Chapter 10

The Winton Company, which conducts a sort of private Automobile Humane Society, offers prizes for chauffeurs who can show the greatest mileage on the lowest charge for upkeep. The first prize winner in the contest for the eight months ending June 30, 1909, drove his car 17,003 miles with no expense whatever for up-keep. The second prize winner drove 11,000 miles at an outlay of thirty cents, while the third man drove 10,595 miles without any expense. This makes a total of 38,598 miles by three cars at a cost of thirty cents for repairs. And all the cars were two years old when the contest began.

The moral for those who really want to see what an automobile can do is obvious.

ISAAC F. MARCOSSON

Every automobile that you see is a link in a chain of steel and power which, if stretched out, would reach from New York to St. Louis. What was considered a freak fifteen years ago, and a costly toy within the present decade, is now a necessity in business and pleasure. A mechanical Cinderella, once rejected, despised, and caricatured, has become a princess.

Few people realize the extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions. Behind them is a stalwart business representing, with parts and accessory makers, an investment of more than a billion and a quarter of dollars. Four hundred thousand men, or more than five times the strength of our standing army, depend upon it for a livelihood, and more than five millions of people are touched or affected by it every day.

Through its phenomenal expansion new industries have been created and old ones enriched. It withstood panic and rode down depression; it has destroyed the isolation of the farm and made society more intimate. There is a car for every one hundred and sixty persons in the United States; twenty-five States have factories; the _honk_ of the horn on the American car is heard around the world.

Such, in brief, is the miracle of the motor's advance. Its development is a real epic of action and progress.

Before going further, it might be well to ask why and how the automobile has achieved such a remarkable development. One reason, perhaps, is that it appeals to vanity and stirs the imagination. A man likes to feel that by a simple pressure of the hand he can control a ton of quivering metal. Besides, we live, work, and have our being in a breathless age, into which rapid transit fits naturally. So universal is the impress of the automobile that there are in reality but two classes of people in the United States to-day--those who own motor-cars and those who do not.

It must be kept in mind, too, in analyzing the causes of the automobile's amazing expansion, that it is the first real improvement in individual transportation since the chariot rattled around the Roman arena. The horse had his century-old day, but when the motor came man traded him for a gas-engine.

Characteristic of the pace at which the automobile has traveled to success is the somewhat astonishing fact that while it took inventive genius nearly fifty years to develop a locomotive that would run fifty miles an hour on a specially built track, it has taken less than ten years to perfect an automobile that will run the same distance in less time on a common road.

Since this business is so invested with human interest, let us go back for a moment to its beginnings. Here you find all the properties, accessories, and environment to fit the launching of a great drama.

Toward the close of the precarious nineties, a few men wrestled with the big vision of a horseless age. Down in Ohio and Indiana were Winton and Haynes; Duryea was in Pennsylvania; over in Michigan were Olds, Ford, Maxwell, with the brilliant Brush, dreaming mechanical dreams; in New York Walker kept to the faith of the motor-car.

At that time some of the giants of to-day were outside the motor fold. Benjamin Briscoe was making radiators and fenders; W.C. Durant was manufacturing buggies; Walter Flanders was selling machinery on the road; Hugh Chalmers was making a great cash-register factory hum with system; Fred W. Haines was struggling with the problem of developing a successful gasoline engine.

Scarcely anybody dreamed that man was on the threshold of a new era in human progress that would revolutionize traffic and set a new mark for American enterprise and achievement. And yet it was little more than ten years ago.

Those early years were years of experimentation, packed with mistakes and changes. Few of the cars would run long or fast. It was inevitable that the automobile should take its place in jest and joke. Hence the comic era. With the development of the mechanism came the speed mania, which hardly added to the machine's popularity.

You must remember in this connection that the automobile was a new thing with absolutely no precedent. The makers groped in the dark, and every step cost something. New steels had to be welded; new machinery made; a whole new engineering system had to be created. The model of to-day was in the junk heap to-morrow. But just as curious instinct led the hand of man to the silver heart of the Comstock Lode, so did circumstance, destiny, and invention combine to point the way to the commercially successful car.

Out of the wreck, the chaos, and the failure of the struggling days came a cheap and serviceable car that did not require a daily renewal of its parts. It proved to be the pathfinder to motor popularity, for with its appearance, early in this decade, the automobile began to find itself.

Now began the "shoe-string" period, the most picturesque in the whole dazzling story of the automobile. There could be no god in the car without gold. Here, then, was the situation--on the one hand was the enthusiastic inventor; on the other was the conservative banker.

