Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Wilhelm Maybach died in 1929, having never personally owned a car. After 1940, his eponymous firm made tank engines for the German army. Only just surviving the lean postwar years, the firm struggled on until 1960 when it was bought, predictably, by Daimler-Benz. In 2002, the successors of DMG finally, if belatedly, made amends for a shameful episode in their company’s history by reviving the Maybach name as a brand for super-luxury limousines. Without Maybach, there may never have been a Mercedes.

  Karl Benz suffered a similar fate to his rival, Daimler. Although he had improved his cars by inventing the radical horizontal ‘boxer’ engine in 1896, Benz was forced into retirement by his fellow directors in 1903, although he was allowed to remain notionally on the board until his death in 1929. Once again, the careful money men had triumphed over the visionary engineers.

  Benz did at least live long enough to witness his company evolve into of one of the world’s automotive giants, created by the 1926 merger of the Daimler and Benz operations. He also presided over the first Mercedes brand car. One of Benz’s most important early customers was the Jewish entrepreneur Emil Jellinek, the Austro-Hungarian consul in Nice. Jellinek had been happy to help Benz market his cars in the 1890s, but found the Teutonic badge a handicap in a country still smarting from its comprehensive defeat by the Prussians twenty years earlier. Accordingly, he persuaded Benz to adopt a brand name for marketing purposes. Jellinek had recently met and married a vivacious new wife, the exotic Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert, in Morocco. Their daughter, born in 1889, was christened Adrienne but nicknamed ‘Mercédès’, a Spanish word meaning ‘mercy’ – the adoption of which, in hindsight, seems highly appropriate. By 1900, Jellinek was already using the name Mercedes for his private racing team, as well as for his yacht. He now persuaded Maybach to build him a new sports car using the same name. Rather presciently, Jellinek asserted that the Mercedes automobile should not be ‘a car for today or tomorrow [but] the car of the day after tomorrow’.

  The 35 hp Mercedes that Maybach built, which was first sold to the public in 1902, was revolutionary: it featured the first-ever gate gearchange, a honeycomb radiator, and a steel (not wooden) chassis. It was, as design historian Stephen Bayley has noted, the model in which ‘the fundamental architecture of the car [was] established’. The prototype Mercedes dominated Nice Speed Week in March 1901 and was enthusiastically backed by prominent patrons such as Baron Henri de Rothschild. The director of the French Automobile Club announced that: ‘We have entered the Mercedes era.’

  At the time of the Daimler-Benz merger in 1926, the Mercedes name was extended to the whole of the company’s output, thus preventing any bitterness at the seeming triumph of either the Benz or the Daimler brand. Sadly, Mercédès herself died of cancer, aged only thirty-nine, in 1929, the same year that Benz died. She was thus spared witnessing the grotesque incongruity of cars named after a young Jewish girl being used to haul the anti-Semitic hierarchs of Nazi Germany around the Third Reich.

  While the automobile was invented and perfected in Germany by Benz and Daimler, it was in France that it was developed into the vehicle we know today. One of the first French automotive pioneers was Armand Peugeot. Born into a family of Franche-Comté metalworkers, Armand was inspired by a visit to the factories of Leeds in 1881 and the following year not only set up a bicycle manufacturing business but also began experimenting with Benz-type gasoline engines. In 1889 he exhibited a steam-powered tricycle – in truth, more of a motorbike than a fully fledged car – at the Paris Exposition, and in 1896 he built a factory at Audincourt to make petrol-powered cars. By the time Armand retired in 1913, two years before his death, Peugeot was the largest car manufacturer in France, producing over ten thousand vehicles per year.

