The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  The bankers were astounded. Over the following months, the trust was dissolved. On June 1, 1916, The Man took over as president of General Motors.77 He signed Walter Chrysler to a three-year contract as general manager of Buick.78 It was time for another big show.

  Soon The Man reorganized the General Motors Company of New Jersey into the General Motors Corporation, a Delaware corporation.79 He transformed GM into an operating company instead of a holding company—auto manufacturers like Buick and Cadillac and accessory companies such as the Champion Ignition Company became operating divisions.80 General Motors was coming into its modern image. Durant had bigger plans ahead, more companies to purchase and bring into the GM fold.

  Champion, encouraged by Albert Schmidt, himself a devotee of aviation during the early days of the sport in France,81 foresaw a future in flight. Aircraft engines derived straight from car motors. The US aviation industry was small, with annual output measured in the dozens—ironic considering that America had claimed the airplane as a technical breakthrough only to let aviation languish.82

  Across the Atlantic, France made bold progress in flying. Champion’s comrade in Paris Edouard Nieuport had built early bi-wing and mono-wing Nieu-port Aéroplanes. He had set world air-speed records in 1911.83 He was the first ever to fly faster than 80 mph. Nieuport campaigned to pilot his plane at 100 mph, but he died in a crash at the end of the summer.84 The Nieuport Company continued to use his name. During the Great War, French pilots in Nieuports were shooting German aviators from the sky in modern aerial combat.

  America’s neutrality was threatened in May 1915 after a German submarine sank the English passenger ship Lusitania in the Atlantic.85 Among the twelve hundred passengers killed were 128 US citizens. Tensions rose between the governments of the United States and Germany—and among Americans about whether to enter the war. President Woodrow Wilson won reelection for a second term by speaking out against German aggression and the need for a strong US defense—he called for doubling the size of the army and funding a naval building program.86

  The US federal government, meanwhile, requested a complete inventory of Flint’s industries.87 Champion was appointed to a special board with Charles Stewart Mott, a director of General Motors and the mayor of Flint, and three additional business leaders to conduct a survey of the city’s factories for the Department of War (predecessor to the Defense Department) and US Navy. The survey was submitted in a confidential report intended to aid the federal government’s planning for conversion of civilian factories for production of war materials.

  In 1916 Champion designed a new AC Titan aviation spark plug to correct mechanical mishaps that had beleaguered plane engines.88 He and his chemists experimented in the lab with different clays and unique grinding and mixing to improve porcelain insulation. They tried assorted steel alloys and varied copper thicknesses in their efforts to produce spark plugs that were more robust. His company distributed prototypes to aircraft companies for field tests.

  Car racing had charged ahead to ever-faster records thanks to a new era of speedways, one or two miles around. Board surfaces had less rolling friction than asphalt, brick, and dirt. More steeply banked board turns meant drivers could fly around the ovals and average more than 100 mph in races up to 250 miles. Sustained high speeds caused carbon deposits to build up on spark plugs from the fuel-air mixture burning at intense heat inside the piston chamber. Frequently oil leaked into the chamber and collected. Carbon buildup on the central porcelain, which held the electrode tip in place, prevented the spark from jumping across the electrode gap—a misfiring known today as “fouling.”

  Champion created a new AC Cico spark plug and distributed prototypes for racecar teams to try out on the national circuit. More durable spark plugs would benefit passenger cars. “Keep ahead of the race,” he said. “That is what brings success. It makes the great racer. It makes the successful businessman. No champion ever arrived resting on the oars.”89

  It was natural that journalists were drawn to the Frenchman as a business leader, more so in Flint. He was a player in the city’s surging economic engine. Reporters saw Champion as a debonair continental, natty in a tailored suit, pushing forty but as energetic as men half his age. The Flint Journal described his hands-on approach to running all the departments. “If a universal eight-hour working day were compulsory, Albert Champion, president of the Champion Ignition Company and maker of A.C., AC Cico, and AC Titan spark plugs, would be an outlaw, as he is one of the busiest men in the automobile industry and thrives on work. Intensely enthusiastic and tirelessly energetic, he would resent any limitation being put on his hours of planning and execution.”90

