But Ford had been premature. Of the team of assistants that had been instrumental in helping him transform his previous visions to quadricycle reality, only one was willing to leave his job and roll the dice in the new venture. Without his team, Ford couldn’t even decide what product to produce. The Detroit Automobile Company turned out to be a scattershot affair, fabricating beautifully wrought bodies with no working parts to mount inside them, or finely tuned parts with no chassis on which to mount them. Fred Strauss, the assistant who did come to work for him, summed it up: “Henry just wasn’t ready.” When the company folded after eighteen months, it had failed to complete a single automobile. It had also cost its investors $86,000.
Ford’s explanation was somewhat different:
A group of men of speculative turn of mind organized, as soon as I left the electric company, the Detroit Automobile Company to exploit my car. I was the chief engineer and held a small amount of the stock. For three years we continued making cars more or less on the model of my first car. We sold very few of them; I could get no support at all toward making better cars to be sold to the public at large. The whole thought was to make to order and to get the largest price possible for each car. The main idea seemed to be to get the money. I found that the new company was not a vehicle for realizing my ideas but merely a money-making concern—that did not make much money. In March, 1902, I resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders.3
While it is certainly true that Ford chafed at taking orders from anyone, the idea that he was upset at the rapaciousness of his partners is at best a half-truth. For one thing, the sort of men Ford described were unlikely to sit still while Ford frittered away their cash. For another, Ford loved money, as long it was he who was making it.
The timeline was not inaccurate, however. Detroit Automobile did last three years, albeit in two segments. After the company folded, some of his investors were still convinced Henry Ford was the man to bring the automobile to the people and great riches to them; they bought up the remaining assets at a receiver’s sale. With Ford’s complete and enthusiastic approval—and promise to produce a working automobile this time—these same men set him up at Cass Avenue once more.
Their eagerness to get Ford back in the shop was not misplaced. Enthusiasm for the automobile in the United States had grown; its evolution into a mainstream consumer good seemed inevitable. In August 1899, taking a cue from France, a group of automobile enthusiasts, many of them wealthy, had incorporated the Automobile Club of America (ACA). “The objects…are the formation of a social organization or club, composed in whole or in part of persons owning self-propelled pleasure vehicles for personal or private use. To furnish a means of recording the experience of members and others using motor vehicles or automobiles. To promote original investigation in the mechanical development of motor carriages, by members and others. To arrange for pleasure runs and to encourage road contests of all kinds among owners of automobiles.”4
The club sponsored a number of races, some for substantial purses. These contests always attracted a large crowd as well as heavy newspaper coverage, and they established Alexander Winton as the most famous and accomplished manufacturer (and driver) in the nation.*1 In the spring of 1900, the club announced that it would mount America’s first automobile show, to be held in late fall in New York.5 In addition to a large space for exhibitors, an oval track for test-driving the automobiles was laid against the inner walls of the arena. Every means of propulsion would be represented, as would every design employed in both the United States and Europe. (The Panhard would come in for particular scrutiny from American designers.)
The auto exposition, held only two months before the reorganization of the Detroit Automobile Company, was an immense success. As The New York Times reported, “With the glitter of polished nickel and the sheen of many-colored enamels, the first show of the Automobile Club of America, an exhibition dubbed by facetious onlookers ‘the horseless Horse Show,’ was opened last night in Madison Square Garden. From the hour the doors of the big building swung inward until midnight, a throng of spectators variously estimated at from 7,000 to 10,000 surged through the maze of narrow aisles.”6 More than seventy exhibitors brought “an almost endless variety of motor vehicles,” which enthralled a cross-section of New York society. “All,” assured the Times, “went away satisfied.” Horseless Age added, “It is…evident from a review of the machines exhibited, that neither money nor brains are being spared in the contest to produce the most attractive and reliable machine, not for exhibition purposes alone but for general road work.”7
In the end, the ten-day affair was reported on in every major newspaper and journal in the nation and attracted more than forty-eight thousand visitors, one of whom was Henry Ford. He walked the floor, perused his competitors’ products, and met with builders, designers, and moneymen. He returned home more aware than ever before of the public clamor for automobiles, and this time he very definitely produced one of his own. Unfortunately for his investors, it was neither the one he had promised nor one that could be sold to the public. But what it could do was go very fast.
The first thing Ford did was reassemble the team that had built the quadricycle. In a stroke of luck, Charles King had decided to go off and fight in the Spanish-American War instead of continuing in the car business, and thus Oliver Barthel became available just when Ford needed him. Ford persuaded Spider Huff to join him as well. To this crew, he added C. Harold Wills, a virtuoso designer and engineer, although still only twenty-two years old.8
Wills’s hire epitomized an irony of Ford’s legacy. His widely touted but vastly overstated near-genius as an inventor obscured an authentic near-genius for management. Throughout his career, and certainly in its first two decades, Ford was uncanny in his ability to choose just the right people to complement his talents and maximize his efficiency. And he didn’t restrict himself, as so many other businessmen did, to those who looked like him, thought like him, or had the same out-of-business pursuits as he had. Spider Huff, for example, adept with the electrical components that Ford could never quite master, was a hard-drinking carouser—and that is putting it mildly—who would not infrequently disappear on a jaunt, sometimes for weeks at a time. But Ford, who during Prohibition would vow to close down his factories if alcohol was once more made legal, always welcomed Huff back without judgment and even paid his bills. To design and build his factories, Ford, the vitriolic anti-Semite, would consider no one but Albert Kahn, the man who could best bring Ford’s vision to reality. And then, of course, there were the thousands hired to work on the floor of the Ford factories, judged only on their ability to fit the needs of the assembly line’s mind-numbing repetition. The examples of Ford’s insight into personal and corporate dynamics are endless, and without those astonishing instincts, Henry Ford would have been, at best, a minor footnote in the saga of automotive engineering rather than its headline.