  It was Peugeot’s rival Émile Levassor, however, who did most to shape the design of this new mode of transport. In 1886, Levassor, newly licensed to build Gottlieb Daimler’s Phoenix engine, had started building petrol engines in partnership with his friend, the engineer René Panhard, as Panhard et Levassor. By 1890 the pair, who had both graduated from the prestigious École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, were building whole cars – again, under licence from Daimler. Indeed, Levassor, Peugeot and Daimler all met in 1888 at Peugeot’s Valentigny factory to share their knowledge, a summit that led Levassor and Peugeot to cooperate in experimenting with Benz and Daimler engines. However, Levassor gave more thought to the design and operation of the new car than had Benz, Daimler or Peugeot, all of whom had been more concerned with introducing a successful engine into what was still basically a small carriage. With his Daimler-powered Panhard et Levassor of 1891, Levassor introduced a series of innovations that effectively created the modern car. He moved the engine from the rear to the front of the car, and cooled it via a front-mounted water radiator rather than relying, as had been customary, on natural aspiration, which was often insufficient. He also introduced a crankshaft to link the engine with the gearing, eschewing the bicycle-style belt drive of previous cars; and he installed a clutch pedal and a gear stick, situated between the seats, to operate the gearbox, thus creating the first modern transmission.

  Levassor’s brave challenge to the convention that cars should be disposed in the same basic format as their horse-drawn predecessors, by siting the engine not under the chassis but at the front of the vehicle, provided far more room for passengers, as well as easier access in and out of the automobile. The resultant configuration – which, unfortunately for Levassor, was soon called the système Panhard, after the Panhard et Levassor company rather than its actual progenitor – became the standard layout for all cars throughout the ensuing century.

  Levassor was no studious engineer in the mode of Benz and Peugeot. Bold and ambitious, he hugely enjoyed his new creations. It was largely due to his efforts that his firm, in alliance with Peugeot, organized the world’s first car race, staged between Paris and Rouen in 1894. However, Levassor’s passion for racing was to lead to his untimely demise. Whilst driving in the Paris–Marseilles rally of 1896, he swerved to avoid a dog and crashed the car. He never recovered from his injuries, and died the following year.

  Soon after Levassor’s death, his firm’s early lead in the field of automobile production was overtaken by De Dion-Bouton. This pioneering French auto manufacturer was founded in 1883 by an eccentric, aristocratic motor enthusiast, Jules Félix Philippe Albert, Marquis de Dion, a playboy who was better known as a notorious duellist, and the engineer Georges Bouton. By 1900 this unlikely combination had made their firm into the world’s biggest car maker. De Dion-Bouton’s tiny Voiturette of 1899 was not a radical advance in the manner of Levassor’s groundbreaking model of eight years before. However, it was the first ‘people’s car’: a cheap runabout aimed not at the idle rich, who had previously been the only sort who could afford motor cars, but at the middle classes. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, De Dion-Bouton was supplying engines to French rivals Peugeot and Renault, as well as to foreign competitors such as Humber in Britain, Opel in Germany and Packard in America. The Marquis de Dion, meanwhile, had fostered his reputation as a rightwing maverick, assaulting the French president with his cane at a Parisian racecourse (the anti-Semitic marquis was incensed at President Loubet’s moderate stance over the Dreyfus scandal, which had split French society right down the middle), and bankrolling a variety of ultra-conservative periodicals.1

  In 1899 another new French car maker, Renault Frères, was founded in Paris. Little attention was paid at the time to the launch of yet another French manufacturer in what was then the global centre of car production. Yet, while Panhard et Levassor and De Dion-Bouton both prospered in the first decades of the twentieth century, only to stumble after 1918,1 the Renault firm lasted the course to become, by 2000, one of the world’s most successful car makers. Its founder, however, was no daredevil in the mould of Émile Levassor. A born engineer, Louis Renault was undersized, odd-looking and distinctly unsociable. But his Renault Voiturette had a revolu
tionary three-speed gearbox connected to a crankshaft, rather than to a bicycle-style chain drive, and was consequently smoother, faster and more reliable than its competitors. When Louis’s dashing brother Marcel was killed in the Paris–Madrid motor race of 1903,2 Louis took control of the company, remaining at the helm until 1942.

  Few would have predicted in 1900 that, in less than two decades, America would have overtaken France as the world’s leading producer of cars. This astonishing achievement – from a nation that, in contrast with France and Germany, came late to car manufacture – was largely due to the energy and vision of two very different men: Henry Ford and William Durant.

  When Henry Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan (then a small settlement outside the modestly sized town of Detroit), on 30 July 1863, America was still in the midst of the Civil War. Ford’s was not an impoverished childhood, his father had become a prosperous farmer. But from his earliest years, Henry was a loner who did not get on well with the rest of his family and who seemed to follow his own star. His mother died in childbirth when he was only thirteen years old, and for ever afterwards Henry revered his late mother’s memory – while marginalizing his father, whose mechanical aptitude he had clearly inherited – and always attributed the organization of his factories to her tidiness and cleanliness.