  He climbed aboard trains taking him around the country to personally solicit business from blunt-talking, hard-working, ingenious, and singular carmakers shaping the industry—Fred and Augie Duesenberg, Harry Stutz, George Pierce producing Pierce-Arrows, and more.91 Champion served as the purchasing agent, capable of talking with experts about the finest of raw materials found in America and imported from France and England.92 He had a craftsman’s knowledge of firing clay into porcelain.93 He bought the materials and conducted exhaustive experiments, assisting his chief mechanical engineer Albert Schmidt and the chemists in his company laboratory. Adapting to manufacturing without precedent, he designed original machinery to save time and labor while raising the quality of his products.94 He preferred to say that the three hundred people on his payroll did not so much work for Albert Champion as work with him.95

  “I have always felt that the education and training I received as a bicycle racer was a great help in business because it is a game in which you train to fight and win,” Champion told a Detroit Daily News scribe. He emphasized that experimenting and learning leads to progress. “I always remember what a friend of mine once told me. He was a well-known chemist, an authority in the automobile world. He said that four times during his life he has had to scrap his knowledge of chemistry and begin again at the start. He was not only happy about it. He is ready to do the same thing over and over when he finds it necessary.”96

  Even so, Champion was not without his quirks. Speaking to a Flint Journal reporter he brought up the Rudyard Kipling poem “The Vampire,” to describe the construction of a spark plug. His taste for the Victorian English poet and other Victorian authors had been acquired from his former trainer-manager Choppy Warburton. Kipling’s poem summarizes a woman as “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” In that reductionist way, Champion suggested that a spark plug can be defined as a lump of clay, a cylinder of steel, and a copper disk. “But it is just as difficult a task to refine, shape, and assemble these raw materials into a spark plug as it would be to fashion a woman out of the ingredients of the Kipling formula.”97

  In his obsessive thoroughness, he devised quality-control inspections. The plugs went through two simple but effective tests prior to shipments. First, plugs were hooked up to a special machine connected to a thirty-thousand-volt transformer to measure electrical leakage.98 The second tested compression leakage in the combustion chamber under very high air pressure.99

  Germany’s invasion of France had roused Albert Schmidt to return to his homeland. He was forty-eight, had gray in his mustache and the hair at his temples, but he wanted to offer his knowledge of engineering and aviation to help defend France. He made travel arrangements through the French consul in Detroit and shipped out. In Paris Schmidt bought a Blériot airplane and donated it to the government.100 He flew a reconnaissance mission near Antwerp, a seaport in northern Belgium, and spotted thousands of German troops advancing. He flew back to his camp to report an impending attack. In an artillery barrage, he was knocked unconscious. He was captured but escaped to Antwerp. He fled in the dark to Holland and was smuggled out in a pile of coal on a boat to southern England. In Calais he was discharged from the French army for hearing loss from the explosion. His German-sounding name made English military officials suspicious that he was a spy until he produced a cablegra
m with Champion’s name and the Champion Ignition Company address in Flint with instructions to take the French liner Rochambeau to New York.101

  By 1917, production had spiked to nearly 1.9 million new cars.102 Albert Champion had three new buildings erected in Flint, and he equipped them with energy-saving industrial machinery.103 He had once regarded the manufacture of five thousand plugs as a good day, but his production now soared to sixty thousand plugs daily,104 an annual rate of 12 million,105 all stamped with his AC trademark on the porcelain. His labor force had expanded in nine years from fifteen to three hundred.106 “In fact, the growth of the Champion Ignition Company is one of the many inspiring romances of the automobile world,” burbled the Boston Herald.107

  In April 1917 the United States declared war against Germany, joining France and England in the fight. Congress approved the Selective Service Act, which required that men aged eighteen to thirty register for the draft. The Buick factory geared up to make Liberty airplane motors, tanks, artillery shells, and parts for ambulances bound for France.108

