers in particular thus kidded themselves. Generally they fought us till they failed and went down with the flag flying—a very poor substitute for vision.”6
In addition, reaction to automobiles by the local citizenry in friendly Peoria was no better than it had been in the English countryside. Charles Duryea’s wife, Rachel, described their reception to the Peoria Journal: “We had tomatoes thrown at us, and we had things worse than tomatoes thrown at us. People said our automobile scared the horses and should be kept off the roads. Many times we had unpleasant experiences.” In one Illinois town, if a horse refused to pass an automobile, the driver was required to “take the machine apart as rapidly as possible and conceal the parts in the grass.”7
Whether or not the Duryea brothers would have succeeded had they stayed together is uncertain. Certainly Frank was an outstanding engineer and Charles had a well-honed promoter’s flair. Separately, however, they soon faded into irrelevance. Charles, in particular, became an object of pathos. “He drifted down and out of the automobile world until he was reduced to running a question-and-answer column on a trade paper and writing pamphlets protesting that it was not Haynes or Winton or Ford or Olds who deserved credit for fathering the American automobile, but he, Charles Duryea.”8
The Duryeas, however, were soon replaced by more aggressive and forward-thinking competitors. The most significant of these was a Scottish-born engineer, another bicycle manufacturer, who, like Colonel Pope, was heavily investing both time and money in motorized transportation.
Alexander Winton had immigrated to the United States at age nineteen. After a number of years working on steamships, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where, in 1891, he began the Winton Bicycle Company, one of the hundreds of small independents springing up across the nation to compete with the likes of Albert Pope. (The Wright Cycle Company of Dayton, Ohio, was another.) Winton had a keen eye for detail and was precise in construction, and so he fared well in an industry where demand seemed always to overwhelm supply.
Also like Pope, Winton sensed the imminent saturation of the bicycle market and became convinced that the future was in motorized transportation. Although the number of automobiles sold in the United States by then barely numbered one hundred—and virtually all of these were imported from France and Germany—Winton saw it as a market ripe for exploitation.
He quickly rejected steam as a power source. The Europeans had by that time demonstrated that a gasoline engine could be powerful and compact, and have great range, in some cases more than 200 miles, so Winton began tinkering with gasoline motors. By 1894, around the time the Duryeas were bringing their automobile to market, Winton began building his first prototype.
In March 1897, Alexander Winton founded his automobile company in Cleveland. After only three months he had produced a 10-horsepower model that achieved the astounding speed of 34 miles per hour on a horse track. Soon afterward, Winton drove his automobile 800 miles, from Cleveland to New York City and back. One year and nine days after the company’s inception, he sold his first automobile, one of two dozen that year. Winton built his automobiles by hand, and each had brightly painted sides, padded seats, a leather roof, and gas lamps.
Later in 1898, a Michigan man who had recently built an experimental gasoline vehicle was invited to Cleveland, but Winton thought him too old—he was thirty-five—and not especially impressive. When Winton declined to hire him, Henry Ford returned to Detroit to continue work on his own.
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In October 1895, American motoring passed a milestone—it got its very own trade magazine when The Horseless Age: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Motor Vehicle Industry was published in New York. Horseless Age—subscriptions two dollars a year, single issues twenty-five cents—became the dominant entrant in what was soon to be a burgeoning field, and remains in publication to this day.9
The magazine itself opened with a “Salutatory,” in which editor and proprietor E. P. Ingersoll wrote:
The appearance of a journal devoted to a branch of industry yet in its embryonic state may strike some as premature. But those who have taken the pains to search below the surface for the great tendencies of the age know when a giant industry is struggling into being. All signs point to the motor vehicle as the necessary sequence of methods of locomotion already established and approved. The growing needs of our civilization demand it; the public believe in it, and await with lively interest its practical application to the daily business o
f the world.10
While Ingersoll was of course attempting to induce sales of his magazine, his statement turned out to be prescient.