  In 1878 the young Henry began work as an apprentice at Flower Brothers’ machine shop, owned by friends of the Ford family. This was a lowly job, which Henry later exorcized from his résumé. He then moved to the Detroit Dry Dock engine works, which he left in 1882 to strike out on his own. In 1888 he married Clara Bryant, who was also from local farming stock, and three years later moved to Detroit itself. Here he began work at the Edison Illuminating Company, which also allowed him some space at the factory to continue his own mechanical experiments. By 1893 Henry was increasingly interested in the motor cars that German and French engineers were producing, and in 1896 he unveiled his own response, the Quadricycle. Ford’s Quadricycle had no brakes and no reverse gear, and was steered by a tiller. But it did have four wheels – albeit bicycle wheels – and an engine, and an electric bell. And it had a top speed of 20 mph, which was very fast by the standards of the time.

  By 1898, having won financial backing from a family friend, Detroit mayor William Maybury, Ford was producing a proper, German-style car, with high wheels, padded bench seats, brass lamps and running boards. And on the back of this breakthrough, he boldly founded the Detroit Automobile Company in August 1899. Yet only fourteen months later the company had ceased trading. Henry had simply never delivered to his new plant a finished car design; unable to adapt his obsessive working practices to industrial deadlines, he simply stopped coming into the factory. His employees saw less and less of him, and eventually found themselves out of work. It was not an auspicious start.

  Ford was not one to give up easily. A new automotive manufacturer – the Henry Ford Company – was set up a year later, in November 1901. By that time, Ford had become an enthusiastic racer and thought only of building faster racing cars. Once again, the company seemed close to collapse after only a year. This time, however, Ford’s fellow directors seized the initiative. They actually sacked Henry before he could walk away, and restructured the company around director Henry M. Leland, renaming it the Cadillac Automobile Company – a name borrowed from the legendary French adventurer Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, who had founded the city of Détroit in 1701.

  Having had two companies shot from underneath him, Ford tried yet again in 1903, with the Ford Automobile Company (later retitled the Ford Motor Company). This time he actually had a car design to put into production: the sturdy, practical Model A, built in two-or four-seat formats, though only available in red, and with a top speed of 28 mph. Even so, the firm was virtually bankrupt by the time the first Model As appeared. Although its assets amounted to just $223.65 in July 1903, the company survived – largely because the Model A proved an immediate success, which in turn encouraged banks to lend on the strength of its sales. Ford’s automotive empire was finally launched.

  Henry Ford was no inventor. Indeed, if he had died in 1907, he would have been dimly remembered as just one of the many pioneers of the early auto industry, one who had endured repeated financial failures only to strike lucky when all seemed lost. Ford’s pivotal role in twentieth-century history derives instead from his development of the first mass-market car, which was soon being made by the world’s first mass-production manufacturing system.

  Ford’s ‘Tin Lizzie’, the Model T, was first introduced in 1908. Its four cylinders were cast all in one block and not separately, as was then common. It had three speeds, like the Model A (though one of these was reverse). It was not the cheapest car available in 1908, but it was the only one to combine innovation with reliability and value. It was hardly festooned with gadgets, either: production models came without a speedometer, windscreen wipers or even doors. But the lack of refinements meant that owners were free to personalize their Model Ts. By 1922, as Robert Lacey has noted, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, America’s mail-order bible, contained ‘no less than 5,000 different items that could be bolted, screwed or strapped to the vehicle’.

  By September 1909 over ten thousand Model Ts had been sold, representing a 60 per cent increase in the company’s sales. Ford even had to stop taking orders for nine weeks in order to catch up with demand. Farmers bought the Tin Lizzie as a cheap form of transport; its crude but effective suspension meant that Model Ts coped with ruts, potholes and offroad conditions far better than their rivals. The car could connect the farmer and his family easily with the nearby town – and the doctor, and the family church. The advertisements vowed that the Model T was ‘designed for everyday wear and tear’ by the average American farmer. ‘Anybody can drive a Ford,’ promised Henry, who also reassured his agricultural constituency that it was ‘never a sporting car’. Indeed, the Model T could be used for just about anything. T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) stated that the only cars that had been of any use to him in his desert campaigns were the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and Ford’s Model T; while John Steinbeck, in his 1945 novel Cannery Row, recalled how ‘most of America’s children were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few of them were born in them’.

