But before the courts came the advertising. ALAM began running ads in newspapers and magazines such as Harper’s, informing “Users, Agents, Importers, Dealers, and Manufacturers of Gasolene Automobiles” that the Selden patent “controls broadly commercial forms of gasolene automobiles” and that the licensed manufacturers are “pioneers” who have “commercialized the gasolene vehicle by many years of development and at great cost.” The last line warned that “the basic Selden patent and all other patents…will be enforced against all infringers.” The notice conveniently omitted that the Selden patent could not be said to control anything until the courts agreed that it did.
Ford responded in kind. In an ad directed to the same list of recipients, Ford promised, “We will protect you against any prosecution for alleged infringement of patents.” The copy went on to assure buyers of Ford cars that the Selden patent “does not cover a practicable machine, no practicable machine can be made from it, and never was.” Then, borrowing an untruth from its founder, the ad asserted, “Our Mr. Ford made the first Gasoline Automobile in Detroit and the third in the United States.” Finally, in a turn of the knife that Ford must have approved personally, the ad read, “Mr. Ford, driving his own machine, beat Mr. Winton at Grosse Pointe track in 1901. We have always been winners.”
Ford’s notice did not specify how he would indemnify buyers of his automobiles if his company went bankrupt either fighting the coming lawsuit or losing it. But what it did do was establish to the ordinary American that here was a man unwilling to be cowed by big money. Thus, when Henry Ford chose to defy ALAM, he became a hero not only to his fellow independents but also to small business owners and working people across America. No man who intended to sell his products to those very same segments of society could have asked for more.
By autumn, ads run by ALAM members—Winton, Cadillac, Locomobile, Peerless, Olds, and the rest—included a postscript, “Member Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers,” and the automobiles that rolled out of their factories contained a metal plate that read, “Licensed Under Selden Patent, No. 549,160. Patented November 5, 1895,” against the backdrop of Selden’s never-built vehicle.
At the end of August, ALAM even trotted out George Selden, who until then had been only a spectral presence, and had him interviewed for the Hartford Courant. The reporter claimed to have merely run into Selden at the Hotel Heublein and there put questions to him. The newspaper then dutifully printed a series of misstatements and distortions, without once questioning their veracity. “We have now six good and sufficient grounds on which the court would award an injunction—viz., five decrees and the public acquiescence,” Selden asserted, although no decrees had yet been issued. “In truth,” he added, although it was no truth at all, “on a motion for a preliminary injunction on my patent as it now stands, the only question the court would consider would be that of infringement, and on this question all parties have agreed that it is impossible to build a gasolene automobile without infringing.”5
Ford and Couzens matched each escalation. A letter, dated September 28, 1903, which appeared in Horseless Age and other trade journals over Couzens’s signature, but had likely been written by Ralzemond Parker, stated,
So far as our plan of action is concerned for the future it is extremely simple. We intend to manufacture and sell all of the gasoline automobiles of the type we are constructing that we can. We regard the claims made under the Selden patent as covering the monopoly of such machines as entirely unwarranted, and without foundation in fact. We do not, therefore, propose to respect any such claims, and, if the issue is forced upon us, shall defend not only ourselves but our agents and customers to the fullest extent, and this, too, without regard to whether or not we join any combination for the purpose of defending against said patent.6
The letter did not mince words as to what the Ford camp had thought of Selden’s interview. “In taking this stand we cannot conscientiously feel that Mr. Selden ever added anything to the art in which we are engaged. We believe that the art would have been just as far advanced today if Mr. Selden had never been born; that he made no discovery and gave none to the world.” Finally, Parker went on to point out that George Selden’s contention—which had also been, by implication, ALAM’s—that the legal issues had been all but settled by Judges Coxe and Hazel was utterly false, and that those rulings bore no relation to the court case to come. In this he was technically correct, but from a practical standpoint—de facto, if not de jure—precedent had been set with those rulings.
It is debatable whether either of these missives swayed the undecided, but they established clear battle lines and, of greater significance, continued to position Henry Ford as a major player in automobile manufacture, a status he could not possibly have achieved based solely on his company’s performance. Of the seventeen hundred Model As that he would sell that model year, virtually all of them were purchased after ALAM threatened its prospective buyers. ALAM, in attempting to isolate Ford Motor and squeeze it out of business, had succeeded only in elevating the company in the public eye. Ford and Couzens clearly understood the value of being perceived as the small independent, willing to wage the noble fight against a powerful bully. In another release picked up in newspapers and trades, Ford proclaimed, “We are fighting this matter single-handed, and have not joined any association whatever, nor do we anticipate doing so.”7
The print campaign was merely the opening round of what would be an eight-year slugfest, a classic contest in which the heavy puncher needed an early knockout because as the fight went on he grew weaker while his more deft opponent grew stronger.