"We will make four thousand machines this year," said the inventor.

"Who will buy them?" asked the banker in amazement; he refused to lend the capital that the inventor so sorely needed.

The idea of selling four thousand motor-cars in a year seemed incredible. Yet within ten years they were selling fifty times as many, and were unable to supply the demand. No fabulous gold strike ever had more episodes of quick wealth than this business. Here is an incident that will show what was going on:

A Detroit engineer, who had served his apprenticeship in an electric-light plant, evolved a car which he believed would sell for a popular price. He tried to interest capitalists in vain. Finally, he fell in with a stove-manufacturer, who agreed to lend him twenty-seven thousand dollars.

"But I can't afford to be identified with your project," said the backer, who feared ridicule for his hardihood.

That small investment paid a dividend as high as thirteen hundred per cent. in a year. To-day the name of the struggling inventor is known wherever cars are run, and his output is measured by thousands. This, in substance, is the story of Henry Ford.

A young machinist worked in one of the first Detroit automobile factories, earning three dollars and fifty cents a day. One day he said to himself: "I can build a better car than we are making here."

He did so, and the car succeeded. Then he went to his employers, and said: "I am worth three thousand dollars a year."

They did not think so, and he left, to go into business on his own account. A manufacturer staked him at the start. Later, through a friend, some Wall Street capital was interested. Such was the start of J.D. Maxwell, whose interests to-day are merged in a company with a capitalization of sixteen million dollars.

A curly haired Vermont machinery salesman, who had sweated at the lathe, became factory manager for a Detroit automobile-maker. His genius for production and organization made him the wonder and the admiration of the automobile world. He was making others rich. "If I can do this for others, why can't I do it for myself?" he reasoned one day.

With a stake of ninety-five thousand dollars, supplemented with a hundred thousand dollars which he borrowed from some bankers, he built up a business that in twenty months sold for six millions. This was the feat of Walter E. Flanders. I might cite others. The "shoe-strings" became golden bands that bound men to fortune.

All the while the years were speeding on, but not quite so fast as the development of the automobile. The production of ten thousand cars in 1903 had leaped to nearly twenty thousand in 1905. The thirty-thousand mark was passed in 1906. Bankers began to sit up, take notice, and feed finance to this swelling industry, which had emerged from fadhood into the definite, serious proportions of a great national business.

The reign of the inventor-producer became menaced, because men of trained and organized efficiency in other activities joined the ranks of the motor-makers. With them there came a vivifying and broadening influence that had much to do with giving assured permanency to the industry.

But other things had happened which contributed to the stability of the automobile. One was the fact that automobile-selling, from the start, had been on a strictly cash basis. Yet how many people save those in the business, or who have bought cars, know this interesting fact?

No automobile-buyer has credit for a minute, and John D. Rockefeller and the humblest clerk with savings look alike to the seller. It was one constructive result of those early haphazard days. Every car that is shipped has a sight draft attached to the bill of lading, and the consignee can not get his car until he has paid the draft.

Why was the cash idea inaugurated? Simply because there was so much risk in a credit transaction. If a man bought a car on thirty days' time, and had a smash-up the day after he received it, there would be little equity left behind the debt. The owner might well reason that it was the car's fault, and refuse to pay. Besides, the early makers needed money badly. In addition to the cash stipulation, they compelled all the agents to make a good-sized deposit, and these deposits on sales gave more than one struggling manufacturer his first working capital.

Another reason why the business developed so tremendously was that good machines were produced. They had to be good--first, because of the intense rivalry, and then because the motor-buyer became the best informed buyer in the world.

This reveals a striking fact that few people stop to consider. If a man owns a cash-register or an adding-machine, it never occurs to him to wonder how, or of what, it is made. But let him buy an automobile, and ten minutes after it is in his possession he wants to know "what is inside." He is like a boy with his first watch. Hence the automobile-purchaser knows all about his car, and when he buys a second one it is impossible to fool him.

Perhaps the first real test of the stability of the automobile business came with the panic of 1907. It resisted the inroads of depression more than any other industry. Most of the big factories kept full working hours, and the only reason why some others stopped was because of their inability to secure currency for the pay-rolls.

Still another significant thing has happened--more important, perhaps, than all the rest of the changes that have crowded thick and fast upon this leaping industry. It began to be plain that certain features must be present in every first-class car. Hence came the standardization of the mechanism, which is a big step forward.

