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

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Public disgust, it was widely predicted, would cast a pall over automobile sales for years to come.

  In fact, the aftermath of what was widely termed the “Race to Death” saw both racing and automobiles catapulted to unprecedented popularity. Almost overlapping the condemnations were demands for more events. Paris-Madrid was an anomaly, it was argued. Such recklessness would never again be permitted. Sound policies could make for safe—or at least safer—racing. Orders to purchase automobiles increased, both in Europe and in the United States.

  And of course, as automakers were quick to point out, however reckless the actual racing may have been, the need to create a successful racing machine had been the goad for improvements in motors, carburetors, cooling systems, brakes, suspensions, tires, control systems—in fact, there was no aspect of automotive design that had not benefited from the very sort of event that the French government, among others, wanted to ban.

  Against pressure from the public, auto clubs, and automakers, naysayers soon began to backpedal. The trade magazines switched bandwagons, with the most immediate beneficiary of the new forgiving attitude being the Gordon Bennett Cup, scheduled to be run in Ireland in early July. (Britain had won the honor of hosting the 1903 race by virtue of Selwyn Edge’s victory the previous year in a race from Paris to Innsbruck, Austria, where he had been the only competitor to finish. But road racing had been declared illegal in England, so the venue was changed to County Kildare.)

  Rationalizations in support of the contest began only days after the Paris-Madrid dead had been buried. “But where the Gordon Bennett race differs from the Paris-Madrid is in the fact that it is really a race,” Automobile Topics observed:

  A limited number of cars of estimated even quality, under the charge of the ablest drivers their respective countries can produce, testing their speeding power under the most careful police regulations, is altogether different from the mad chase of two or three hundred vehicles of every shape and design, big racers, light cars, motorettes, and motorbicycles, all mixed up indiscriminately, and all tearing like furies over a roadway which no human power could prevent becoming a dust fog after the first 20 cars have started.13

  The magazine added a cynical postscript in its next issue:

  The statement from Paris that French manufacturers are up in arms against the suppression of road racing is not at all surprising. Without the annual speed parade from Paris, the French automobile loses easily one-half its prestige. Think of the hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of free advertising which has been annually showered on these machines. Where home-made [American] cars could not get next to reading matter with their names in print, foreigners have been given headlines at the top of the column in the very royal box of the daily paper’s make-up, the cable column. Will they surrender this merely at the bidding of a premier or a president of the Republic? Nevvaire!! So I quite look forward to seeing “A bas Loubet!” and “Conspuez Combes!” among the battle cries of automobilists in gay Paree before many moons.14

  There were dissenting voices, albeit not many. Horseless Age noted:

  About the only comment on the horrors of the Paris-Madrid race by those who support road racing as an essential to the prosperity of the automobile industry is that much nonsense is being written regarding the event—which amounts simply to an evasion of the question. Some consider, however, that to make road racing thoroughly safe in the future the most competent drivers should be selected in eliminating trials and the main race reserved for these. This argument may sound plausible, but isn’t it a fact that most of the drivers involved in recent catastrophes—Zborowski, Renault, Barrow, Stead—were among the best known men in automobile racing circles?15

  But logic was not going to overwhelm the thirst to see automobiles speed through the countryside, so on July 2, drivers from France, Germany, Britain, and the United States took off on the first of three and a half laps of a 98-mile figure-eight course that had been cleared of traffic and was guarded by 7,000 soldiers and police.

  Notwithstanding the lack of success that had prompted American automakers to forgo the most prestigious European races, there was no choice but to again enter a team in the Gordon Bennett. Bennett was an American himself, after all, and the owner of a major newspaper, in which he could easily question the patriotism of automakers too timid to take on the Europeans. So Alexander Winton again entered his two automobiles, one of which was a redesigned Bullet. But this time he was not alone; another carmaker, also based in Cleveland, sought to qualify. Peerless Motor Car was new to the sport—until two years before, the company had been best known for making clothes wringers.

