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

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Although there are no reports of friction between him and Ford, Pelletier eventually left the company to become Flanders’s advertising man at E-M-F.

  With the Model N, Ford, by then forty-four years old, had finally hit his stride, not simply in the production of automobiles but also in the development of the corporate structure that within a decade would be the most sophisticated in America. Although Ford was aware of the work of certain “experts” in organizational dynamics, especially Frederick Winslow Taylor, the Ford Motor Company evolved in the same manner as did the Ford automobile—through tinkering and a constant process of trial and error undertaken by a group of people who were, to a striking degree, superb at their jobs.*3 That many were either discarded or left disgruntled—in almost every case after they had served their purpose—adds to Ford’s natural genius for business, rather than detracts from it.

  —

  But no matter the potential of the automobile, there remained the issue of finding places to drive it. Although telephones, typewriters, electric lights, gas stoves, and indoor plumbing were appearing in increasing numbers in American homes and cities, road paving was a skill that, despite decades of Albert Pope’s Good Roads movement, remained primitive. In 1904, more than 2 million miles of American roads were dirt, compared to only 150,000 miles deemed to be “improved,” and of these, two-thirds were gravel. Most of the better roads, of course, were in and around the large metropolitan areas. While most of the automobiles built in that decade were capable of negotiating the rocky, rutted, sometimes dusty, sometimes quagmire-like trails, bouncing around or through obstacles limited speed and made breakdowns more likely. That demand for automobiles still grew as it did was an indication of just how vast the market might be if the public could somehow be convinced that automobile travel was “convenient.”

  Willie Vanderbilt provided the seeds of the solution.

  Despite the great success of the Vanderbilt Cup and the tens of thousands of dollars of revenue Nassau County took in from the race, the hue and cry over the closing of taxpayer property for an automobile race did not evaporate. After a spectator who had wandered onto the course was struck and killed in the 1906 race, bureaucratic resistance to Willie’s extravaganza stiffened further. Despite his wealth and influence, receiving further race permits seemed unlikely. So, with typical flair, Willie K. decided that if public roads would not be made available for his race, he’d simply build a road of his own.

  He put together a corporation to construct the nation’s first road that would be built exclusively for automobile traffic. It would be flat, constructed of reinforced concrete, with over- and underpasses to keep traffic moving, and it would be free of police, pedestrians, and horses. Willie named it, appropriately, Motor Parkway.

  In an address at the Automobile Club of America’s banquet, Willie K. laid out his vision: “It has been the dream of every motorist to own a perfect car and to have a road without speed limit.” He then described a fifty-foot-wide road on a one-hundred-foot-wide right-of-way, tarred and oiled to be bump- and dust-free, fenced its entire length, with access through tollgates placed every 5 miles. The road being private, there would be “no interference from the authorities.” But his ultimate objective was more grand. “If we can prove to the public it is a paying investment, we will not only have the Long Island Motor Parkway, but roads of a similar character extending to Philadelphia, Albany, Boston, and many other smaller towns.”12

  It took him only a few months to put together a group of “directors and incorporators” that was as impressive as any in America. On December 3, 1906, when Long Island Motor Parkway, Inc., was born, the roster boasted not only a Vanderbilt but also a Whitney, a Belmont, an Astor, a Schiff, a Barney, a Bourne, and a Heckscher. Oddly, only one automaker had joined a group that would create the blueprint for a highway system that would revolutionize America—Henry Ford.

  It was Willie K.’s initial intention to have the road completed in time for the 1907 Vanderbilt Cup, but once again reach far exceeded grasp. Buying a right-of-way more than 50 miles long turned out to be a good deal more difficult than he thought. In addition, construction of a road so advanced from the prevailing technology would be both costly and fraught with error. The 1907 race was therefore canceled, with a new target set in the following year. The official groundbreaking was not until June 1908, but after a major effort, on October 10, 1907, a 9-mile section of the road was officially opened. Automobile magazine called it “an epoch in motor-driven land transportation.” Two weeks later, that same stretch accounted for 9 miles of the 23-mile course for that year’s Vanderbilt Cup race.