  Champion’s efforts to develop AC Titan spark plugs for aircraft engines and test them for a year assured that his company was well prepared. The Champion Ignition Company stepped up to furnish AC Titans for Liberty, Wright, and Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines in US Army planes that would be shipped across the ocean as soon as they were built.109

  The next month the case of The Champion Spark Plug Company v. Champion Ignition Co. et al. was transferred from the US District Court in Cleveland to the US District Court in Detroit.110

  The Stranahans filed a motion to dismiss Champion’s counterclaim on the grounds that the District Court in Detroit lacked jurisdiction to entertain a counterclaim.111

  Champion fought to distinguish his products from those of his adversaries. On June 4, 1917, he filed an application with the US Patent Office for a spark plug that reduced electricity leakage with an improved electrode and insulation of the inner, exposed end of the electrode.112 The new design also cut the cost of manufacturing the spark plugs.

  More than two hundred thousand American troops landed in France in the summer of 1917 as part of the American Expeditionary Force under US Army commander John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. The AEF consisted of five divisions of Army and Marine Corps. They were the vanguard of what would reach a million US troops over the next year. The American soldiers and marines were deployed to the front lines. The Great War had expanded into World War I.

  Champion was saddened by the news of the losses of Marius Thé,113 driver of the motorcycle he had paced behind to win the French national motorpace title, killed at the Battle of the Somme along with Emile Friol, the national sprint champion.114 German audiences had cheered Champion, but German soldiers had destroyed the landmark Roubaix Velodrome,115 where he had scored one of his greatest victories. Germans blew up the auto factory that his boss Adolphe Clément-Bayard had operated in Mézières.116 In 1915 a German submarine had sunk the Majestic, the ship Champion had first sailed on to America.117 Jean Hallier,118 husband of Champion’s amour Olta de Kerman, was killed flying in a dogfight. The Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916 had killed or wounded more than one million French, English, and German troops.119

  Champion was still fighting the Stranahans in federal court. France and America, allied with England and Belgium, were battling Germany. His only way to fight was to endure and win, so Champion threw himself into his work.

  On November 22, 1917, US District Court judge Arthur J. Tuttle denied the Stranahans’ motion to dismiss Champion’s counterclaim.120

  Judge Tuttle noted in writing his opinion that the Stranahans and the Champion Spark Plug Company had been for the last ten years engaged in continuous manufacture and sale of spark plugs under the trade name and trademark of “Champion.” That left open the issue of whether Albert Champion had interrupted the use of his name after he had moved.

  The case remained in the US District Court of Detroit.

  By the end of that month, Champion had filed his third patent with the US Patent Office, for a spark plug that reduced carbon deposits on the porcelain insulator to ensure continuous firing.121

  The court case contesting his name was hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. Yet it would take a different lawsuit, involving another woman, to resolve who would win his name.

  FOR ONE THING IT IS QUITE LETHALLY DANGEROUS. FOR ANOTHER, HARDLY ANYONE MAKES A PENNY OUT OF IT, AND MOST PARTICIPANTS LIVE LIVES OF REAL SACRIFICE IN ORDER TO BE PART OF IT.

  —GRIFFITH BORGESON, THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE AMERICAN RACING CAR1

  Forty-year-old Albert Champion, formerly a draft dodger in his native country, registered under the US Selective Service Act in the final weeks of America’s combat involvement in helping its allies France, England, and Belgium at last to win.2 Following the armistice of November 11, 1918, after four years of artillery bombardments and trench warfare had devastated major sections of France and Belgium, the Allies looked ahead to massive reconstruction.