  In 1900, the Peerless Manufacturing Company hired Louis Mooers, a twenty-eight-year-old engineer from Watertown, Massachusetts, to get them into the car business. Peerless had, a few years before, begun to manufacture bicycles as well—Mooers was running a bicycle factory when they hired him—but automobiles, the company decided, were a growing market and bicycles a declining one. Mooers’s first design was a single-cylinder, 5-horsepower motorette powered by a De Dion–Bouton motor. Soon Mooers was designing his own two-cylinder motors, working up to 40 horsepower, and the company reincorporated as Peerless Motor Car. In 1903, Mooers created a four-cylinder, 80-horsepower behemoth. He mounted the cylinders vertically, copying Panhard, Mors, and the other successful Europeans.

  Mooers was a talented engineer who “believed that racing not only advertised the brand, but motivated better innovations,” and his design was quite advanced.16 He employed a

  bevel-gear drive, with direct drive on high speed; also of the universal shaft. Each of the four cylinders is of steel with a cast explosion chamber. Both inlet and exhaust valves are mechanically operated. There are two systems of ignition; one a jump spark, placed directly over the inlet valve, the other a contact spark, placed alongside the inlet valve. Both can be advanced or retarded by the operator at will from the seat. The car is equipped with sliding-gear transmission. Ball bearings are used throughout the machine wherever possible in order to overcome friction. The engine, including flywheel, weighs about 700 pounds, and the car, complete, about 2,200 pounds, aluminum being used wherever possible to reduce the weight. The wheel base is nine feet. The front wheels are 34 inches in diameter, with four-inch tires, and the rear wheels 34 inches in diameter, with 4½-inch tires.17

  But the road to the Gordon Bennett would have hazards even beyond those experienced by the Paris-Madrid drivers. The American auto club had decreed that potential entrants in the race must establish their bona fides in a qualifying run, which was to be held in Nassau County, Long Island, in April. Resistance to automobiles on public roads had grown in New York, however, and the state legislature had passed what came to be known as the Bailey Law, a horse-friendly decree that sharply restricted motorists’ freedom on New York roads, establishing very low speed limits—usually 8 miles per hour—and under some conditions prohibiting access entirely.*4 In addition to local law enforcement, private vigilante groups had sprung up to ensure that New York’s thoroughfares were safe from the mechanical menace. The American team might not, therefore, be able to make its qualifying run without incident.

  Garden City, L.I., was the place chosen for the farce, and a tip to this effect was conveyed to Messrs Mooers and Owen [in the Winton] on Monday, with instructions to keep it secret as they valued their chances of ever seeing the Irish course. An inkling of what was coming off was also allowed to reach Mr. Shattuck’s lately-discovered political allies, the Long Island Protective Association, under pledge of the strictest secrecy, of course. As a result, two of the hired sleuths of this motorphobic organization were conveniently posted behind a hedge when Messrs. Mooers and Wridgway [the riding mechanic] hove in sight on their way to the rendezvous on Monday afternoon. There was the usual flutter of a handkerchief, followed by the indistinct tintinnabulation of a tomato can signal bell, and forthwith Mr. Mooers found himself under arrest, while the pair of sleuths, congratulating themselves
on having earned their little four dollars a day apiece, went their ways rejoicing and were seen no more during the “trial.”18

  Mooers was eventually released and allowed to complete the trial, in which his racer, which he called the Peerless, after the company, was given leave to join the American team.

  But in Ireland, the Peerless turned out to be far less than that. Winton also, although widely reported to be a victim of “bad luck,” had a woeful showing. Camille Jenatzy, in a Mercedes, won for Germany, while the three French entries, René de Knyff and Henri Farman in Panhards and Fernand Gabriel in a Mors, were the only other cars to complete the course. Charles Jarrott broke his collarbone when his Napier overturned, and another British driver, J. W. Stocks, drove off the course and crashed into a fence.