Once the right staff was on board, Ford demonstrated a commitment to this venture that he had not to its predecessor. He set up his cot at Cass Avenue and spent a good deal more time at the factory than he did at home. As one biographer put it, “Ford put into the racer all the energy his backers urged him to devote to the car they wanted to produce.”9
By summer 1901, Ford’s team began to get results. The engine they produced, a horizontally mounted twin-cylinder opposed-piston version that was cooled with water coils, was capable of 26 horsepower. Oliver Barthel later insisted he had designed the car from “the ground up,” but the racer bore all the Ford trademark touches—elegant design, extreme functionality, durable construction.
Ford had never built a race car before, so balance and stability could only be determined in road testing. The machine was so loud that Ford had it towed out of the city to see how it handled. While Ford and his assistants were running and fine-tuning their racer, an official of the Detroit Driving Club—the Automobile Club had spawned a spate of local associations—got together with Alexa
nder Winton’s sales manager and arranged to host an auto meet in Detroit in October. There would be a number of different events culminating in a 25-mile stakes race, for which the winner would be awarded a hefty $1,000 prize. Winton, driving his own car, would be the main draw.
This was the event Ford had been building toward—but even so, he didn’t post his entry fee until the day before the race. He needn’t have hesitated. The finished machine, which Ford called Sweepstakes, was a remarkably advanced product: a large, efficient two-cylinder engine with prototypical fuel injection, improved spark plugs (by now, only Daimler was still using hot-tube ignition), a 96-inch wheelbase for stability, and a steering wheel rather than a tiller. This last improvement was reportedly supplied by Winton, who sportingly gave Ford one of his new steering assemblies because he said that “somebody would get killed” using Ford’s tiller mechanism. Ford later said that Sweepstakes tested at 72 miles per hour, which would have made it by far the fastest automobile on earth. (At that point, drivers were still trying to beat the “mile-a-minute” mark, or 60 miles per hour.)
The organizers had scheduled the event for October 10, a Thursday, at a horse track in Grosse Pointe, at the mouth of the Detroit River. The turns of the mile-long track were built up to a slight bank, to prevent the entrants from running off into the fence or the grandstand. Six thousand people paid to see the race that organizers optimistically billed as the “world championship,” with eight entrants, including the hometown favorite.10 In fact, while the race garnered immense local interest—the Detroit Street Railway Company ran special trains to the track and the city courts adjourned on the day of the meet—it was hardly a championship. Racing had become quite popular and any number of other events were run that fall, particularly in the east, where Henri Fournier had crossed the Atlantic to drive the newest spectacular French machine, the Mors, and was tearing up the tracks.*2
The day began auspiciously for Winton. In a preliminary event, he covered a mile in a record-setting 1 minute 12.4 seconds, cutting almost 2 seconds off the previous mark. The next day, in New York, Henri Fournier—whom Ford had met at the automobile show—took an additional 6 seconds off Winton’s record in his Mors.
By race day, the “world championship” seemed as if it would be anything but. Of the eight expected entrants, only three could make it to the starting line, and one of those was forced to retire with a cracked cylinder. Faced with a match race between Ford and Winton, the judges shortened the race to 10 miles, hoping to ensure that both—or even one of them—finished.
Ford had never before driven in a race. Despite the bank on the track, he was terrified of turning at speed, a justifiable sentiment in a car in which he had not installed brakes. Spider Huff rode with him. There is no report on whether Huff had a few drinks before the race, but he probably should have. He was charged with crouching on the outside running board, grasping two makeshift handholds, and leaning out, his upper body suspended over the track surface, in order to prevent Sweepstakes from capsizing on the turns. Winton, an expert driver, rode with his sales manager, who in theory would have a good less to do.
In addition to being a more experienced driver, Winton also had what seemed a far superior machine. Although his car was about 600 pounds heavier, it generated almost three times the horsepower, a muscular 70 to Ford’s puny 26, and despite its bulk it was a good deal tighter and more stable in the turns. As the ten-lap race began, although the crowd cheered lustily for the local entrant, it appeared that it would not be much of a contest. Ford’s racer held up surprisingly well in the straightaways but, despite Huff’s efforts, he consistently lost ground on the turns.