Finally, on October 22, 1903, war was officially declared when attorneys for George Selden and the Electric Vehicle Company, standing in for ALAM, filed suit in federal court in New York City against the Ford Motor Company for patent infringement. There had been intense speculation as to whether Thomas Jeffery of Rambler would be included in the complaint. Rambler, after all, sold as many cars as Ford and was the other independent that cut substantially into ALAM’s lower-priced market. But in yet another decision that seemed prudent at the time but would prove disastrous, the suit named only Ford and C. A. Duerr, Ford’s agent in New York. Thomas Jeffery’s reputation for never backing down, it seemed, had successfully deterred ALAM and Electric Vehicle’s boards.
The reaction in the industry was mixed. On the one hand, ALAM seemed to hold all the cards—it was the biggest and most powerful consortium in the business, with a patent that had survived its first court tests—but the independents were also producing cars that people seemed to want to buy, and in growing numbers. And, of course, the ultimate legal resolution was uncertain. No one wanted to commit to the side that ended up losing.
The trade magazines, for example, used firm language to say absolutely nothing. Horseless Age wrote:
As stated in THE HORSELESS AGE some weeks ago, the institution of this suit was inevitable, and it was only a question of time. The association apparently pursued the policy of diplomacy in securing recognition of the validity of the Selden patent to the very last, for rumors were rife to the effect that an important concern outside the fold was about to institute suit against the association for alleged intimidation of its agents. On the other hand, a prominent member of the association, located also in Detroit, is reported to have threatened to withdraw from it unless proceedings were instituted at once against the manufacturer who is made defendant in the present suit….Now that the fight has begun we believe we voice the sentiment of the entire body of automobile users in this country and of the greater number of agents and manufacturers, both licensed and unlicensed, in saying that it is to be hoped that the fight will be short and decisive and that it will be settled once for all whether George B. Selden actually made a new and useful improvement in means of road locomotion of such scope as to entitle him under the law to the tribute of the entire gasoline automobile industry, or whether the patent was unjustly granted or does not cover the modern
gasoline road vehicle.8
—
The lawsuit was not Ford’s only problem. Members of Ford Motor’s board of directors, especially the quixotic Malcomson, wanted the company to switch direction after one season of moderate success and produce a higher-priced luxury car. It hadn’t taken long for Malcomson to forget that the very point of hiring Ford was his promise to produce a lower-priced car. Ford—as later events would prove—thought Malcomson an idiot, but he didn’t have an alternative with which to bargain. The Model A had already acquired a reputation for overheating, even when being driven steadily on a flat road. As the car began to deteriorate under day-to-day use, it became less and less likely that those seventeen hundred sales could be repeated in the 1904 model year.
“Here, then, was Henry Ford’s situation,” wrote longtime Ford employee and future head of production Charles Sorenson. “He had in Wills a chief engineer who was a perfectionist; in Couzens, a dragon at the cashbox; in himself, a man with a strong stubborn hunch for a cheap car for the average man, yet unable to describe its execution; and a board of directors out of sympathy with his aim and driven almost to hysterics by the groping and fumbling toward a low-cost car. For Ford merely had the idea; he had no picture in his mind as to what that car would be like, or look like.”9
Ultimately, Malcomson forced Ford to produce a $2,000 luxury car, the Model B, with four cylinders instead of two, an engine positioned in front of the driver instead of underneath the seat, and a rotating shaft drive instead of the Model A’s chain. It was appointed with all the upscale touches that the cheaper models weren’t—padded, tufted leather upholstery, a polished wood body painted “a rich dark green,” and a brass steering wheel, steering post, and trim. The motor was rated at 20 horsepower, with a top speed of 40 miles per hour. The Model B was a drastic change in design and tooling that took a good part of 1904 to effect, and so it was not introduced until October. Although the sales brochure described the Model B as “a touring car of light weight and great power,” sales, while respectable, were hardly brisk.
But Ford had not ceded authority entirely. That second year, the company also designed and produced a Model C, a vastly improved Model A. The C, which was not introduced until December 1904, had the stronger engine, redesigned cooling system, upgraded transmission, superior handling, and enhanced reliability that were necessary to compete with Olds and Rambler. Many of these improvements were fashioned by Wills, drawing on the work he had done designing the detested Model B. The Model C was slightly more expensive than the A, priced at $850 as a runabout, $950 with tonneau. Doctors, who had already established themselves as a prime market, were specifically targeted in Ford’s brochure.
To The Doctor: You need not be told the value to you of a few hours saved. Every doctor knows that, and today thousands have taken advantage of the time and money economies of the automobile. No longer experimental, the motor car has taken its place among the necessities of existence. The Ford stands first and foremost as the ideal doctor’s car. With every quality found in other cars it is conceded to be the easiest riding car of its type known. To the physician whose steadiness of hand and brain and nerve are all important, this is food for thought. The Ford stands for economy, reliability and simplicity. Its past successes vouch for it.
Ford’s automobiles, of course, were no more reliable, no more elegantly designed, and certainly no less expensive than those of its competitors. And by the end of 1903, while the company was generating sufficient cash flow to keep it afloat, under ordinary circumstances Ford cars would hardly have garnered special acclaim. But the notoriety the company and its eponymous chief engineer had received from its enemies, as well as the constant growth in demand for automobiles engendered by the glamour of racing, virtually guaranteed that Ford products would continue to remain prominent in the eyes of consumers.