In one of the main features of that first issue, Alexander Winton described his new “motor-carriage,” a four seat dos-a-dos with “an eight-hp improved gasolene [sic] motor.” The key features, Winton noted, were:
the hydro-carbon feeder, the electric igniter, and the regulator. The feeder converts oil to a fixed gas before entering the cylinders, without any of the objectionable feature of the carburetor now in general use. The igniter is absolutely positive in its workings, requires no adjustment, and will run for years without any attention whatever. The governor is pneumatic and by pressing a button, the speed of the motor can be varied from 200 revolutions…to 700 or 800 if necessary. The engine is entirely self-oiling [and] a condenser or cooler is used to reduce the temperature of water for cylinders. Five gallons are all that is necessary and it does not attain more than 200 degrees Fahr., so that evaporation is very light. My vehicle for two persons will not weigh to exceed 400 pounds, and will be capable of a speed of 30 miles per hour.11
Other machines were profiled, including Hiram Percy Maxim’s motor tricycle and a Duryea motorcar, although the article had Charles, identified as the sole inventor, discussing America’s first practical automobile from Peoria, while the company that was producing it was noted as operating out of Springfield, Massachusetts. Although Frank was shown at the tiller of the machine in the accompanying photograph, he had not been interviewed for the piece.12
In all, more than two dozen motors or vehicles were featured—among them automobiles, buggies, carriages, motorized bicycles, even a sleigh—the vast majority gasoline-powered, although steam, kerosene, electricity, compressed air, and carbonic acid were also represented. This was a stunning array for a machine that had yet to be marketed beyond a meager audience. (Horseless Age would soon establish itself as an advocate for gasoline motors and an antagonist to all other forms of propulsion.)
Finally, there was an extensive section devoted to what was to be America’s first auto race, to be held the following month in Chicago, sponsored by The Times-Herald, which was putting up $5,000 in prize money. Entrants included the Duryeas, a Benz that had just recently been manufactured under license in the United States, and more than fifty others. The rules of the contest ran to an entire page in small print.
But the lifeblood of any magazine is advertising, and the first thing a curious browser would have noticed in the premier issue was a full-page advertisement for Daimler Motors, “operated by either gas, gasoline, or kerosene,”13 to be manufactured in Long Island City, New York, at a site used to fabricate a different sort of product. William Steinway, the piano maker, had been so taken with the Daimler motor on a trip to Europe in 1888 that he purchased from Daimler a license to be the sole distributor in the United States, and he then set up a factory at the site of his piano manufacturing plant. Curiously for an automobile trade journal, the Daimler ad was not promoting the use of the motor in motorcars but rather “for launches, triple, twin, and single screws. Paddle and stern wheels of the lightest draft,” and “for stationary purposes.” As the journal also reported, “Daimler Motor Launches are familiar sights in the New York waters, as well as in regions more remote, their reputation for speed, economy and general serviceableness being unsurpassed.”
On page three was a half-page ad for the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, “manufacturers of motor wagons, motors, and automobile vehicles of every kind.” And among the other manufacturers who took out ads was Charles Brady King, a well-known figure in the burgeoning city of Detroit, and one of the most prominent advocates of motorized travel, promoting his “patent gas engines for vehicles, launches, etc.” King had been sketching designs for automobiles since 1892 and has been described as “the most technically knowledgeable of the early automotive pioneers and one of a handful of men who could envision the automobile as a part of everyday life.”14
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Charles King had been born on an army base in San Francisco in February 1868. His father was a Union Army general who had fought with distinction in eight major battles and would remain on active service until his death in 1888. King entered Cornell University in 1887 to study engineering but left after two years. In the early 1890s, he amassed a small fortune by inventing a variety of devices, including the jackhammer and a brake beam for railroad cars. He had become interested in gasoline motors after seeing a two-stroke engine exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893—at which he was awarded a medal for his display of pneumatic tools.15 In 1894, he began a company to manufacture gasoline motors, pneumatic tools, and, ultimately, an automobile.
As Horseless Age went to press for the first time, King had yet to actually build a motorcar of his own, but he soon would. Five months later, on March 6, 1896, at age twenty-eight, Charles B. King gained the distinction of being the first man to drive an automobile on the streets of Detroit. It was powered by a four-cylinder, four-stroke engine of his own design.