  Eventually, Motor Parkway ran for 43 miles, from the New York City line to Ronkonkoma.*4

  * * *

  *1 The architect would be Albert Kahn, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete. Kahn, although he would design many buildings for Henry Ford and become known as “Ford’s architect,” also would design corporate headquarters for both Packard and General Motors. Kahn’s father had trained as a rabbi, and after Ford’s anti-Semitism had publicly escalated, he refused to ever again set foot in the buildings he had designed.

  *2 In 1920, Hawkins would publish “Certain Success,” whose opening was:

  *3 Taylor was America’s foremost authority on “scientific management,” and much is made of Ford being told of his punctilious industrial time-and-motion studies and then being inspired to create the production system that would result in the assembly line. But Ford had been made aware of Taylor’s work before the Piquette Avenue plant was built, and until Max Wollering and Walter Flanders joined his company, that operation was, as has been described, a scattershot affair. Ironically, Taylor’s most devoted follower among the automakers was Henry Joy at Packard, who opened a fully “Taylorized” plant in 1913, just about the time Ford’s assembly line was reaching fruition.

  *4 Motor Parkway still exists, stretching from Ronkonkoma to Dix Hills in Suffolk County, and can be accessed directly at Exit 53 of the Long Island Expressway.

  CHAPTER 21

  The increase in auto sales after the Panic of 1907, when just about every other consumer item was losing ground, occurred in good part due to a constant stream of news spotlighting the glamour and desirability of an exotic technical marvel that, thanks to Henry Ford and friends, had become possible for many average people to own. Much of that news was generated within the nation’s borders, where racers such as Barney Oldfield had become idols. But the most arresting and compelling headlines were generated from the other side of the globe, where an American driver in an American automobile seemed poised to perform a feat that many had considered impossible.

  In the spring of 1907, when George Selden was preparing at last to demonstrate the automobile he claimed to be the first of its kind, the French newspaper Le Matin announced sponsorship of a race to Paris from Peking, China, a distance of more than 6,000 miles. The course would take the participants through territory that was as exotic to Westerners as the surface of the moon: through the Gobi Desert; around Lake Baikal (so deep that no one had ever reached the bottom); through Kansk, Omsk, and Tomsk; to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin; and finally, down the Champs-Élysées. The course was so alien that estimates of the race’s duration varied by months. One of the entrants, Prince Scipio Borghese, journeyed to China in advance of the event and walked with a pole the precise width of his automobile, a 40-horsepower Itala, to ensure that it would fit through a series of narrow rocky passes.

  Le Matin received inquiries from forty potential competitors, but that number was winnowed to a mere five when the race began on June 10. The spirit of pioneering adventure was established almost immediately. On the third day, Prince Borghese’s car

  was buried over the axles in a morass, and held up by immense roots of trees, which had to be cut away with axes, whilst two days after, it had to be drawn through about 18 miles of deep sand by coolies and mules. Near Urga the car stuck in a morass and fell on to its side. With the aid of
Mongolians using beams as levers, and oxen, the car was pulled backwards out of the swamp. On the next day the vehicle again sank in thick mud to the axles, and gradually sank lower until rescued by Mongolian shepherds.1

  Another of the competitors, a swashbuckling Frenchman named Charles Godard, driving a 15-horsepower Dutch Spyker, “drove through the Gobi Desert without a sufficient supply of gasoline. For two days he had to lie beneath his car while the sun was burning fiercely.” Finally, “camel riders brought him the gasoline.” Godard, who was riding with a Le Matin correspondent, sold all his spare parts for cash to finance the journey, then, when that ran out, borrowed money from virtually everyone he encountered, assuring them that the newspaper had agreed to pay all his expenses. Unfortunately for the luckless Godard, that turned out not to be the case, and he was eventually sentenced to eighteen months in prison for swindling the Dutch consulate in Peking. (The charges were later dropped.)2