  As America’s participation in the Great War escalated to a deployment of one million soldiers and marines fighting in France by 1918,3 General Motors president Billy Durant was wheeling and dealing in high gear. Pierre du Pont had come aboard GM as chairman, giving the corporation credibility on Wall Street.4 Durant added several companies to GM, and GM bought all the shares of the Chevrolet Motor Company, completing the company’s modern lineup. The Man arranged for GM to acquire the company that had supplied its bearings, and he brought in its president, Alfred P. Sloan, as the new GM director and president in charge of accessory operations.5 General Motors purchased the Dayton Engineering Laboratories (Delco) and hired its founder, Charles Kettering,6 inventor of the automobile electric starter, which replaced manual hand cranking and aided the auto industry’s growth. Kettering joined GM as a vice president and director of research. Sloan and Kettering were rare college graduates with degrees in electrical engineering—Sloan from MIT and Kettering from Ohio State University.

  In the spring of 1919, diplomats from around the globe converged in Paris to sign the Versailles Treaty, which officially ended the Great War. The treaty created new countries and changed national boundaries on three continents. Durant organized a group of GM executives to go there in the late summer to look for overseas investment opportunities.

  Champion was a likely pick. Following the war’s end, declassified documents disclosed that every day the Champion Ignition Company in Flint had been manufacturing forty thousand spark plugs capable of fifty-hour runs in Liberty and Hispano-Suiza high-compression aircraft engines.7 Within only a few months after the entry of the United States into the war, Champion had ramped up his company as the sole provider of aviation spark plugs to US military planes.8 The Champion Ignition Company had produced more aviation plugs daily than any factory in Europe. In addition, AC Titan plugs powered 90 percent of US military tanks and trucks.9

  Champion intended to establish branch plants in France and England for manufacturing AC spark plugs and, his new pursuit, speedometers, to supply foreign automakers.10 He and Elise and her sister Gabrielle joined GM brass, including Alfred Sloan, Charles Kettering, Charles Stewart Mott, and Walter Chrysler—all traveling with their wives.11 They shipped out in late August on the S.S. France,12 a lavish French liner graced with portraits of Louis XIV and his Bourbon family adorning the first-class cabins. In Paris, they checked into the luxurious Ritz.

  “Champion is a famous guide,” Mott wrote in a letter to the Flint Journal.13 The group toured several auto companies to see about acquiring a share. Among the factories they visited were Clément-Bayard, De Dion-Bouton, Panhard, Hispano-Suiza, Ballot, and Citroën. “It seems that all of the auto manufacturers here were in the bicycle game—riding, pacing, or training him, and they all know him and like him.”14

  The weather cooperated. So did the rate of exchange—from the prewar rate of five francs to a dollar to a postwar rate of eight francs to a dollar. The group traveled to Ly
on to tour the Peugeot factory and to Turin, Italy, to survey the Fiat operation.15

  Champion was forced to face the immense suffering France had endured. Industry and trade remained unorganized, and there was a shortage of every sort of material.16 He offered brothers Louis and Henri employment in America. Louis accepted his help and moved to New York,17 where he founded a company that imported essential oils for food processing.18 Henri opted to stay in Paris, near their mother.

  Four years of bloody trench warfare in northern France had destroyed roads that Champion had ridden to win Paris-Roubaix. The event had resumed in April 1919. A Paris journalist, appalled by bomb craters that devastated the countryside, had declared that Paris-Roubaix was crossing “the Hell of the North.”19 Long after the roads were repaired, the description stuck as a metaphor for the arduous Queen of the Classics.

  Champion renewed acquaintances with Constant Huret and former pace manager Pierre Tournier. Champion located a spark plug company in Levallois-Perret,20 and he designated Tournier to inquire how much it would cost to purchase and replace old machinery with the latest technology. He also visited England and decided on a plant he could purchase in Birmingham.21

  Of all the potential purchase targets in France and Italy, only André Citroën was willing to sell to General Motors.22 Weeks of negotiations followed, with Champion translating back and forth. Barriers arose. The French government sneered at the prospect of an American auto company acquiring a French one, especially Citroën, which had made important contributions during the war.23 The Citroën production facilities required a greater investment than the initial cost.24 Worse, its management was deemed inadequate.