  Spurred by his success, Ford decided to put all his eggs into one, crudely sprung, basket. He dropped all his other car models and concentrated just on the Model T. He also made the car more affordable, at a time when other car makers were struggling to keep pace with Ford’s runaway success. Thus in 1912 the Model T’s price, which had started out at $825, fell to just $575. For the first time, a car cost less than the average annual wage.

  A vehicle that was now within reach of the purse of almost everyone, the Model T was effectively the first global car. And Ford prospered mightily; until the mid-1920s it appeared that Ford’s low-price, single-model strategy would be the way ahead for the world’s car makers. By 1918 Ford’s American market share stood at an astonishing 49 per cent, while 40 per cent of cars on British roads were Model Ts. By 1921 the Model T commanded 60 per cent of the new car market around the world – a dominant position that no car maker, or car, has ever enjoyed since. By 1913 Ford’s US dealer network covered virtually every town of reasonable size, and the company boasted more dealerships and agents than any other car maker in the world. Ford also dispatched Model T kits all over the world for local assembly. After the end of the First World War he extended his global supply empire by buying up rubber plants in Brazil, coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, a fleet of cargo ships, and glassworks in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. By the time production of the Model T was stopped in 1927, 15 million cars had been sold – a record that stood until Volkswagen’s Beetle and Golf surpassed it decades later.

  The Model T was the car of the century, transforming motoring for millions. Its cheapness and flexibility meant that the car became less a symbol of wealth and leisure than an affordable adjunct to the everyday life
of even the humblest worker. And the key to its cheapness was its revolutionary production method.

  Henry Ford’s introduction of a moving assembly line at his recently built Highland Park factory in 1913–14 transformed the way cars were made and sold. Highland Park’s pioneering system was based on a metal conveyor belt, operated by flywheels, which enabled workers to assemble magnetos, then transmissions, then whole engines. The initial drawback of this revolutionary approach to manufacturing was that the swifter production of these elements quickly swamped the final chassis assembly at the end of the factory. It was only when every process had been adapted to assembly-line working that massive savings in time and labour could be achieved. In 1913–14 production of Model Ts almost doubled – while the plant’s workforce diminished by 10 per cent – as the assembly time was reduced from 12.5 hours per man to an amazing 1.5 hours. The pace was quickened even more when, in 1914, Ford famously prohibited his cars from being painted any colour except black. Meanwhile Ford’s new, all-steel bodies meant that there were fewer parts to assemble; while the company’s pioneering use of vanadium steel, which gave greater strength for less weight, also added to the cars’ performance. Highland Park was, unsurprisingly, the envy of every industrialist in the world.

  The home for this new assembly line, Albert Kahn’s Highland Park factory, was as revolutionary as its product. Kahn was a rabbi’s son who, aged eleven, had emigrated from the Rhineland to Detroit, where he set up his own architectural office at the tender age of twenty-six. He pioneered the use of reinforced concrete, a cheap, fireproof and immensely strong material which could be used to span vast areas. Beginning with his Packard factory of 1905–7, Kahn’s concrete-vaulted buildings changed the face of Detroit forever. His new factory for Ford, built in 1909 in the inner-city suburb of Highland Park, comprised a vast open space spanned by a reinforced concrete roof and lit by fifty thousand feet of grid windows – a feature that led journalists to dub it ‘Detroit’s Crystal Palace’ when it opened in December 1909. Eight years later, Kahn designed the even more capacious Rouge River plant for Ford at Dearborn, a few miles to the south-west of downtown Detroit, creating a factory complex a half-mile long. As a coda to his illustrious career in the city, in 1928 Kahn also gave Detroit’s downtown its most outstanding structure, the art deco skyscraper of the Fisher Building. (Ironically, after 1930 Kahn’s most lucrative client was to be the Soviet Union, which Henry Ford had come to loathe.1 However, that did not prevent Ford from hiring Kahn back in 1942 to design what was to be his last building, the giant Willow Run plant at Ypsilanti.)