  Progress of the race was front-page news in Europe and was regularly featured in trade magazines. Even though there was no American presence in the race, neither car nor driver, it also turned out to be extremely popular in American newspapers. In an article titled “Daredevil Motorists Defy Death in Mad Dash from Peking to Paris,” syndicated across the United States, a “special correspondent” reported, “Grave dangers confront the intrepid motorists, who are wildly speeding from Peking to Paris in the most notable automobile race ever undertaken. The course covers 6,200 miles and traverses the pathless wastes of northern Asia.”3

  The article was a mixture of high adventure and exotic travelogue.

  Of the five entries who left Peking, only one has dropped out, [Auguste] Pons, who became lost in the Gobi desert and had to hire camels to get his car back to Nankin, himself almost dead with fatigue. In the Gobi desert the Italian car’s petrol tank began to leak and by the time the fault was discovered, the motorists found themselves stranded, with no motive power left. They were not provisioned for a long isolated stay, and they could not get forward. The sun beat on them throughout a long day. Their water gave out. A caravan of camels suddenly made its appearance. The automobilists tried to secure relief from the nomads, but the latter refused to halt and callously passed by.

  The party searched for four hours before stumbling on a Mongol village where aid was given.

  Everywhere they went the motorists had to overcome fear on the part of the natives before they could be induced to render any help. In the woods near Krasnolarak, a company of bandits, heavily armed, appeared, and the tourists began feeling for their guns, expecting a fight, but needlessly. The bandits caught one good look at the vehicle, moving by itself, and became panic stricken. They hurled themselves into the shrub, threw down their arms, and made signs that they surrendered to the mysterious spirit that propelled the horseless cart.

  Tales of colorful foreign dignitaries were popular as well.

  At Urga, the Chinese governor asked permission to ride in the automobile. Dressed in the greatest pomp, the celestial got into the car, somewhat nervously, but, gaining courage, he asked that the car be speeded up. The chauffeur moved the levers to five miles an hour, and the party flew along, leaving far in the rear, in wild disorder, a great cavalcade that had hoped to keep up with the pace of the automobile. The governor returned to his palace shaken and pale, but conscious that he had enormously increased his importance in the eyes of his subordinates.

  Daredevil motorists meet the living God

  The adventure continued for weeks until the race ended on August 10, two months to the day from when it began, when Prince Borghese drove into Paris, “escorted by a squadron of cavalry, and followed by hundreds of automobiles,” and cheered by hundreds of thousands from every economic and social stratum.4 He had completed the journey in one day less than Horatio Jackson’s trip across the United States only four years earlier. The prince was given a celebratory banquet attended by thirty thousand guests. It was ten days before the next finisher, a De Dion–Bouton, appeared in Paris.

  At the victory banquet in Paris, Prince Borghese expressed the desire to motor across America, a sentiment that was duly reported in the press. The editors at The New York Times decided to take the prince up on his idea. In late November 1907, they announced sponsorship, with Le Matin, of a race from New York to Paris—going west. The plan was to make almost the entire course land-bound. The cars would be shipped from Seattle to Valdez, Alaska, would traverse the (hopefully) frozen Bering Strait, and would then head across Siberia to Moscow. (Boats would, of course, be available if ice on the Bering Strait was not.) And, the Times was pleased to note, interest was “immeasurably increased when it became known that an American car had entered the race.”5 The Times also observed that “a year or two ago [this undertaking] would have been termed the wildest dream of the automobile imagination.”

  The course was a daunting 20,000 miles, which, in addition to long stretches in the desert, would require the entrants to climb mountains, several over 10,000 feet, and “drop down the sides of mountain ranges on passes and roads that are well-nigh impassable. The drivers will have to go through rivers which in many cases will completely cover the wheels and the flooring of the car, and the motor will have to do its work at a temperature of 100 degrees as well as 50 below zero.”6

  The New York Times was the most widely read newspaper in the United States, and it threw its full editorial might into publicizing the event. Just four days after the article announcing the race, the newspaper ran a full-page feature filled with harrowing tales of automobilists who had braved just some of the terrain the race would cover. European newspapers, fresh off the Peking-Paris bonanza, needed little incentive to hail this new test of human and mechanical endurance.