After 5 miles, Winton was substantially ahead. Although Ford’s driving became more assured as the race progressed, by mile 7 he had failed to cut into Winton’s lead. Then Winton’s racer began to belch smoke. “The brasses on [his] machine became heated,” the journals reported. In fact, the cooling system had broken down. Winton’s sales manager/mechanician frantically poured oil on the gearing assembly, but Winton refused to decelerate and the overheating got worse. Ford began to make up ground. Eventually, the engine began grinding metal and Winton slowed to a crawl. Ford overtook him easily and won by almost a mile. His time was 13:24, impressive but hardly withering. Clara Ford remembered the crowd cheering wildly as her husband crossed the finish line in their native city.
Contemporary biographers generally attribute Ford’s victory to superior design, which is technically correct. Winton’s machine did, after all, overheat. But Ford had been lucky. Everyone’s cars broke down in those days, including Ford’s, and other than the flaw in the cooling system, Winton’s racer was the better machine.
Most accounts of Ford’s life also have the victory over Winton thrusting him into the spotlight, securing renewed financing, and establishing him as a first-rank automobile engineer. While this was true for the extremely limited universe of 1901 Detroit, the race did not engender anything but an occasional paragraph in national newspapers. The trade journals treated Ford and his racer with respect but hardly with unbridled enthusiasm. Horseless Age placed Ford’s racer, “which won the race for its class at the Grosse Point track…among the gasoline machines which have lately attracted public attention in this country.”11 Motor Way did not mention the race at all.
But local accolades were sufficient to renew the faith of Ford’s backers. Not six weeks after his defeat of Winton, a new Ford company, “builders of high grade automobiles and tourist cars,” was incorporated. The new owners—Murphy and his chums—were much the same as the old owners. Motor Way wrote, “The Henry Ford Co., Detroit, Mich., was incorporated on November 30, for $60,000, for the manufacture of automobiles. They will occupy the old plant of the Detroit Automobile Co, at 1343 Cass Avenue, Detroit, of which company they are the successors. It is stated that all the defects of the first machines have been eliminated and the new carriages will be provided with greater power, with a reduction in the weight.”12 Horseless Age added, “The company will proceed at once to manufacture a popular runabout propelled by a two-cylinder 8 horse power motor and selling at about $1,000.”13
Other than the capitalization—which was $30,500 paid in—and the company’s address, nothing in either announcement was true. Having his name on the company did not make Henry Ford any more committed to its investors’ goals, and once again he refused to adhere to the plan on which he and his partners had agreed. Instead, Ford found the perfect partner to help him to the next stage of his business, this time a man with no experience in either designing or even driving an automobile.
Among the spectators at the Detroit race was a twenty-seven-year-old Detroit native named Tom Cooper. Cooper, who had trained to be a pharmacist, had matinee idol looks and a chiseled physique, and happened to be just about the best bicycle racer on earth. He was a household name in both in the United States and Europe and one of the highest-paid athletes in America, outearning heavyweight boxing champ James Jeffries.
Cooper had become fascinated with automobiles and after Sweepstakes’s victory sought Ford out to talk about a racer. The meeting went well, with Cooper passing along a number of design suggestions. Before a deal could be cut, however, Cooper inexplicably announced his intention to journey to Colorado to try his hand at, of all things, coal mining.
Cooper’s departure didn’t change Ford’s plans. He instructed his assistants to set to work on the new racer anyway, this one bigger, faster, and more powerful than its predecessor. When it sank in that Ford was never going to do anything he didn’t want to do, Ford Company investors finally balked. They forbade him to work on his race car on company time and insisted that he build the car he had promised them. Ford merely took to working on the racer at night, mostly with Harold Wills. Predictably, Ford’s progress on the commercial automobile continued to lag and the components he did produce were substandard. So, in order to either spur Ford on or replace him, the now-seething board members engaged Henry M. Leland, the finest precis
ion toolmaker in the nation.14
Leland had been born in Vermont in 1843 and was the quintessence of the flinty, laconic Yankee. He was tall, with ramrod posture and a beard John Brown would have envied. At fourteen he was hired as an apprentice in a tool shop, and he spent the Civil War working with weaponry in the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. After the war, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he got a job in a sewing machine factory. He also worked for a time at Colt Industries. Over the course of two decades, Leland became more and more adept at building machine parts from the best materials at an extremely fine tolerance; the resulting parts could then be employed interchangeably in a company’s product. In 1890, he moved to Detroit with another fine-tool engineer, met a local financier named Robert Faulconer, and founded Leland & Faulconer, which quickly established itself as the preeminent precision tool firm in America and perhaps the world.
Leland, who “epitomized in singular fashion the march of machine technology from the agrarian to the industrial era,” could machine parts to a tolerance of 1/100,000 of an inch, and his son and future partner insisted he had worked as accurately as 1/270,000 of an inch.15 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Leland had become expert in components for bicycles, sewing machines…and gasoline-powered motors. He was first engaged to build Daimler motors for boats, but in 1899 he was approached by a man named Ransom Olds and asked to build engines and transmissions for automobiles. By the time Ford’s investors approached him, Leland’s reputation as an automotive engineer far exceeded that of the man whose name was on the Ford company letterhead.
Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age Page 11