Ford was not a man to miss a chance to help fortune along. In order to successfully fight off ALAM he was going to need money, quite a bit of it, and that meant he needed to do everything he could to maximize sales. No one was more aware of the publicity that speed engenders, so on January 12, 1904, Ford once more took the tiller of his Arrow—which he had sworn he would never again do—and drove across a frozen Lake St. Clair. He was so nervous about the Arrow becoming stuck with the throttle open that he recruited Spider Huff, who like Oldfield was afraid of nothing, to ride on the running board, prepared to choke off the fuel supply if the powerful engine could not be brought under control by the driver.
It was a terrifying ride. The ice, which seemed smooth as polished marble when viewed from the bank, was actually fissured and uneven, not the ideal surface on which to drive a glorified drag racer with no brakes. “I shall never forget that race,” he wrote in My Life and Work. “At every fissure the car leaped into the air. I never knew how it was coming down. When I wasn’t in the air, I was skidding, but somehow I stayed top side up and on the course.”10 But the terror seemed worth it when Ford was told he had set a new measured-mile land speed record of 91.37 miles per hour. He and Huff celebrated by building a fire on the frozen lake and cooking themselves a muskrat for dinner.
Ford’s feat was reported in newspapers across the nation. Unfortunately, the publicity boon was diminished less than one month later when Willie Vanderbilt, in a 90-horsepower Mercedes, broke Ford’s record by tearing across the speed flats at Ormond Beach, Florida, at 92.3 miles per hour.11
* * *
*1 The September-to-August model year for automobiles had been established de facto almost from the moment automobiles were available for sale.
*2 Rambler, built by Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, also produced a $750 touring car that enjoyed a burst of popularity between 1902, when it sold some 1,500 machines, and 1909, when its sales numbers topped 3,000. Jeffery was also not an ALAM member, although, unlike Ford, the association had wooed him regularly. But Jeffery, who had successfully fought infringement suits as a bicycle manufacturer, was a confirmed lone wolf, unwilling to be part of any organization.
CHAPTER 16
William Kissam Vanderbilt II was a man raised to believe he could do or have anything he wanted, and what he wanted least was a humdrum life. From age nine, when his father chartered an enormous yacht to take the family on a luxury trip down the Nile, to his sponsoring France’s first road race when he was just sixteen, to yachting, race driving, playing the new sport of football, or simply traveling the world in luxury, Willie K. never lost the conviction that what were immovable obstacles for most people were merely twigs to him.*1
When he returned from Europe, Willie repaired to Deepdale, his sprawling estate on the aptly named Lake Success, where he and his wife—herself the daughter of a senator and a partner in the Comstock silver mine—became tabloid fodder and from which Willie launched his many high-speed sojourns in the White Ghost, his 33-horsepower Daimler. Local residents were so terrified of the 65-mile-per-hour machine that they prevailed on Hempstead town officials to enact a 6-mile-per-hour speed limit, which Willie simply ignored. “Arrest me every day if you want to,” he is reported to have said. “It’s nothing to pay fines for such sport.”1 Eventually, Willie had an even faster Mercedes racer shipped from Europe, which he called Red Devil—a popular moniker for fast automobiles—and settled in to promote the United States’ first great international road race.
Willie K. at the wheel
The plan was suitably ambitious; the notion that he could not simply get local officials to close any stretch of public thoroughfare he required did not occur to him. The original course, therefore, which he announced in February 1904, was 180 miles, beginning at Sag Harbor, near the eastern end of Long Island, then through Bridgehampton, Southampton, “over the Shinnecock Hills, following the south road through the Hamptons and Quogues, then through Bellport and Patchogue to Bayshore and Babylon, and then following the Herrick Road from Massapequa to Brooklyn.” The automobiles would then return east, “where the road would be extended on the nor
th side to Jericho Turnpike through Huntington to Greenport and Port Jefferson.”2
The impossible logistics of closing so much public road and then monitoring it to ensure that the Paris-Madrid disaster was not repeated might have eluded Willie K. but was painfully obvious to everyone else. Even the Automobile Association of America, which had agreed to co-sponsor the event, could not sign on.*2
Willie persevered, continuing to insist the race be 250 to 300 miles. But he was also no fool. However long the course, he wanted America to reap the benefits of racing without the free-for-all insanity that plagued open European road events, so he fashioned a set of rules similar to Gordon Bennett’s.
Only ten drivers from any one country can compete. Challenges must be made prior to March 15 of the year in which the race is to be run. The race will be run each year as scheduled, rain or shine, and will be open only to members of clubs affiliated with the Automobile Association of America or the Automobile Club of France….During 1904 and 1905 the race must be run in the United States. Subsequently it may be held in the country which holds the cup. The entry fee will be $300 for every car entered, and of this $150 will be returned to the owners of those cars starting….The cars in the race will carry numbers, to be drawn by lot, and these numbers will indicate the order of starting. The entries will be restricted to cars weighing between 881 pounds and 2204 pounds, and each car shall carry in addition to the driver, one passenger, to weigh not less than 132 pounds. The contestants will be required to start on time, and all time lost in getting under way will be counted against them.3
Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age Page 21