  Winton’s first entry, the Bullet 2, could not start and was discovered to have been filled with dirty gasoline. The car ran poorly even afterward and retired less than a third of the way into the race. The other Winton, the original Bullet, lasted a bit longer but eventually quit when it was hopelessly outdistanced by the other competitors. Louis Mooers fared just as poorly, going out with engine trouble before he had completed a second lap.

  Thus once again, Gordon Bennett’s desire to use racing in Europe to advance American automotive technology had come to naught. Winton, in particular, seemed snakebit. In his losses to Ford, as well as in major races, automobiles that had performed admirably, sometimes brilliantly, fell victim to one or another mishap—even though these were the same machines that had amassed an impressive array of speed and endurance records. And every failure in the Gordon Bennett merely pointed up American cars’ inferiority to European machines. Neither Peerless nor Winton would participate in future Gordon Bennetts, and for the 1904 race there would be no American entrant at all.

  Louis Mooers would continue to build racing cars, but he would emphasize track rather than road events. He would hire as his driver the greatest track racer of them all, Barney Oldfield.*5

  Henry Ford, on the other hand, had again played it just right. Not only had he known when to get into racing, he had known when to get out. He had refused to build a commercial car when he knew that he needed the publicity that came with winning on the racetrack, and he knew when to resist the temptation to continue to race after that phase of his career had exhausted its usefulness.

  But if the Gordon Bennett Cup had failed to spur America to produce better cars, Willie Vanderbilt thought he knew something that would. Going against conventional wisdom—and what would be a shrill chorus of dissent—Willie K. decided the only way to use road racing to promote automobiles in the United States was to stage the event itself within the United States. Late in 1903, therefore, he returned to America to bring speed and racing glory to our shores—with a road race to be called, of course, the Vanderbilt Cup.

  * * *

  *1 The top class was 1,443 to 2,220 pounds; next was 888 to 1,443 pounds; then 555 to 888 pounds (“motorette”); and finally less than 555 pounds (“motor bicycle”). Actual weights were in kilograms, of course, with the entrance fee based on class.

  *2 Gottlieb Daimler had died in 1900. Emil Jellinek, an Austrian industrialist who had purchased a number of Daimler automobiles, then made a sizable investment in the company, particularly in vehicles for racing. He named the team Mércedès, after his twelve-year-old daughter. (The diacritical marks were soon dropped.) Mercedes and Benz merged in the 1920s and the first Mercedes-Benz was marketed in 1926.

  *3 Camille du Gast, the widow of a wealthy Parisian department store owner, was also a crack shot and an expert fencer and horsewoman, raced toboggans and motorboats in addition to automobiles, traveled in balloons, and was the first woman to use a parachute. She also became a concert pianist and accomplished singer. When she was seventeen, she was reported to have been the nude model for a painting, after which she sued and won a defamation case. She was not done with scandal, however. In 1910, she successfully confronted a gang of men who had been hired by her daughter to kill her so that the daughter could inherit her fortune.

  *4 One of the provisions, requiring numbered registration plates on the rear of an automobile, was later declared unconstitutional.

  *5 Mooers built Oldfield an enormous racer called the Green Dragon, and watched as Oldfield set a series of speed records—all on a track rather than on the road—and gained immense fame for both himself and Peerless Motor Car. The company would stay in business until the 1920s, building luxury automobiles.

  CHAPTER 15

  Almost fifteen thousand gasoline automobiles were sold in the United States from autumn 1903 through summer 1904, more than had been sold in total since the automobile was introduced in the 1890s.*1 The majority of these were not luxury vehicles, such as Wintons, Cadillacs, or Peerlesses, but rather modestly priced automobiles—Olds, Ramblers, or Fords—aimed at a segment of the market that had been largely ignored until the curved-dash model had caught on the year before.*2 What was more, the largest seller of steam-powered automobiles, Locomobile, with fifteen hundred cars sold in 1902, announced that it would switch exclusively to gasoline in 1904.