Following along on a bicycle was a man in his thirties, old for a tinkerer, who, with King’s help, had been experimenting with motor-powered vehicles on his own. This man would later claim the honor that should have been King’s. In this, as in many distinctions that rightly belonged to others, this man would be almost universally believed.
Because Henry Ford always understood that history belonged to the man who wrote it.
CHAPTER 7
For a man who has provoked as much scrutiny as anyone in American history, save perhaps George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Ford has to a remarkable degree remained an enigma. As one writer noted, it is impossible to discern whether Ford “was a simple man erroneously assumed to be complex, or an enormously complex individual with a misleading aura of simplicity.”1 Much of this confusion is thanks to Ford himself. Another observer noted, “Any effort to quote Henry Ford is like trying to nail Jello to the wall. Since Henry never wrote anything of substance in his life, and avoided public speaking, virtually all of his pronouncements are translations by various spokesmen.”2 Most of all, we are unable to pin down Henry Ford because he went to great lengths to avoid leaving any trail except the one he intended biographers and commentators to follow. Ford was obsessed with his own legend, and his ultimate success often overwhelmed earlier distortion or hyperbole.
For example, in 1921, Ford issued an autobiography whose expansive title was My Life and Work. Ford made no secret that the book was a “collaboration” with Samuel Crowther, one of his publicity men.3 Within this volume lay many nuggets of the Ford legend—how, say, in 1876, the same year that George Selden saw the Brayton engine in Philadelphia, the thirteen-year-old Ford came upon a man driving a self-powered steam engine on the rutted roads of rural Michigan. It was a large and ungainly affair, transported from farm to farm to perform a variety of tasks, threshing and the like. Ford stopped the man and bombarded him with questions on the workings of the marvelous machine. In what has been considered the definitive Ford biography, Allan Nevins noted that forty-seven years later, Ford remembered the incident “as though he had seen it only yesterday,” recalling specifically how the machine ran, at how many revolutions per minute it operated, and even the name of its owner—Fred Reden.*1 From that moment on, the story went, Henry Ford became fascinated with self-driven vehicles and became determined to build one of his own.
But another biographer recounted that after the twelve-year-old Henry saw his first locomotive during a trip to Detroit, he peppered the engineer with questions on the workings of that marvelous machine, and that “seven decades later” he still remembered the engineer’s name—Tommy Garrett.4 From that moment on, Henry Ford became fascinated with self-contained motors and became determined to build one of his own.
One or both of these meetings might well have taken place, of course, and might even have evoked the fascination of which Ford later spoke. These, like many
incidents in Ford’s early years, have no independent confirmation. And any discrepancy or exaggeration in these tales is moot: whatever motivated Henry Ford to dissect and remake machinery is far less important than that he did it, and anyone is entitled to fib. But uncertainty as to the Ford legend stretches to areas that are not at all meaningless. More important, My Life and Work as well as two subsequent biographies penned in the 1920s by Ford flaks (William A. Simonds’s Henry Ford: Motor Genius and Allan L. Benson’s The New Henry Ford) were used as key sources for the “authoritative” biography by Allan Nevins—itself the product of a grant by the Ford Motor Company Fund to Columbia University—which, in turn, was a key source for every biography written since.*2
The result is a boyhood that seems a combination of Horatio Alger and Booth Tarkington. No one in the Ford family yelled, no one fought, there were no resentments or bitterness, Dad was firm but fair, Mom was warm and nurturing. It seems a bit surprising that a man who as an adult could be as gratuitously vicious and vindictive as Henry Ford grew from such idyllic beginnings. Telling also is that the trait to which most biographers point to humanize Ford is his love of practical jokes—which, of course, are based on laughing at a dupe and always involve at least a benign level of cruelty. And Ford’s were often crueler than most.
Still, a reasonably accurate picture can be fleshed out of the man who would become the wealthiest in America. He was born in Greenfield Township on July 30, 1863, roughly three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, the eldest of six, to a farmer who had emigrated from Ireland as a twenty-year-old. Henry’s relationship with his father has been portrayed as one with disagreements—Henry despised farm work and refused to take over the family farm—but largely strife-free. He adored his mother, and when she died in 1876, he was devastated. “A watch without a mainspring” was how he described the family after she was gone.
Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age Page 7