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  At 11:00 A.M. on February 12, 1908, Mayor George Brinton McClellan Jr. fired a gun, and six automobiles departed Times Square, heading north on Broadway for Albany. Three of the cars had been shipped from France: a De Dion–Bouton; a Sizaire-Naudin, one of whose drivers was Auguste Pons, who had almost died in the Gobi Desert; and a Motobloc, whose team included the intrepid Charles Godard. A German Protos and an Italian Züst were also entered, although Prince Borghese had decided against participating. Representing the United States was an automobile built by the E. R. Thomas Motor Company, an ALAM member. The car, a standard 1907 model that had already proved itself in endurance contests, was known as the Flyer.

  For the journey, the Thomas machine, more than 4,000 pounds of it, had mounted “skid planks” atop its mud guards—boards 20 feet long that ran the full length of the car. A winch had been installed at the front. Supplies included two shovels, two picks, two axes, two lanterns, three searchlights, two extra gas tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons, a 10-gallon reservoir of oil, extra springs, and myriad other spare parts. The Flyer was also equipped “with a top similar to those used on the old prairie schooner,” complete with ribs over the chassis, so that the automobile could double as a tent at night. “As an extra precaution” the drivers carried 500 feet of rope, a rifle, and revolvers.7 Lacking in this array were a windshield and a heater. The other automobiles were of similar size and similarly equipped, although the proportions varied depending on whether the drivers thought the desert, the Arctic, or the American West would present the greatest challenge. The Protos, for example, custom-made by a team of six hundred workers on the direct orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was made extra wide to allow the driver—a military officer—to sleep bundled up on the floor.

  Each car had a crew of two or three, one or two drivers and a mechanician. The Flyer carried one driver, the dashing Montagu Roberts, and George Schuster, a mechanic at the Thomas factory in Buffalo who had been summoned only three days before to, he thought, perform a final tune-up. He brought only a few changes of clothing since he believed he would be returning to Buffalo in a day or two.

  With Mayor McClellan’s starting gun, bands played, the flags of the four entering nations flew, and fifty thousand cheering people
crowded into the square to see the racers off. The racers would pass a quarter million spectators lined up for miles as they left the city.

  The feeling of the endurance test to come was captured on that very first day. The New York Times had assigned a young reporter, T. Walter Williams, to ride along with the Flyer, and his page-one lead on February 13 was “Autos Fight Snow Drifts.” North of the city, it seemed, much of the snow that had descended on the East Coast from a series of blizzards in the previous weeks had yet to be cleared from the roads, and the shovels that the participants carried had to be put to good use. In addition, many of the local children decided to amuse themselves by pelting the shovelers with snowballs. By day’s end, only three, the Flyer, the Züst, and the De Dion, escorted by a man holding a lantern, had reached Hudson, New York, 116 miles north, and the other three had made substantially less progress. Two days later, one of the drivers of the German vehicle declared on finally reaching Albany, “Siberia will be a picnic after this.” He would find that he had underestimated Siberia.

  The Times ran page-one updates nearly every day, but it would be another forty days before the newspaper could announce that the Thomas Flyer, still in the lead, had reached San Francisco. By then, only four cars remained, as the Sizaire-Naudin and the luckless Auguste Pons were forced to drop out only nine days after the start, still short of Albany, when a broken casting was found to be unrepairable without a part shipped from France. By that time the Flyer, still in the lead, had already passed Buffalo. At Omaha two weeks later, the Motobloc was also forced to give up the chase due to numerous breakdowns, although Godard did escape in this instance without any criminal charges lodged against him. The Times had a casualty as well. At Chicago, Walter Williams had debarked and refused to continue even if it cost him his job. “Insanity” was the term he used to describe the proceedings.