  These figures belie the notions that automobiles were almost exclusively playthings of the rich and that, before Henry Ford’s democratizing, early automakers failed to recognize the market for their product among the common folk. While the initial purchasers of lower-cost machines were often professional men, automobiles, at $650 to $850, were no longer out of the reach of much of the upper middle class. A far greater impediment to sales than cost was the lack of good roads outside—and in many cases, inside—city limits.

  The broadening and deepening of automobile demand, then, was not an arcane phenomenon that Henry Ford alone perceived but an immense opportunity of which everyone involved in the design and manufacture of motorcars was aware. And since most of those manufacturers of any size were members of the new trade organization, protecting that burgeoning market, carving it up only among those already at the table, became a priority. As a result, in the summer of 1903, ALAM began to turn up the heat.

  ALAM began a campaign aimed at enlisting public support for an organization that, as anyone with a basic knowledge of economics was aware, would result in increased prices. In the June 6, 1903, issue of Automobile Topics, for example, a column written by someone identified only as “Man on the Road” was little more than a press release.1 Noting that he had previously been opposed to such an organization, and that “anything tending to a monopoly or trust would decidedly hurt me individually,” he wrote that it had been his “good fortune” to have made a “fairly close study of the manufacturing conditions in the automobile industry,” and “in the light of a better knowledge of conditions as they exist, my ideas have entirely changed, and I believe the association to be a necessity.”2

  Man on the Road went on to justify his change of mind by a desire to protect the consumer, observing that “the demand for machines has been so large that even the best equipped and largest factories have been and are now weeks behind on their orders,” which would result—using unusual economic reasoning—in a decline in prices, which would, in turn, encourage fly-by-night assemblers to dump shoddily built machines on the market. As an aside, Man asserted that these rattletraps would inevitably be constructed of cheap imitations of patented components, though this, of course, was the actual crux of the argument:

  Take, for instance, such a concern as the Winton, or Olds, and suppose they own a patent on some one small but essential part of a complete machine. Now, suppose that 10 or 20 other concerns, each building a comparatively small number of machines, decide to use this device. They may do so for months, and not be molested, not because they have a right to do so, but because the older and larger makers positively cannot spare the time from their regular business to get after and teach the smaller maker that in reality he is dangerously near to being a thief; and it is here that the association can and will do its greatest work.

  This appraisal was d
isingenuous, of course, since, as Man on the Road almost certainly knew, the only genuine threat to ALAM emanated from automakers such as Henry Ford, innovators who were employing either new ideas or new formulations of old ones. In many cases, the independents held their own patents. Few would be exposed to infringement suits on components. Only the overriding breadth of the Selden patent could protect ALAM’s oligopoly, a point conspicuously absent from the piece.

  As a result, unless ALAM could obtain a favorable ruling in the courts on the Selden patent, innovations were certain to eventually shatter its hold on the market. Although ALAM’s twenty-six members were, for the most part, the largest and wealthiest in the industry, automaking in the United States remained an entrepreneurial enterprise. Fully 502 companies were formed to build automobiles between 1900 and 1908, and 200 of those remained in operation by the end of the decade. Most were small and the vast majority, almost 90 percent, felt they had little choice but to pay the auto trust. Eventually more than $2 million would be siphoned from the independents.3 But of the independents that would not knuckle under, none presented a greater risk than Henry Ford.

  In June—one month before he would ship his first automobile, but with legal action inevitable—Ford (and another independent, Marr Autocar) hired Ralzemond Parker, “the leading patent attorney in Detroit.”4 Parker thought the Selden patent claims ridiculous, or at least represented to his clients that he did. He did warn them that the fight would be long and expensive—possibly costing $40,000 in fees—but if they were willing to stay the course, they would ultimately prevail. While the costs were daunting, particularly to a company that had almost no money, this was precisely what Ford and Couzens wanted to hear. Both were spoiling for a fight, and long odds just made it that much more compelling. The other stockholders went along, and Ford and Couzens enthusiastically agreed to give Parker a more or less free hand to fashion their defense.