What is the result to-day? The automobile has become less of a designing proposition and more of a manufacturing proposition; less of an engineering problem and more of a factory problem. The whole, wide throbbing range of the business is bending to one great end--to meet a demand which, up to the present time, has exceeded the supply.

You have only to go to Detroit to see this pulsating drama of production in action. Here beats the heart of the motor world; here a mighty army is evolving a vast industrial epic.

Its banners are the smoke that trails from a hundred soaring stacks; its music is the clang of a thousand forges and the rattle of a maze of machinery.

You feel this quickening life the moment you enter the city, for the tang of its uplift is in the air. There is an automobile for every fifty people in Detroit. The children on the streets know the name, make, and model of nearly all the cars produced. You can stand in front of the Hotel Pontchartrain, in the public square, and see the whole automobile world chug by.

Formerly our cities were motor-mad; now, as in the case of Detroit, they are motor-made. Ten years ago the proudest boast of the Michigan metropolis was that she produced more pills, paint, stoves, and freight-cars than any other American city. The volume of the largest of these industries did not exceed eighteen million dollars a year. To-day she leads the world in automobile production. Her twenty-five factories turn out, in a year, more than ninety thousand cars, or more than sixty per cent, of the total output of the United States. These cars alone would stretch from New York to Boston.

But these figures do not convey any adequate idea of what the motor-car has done for Detroit. You must go to the spot to feel the galvanic and compelling force that the industry projects. The city is like a mining-camp in the days of a fabulous strike. Instead of new mines, there are new factories every day, and the record of this industrial high tide is being made in brick, stone, and mortar. Energy, resource, and ingenuity are being pushed to the last limit to take advantage of the golden opportunity that the overwhelming demand for the automobile has created. It is a thrilling and distinctively American spectacle, and it makes one feel proud and glad to be part of the people who are achieving it.

Some of the new plants have risen almost overnight, and on every hand there are miracles of rapid construction. The business is overshadowing all other activities. A leading merchant of Detroit asked a contractor the other day if he could do some work for him. On receiving a negative reply, he asked the reason, whereupon the man said: "These automobile people keep me so busy that I can't do anything else. I have a year's work ahead now."

A visit to any one of the great automobile factories reveals an inspiring picture of cheerful labor. As you wind through the wildernesses of lathes, hearing a swirling industry singing its iron song of swelling progress, you find enthusiasm blending with organized ability in a marvelous attack on work. Plants with a daily capacity of forty cars turn out sixty. You can behold a complete machine produced every three minutes; you can see the evolution from steel billet to finished car in six days. Formerly it took five months.

While the development of the automobile business is in itself a wonder story, no less amazing is its effect on all the allied industries. On rubber alone it has wrought a revolution.

Ten years ago practically all the rubber that we imported went into boots, shoes, hose, belting, and kindred products, The introduction of rubber tires on horse-drawn vehicles only drew slightly on the supply. To-day more than eighty per cent. of the crude article that reaches our shores goes into automobile tires; and the biggest problem in the whole automobile situation is not a question of steel and output, but a fear that we may not be able to get enough rubber to shoe the expanding host of cars. You have only to look at the change in price to get a hint of the growth of this feature of the business. In 1900 crude rubber sold at sixty-five cents a pound; now it brings about two dollars and fifty cents.

The facts about rubber have a peculiar human interest. When you sit back comfortably in your smooth-running car, you may not realize that the rubber in the tire that stands between you and the jolting of the road was carried on the back of a native for a thousand miles out of the Amazon jungle; that for every twenty pounds of the crude juice brought in from the wilds, one human life has been sacrificed. No crop is garnered with so great a hazard; none takes so merciless a toll.

The natives who gather rubber in the wilds of Brazil, in the Congo, in Ceylon, and elsewhere must combat disease, insects, war, flood, and a hundred hardships. The harvest is slow and costly. Only the planting of vast new areas in Ceylon has prevented what many believe would have been a famine in rubber, and this would have been a serious check to the development of the whole automobile business, for as yet no man has found a substitute for it. In such a substitute, or in a puncture-proof tire, lies one of the unplucked fortunes of the future.

Meanwhile, it has started a speculative mania that almost rivals the tulip excitement in Holland. In London alone hundreds of fortunes have been made by daring plungers in a crude article which only a few years ago was regarded as being absolutely outside the pale of the gambling marketplace.

Closely allied with the rubber end of the trade is the growing demand for sea-island cotton, which is used in the tires. A few years ago we used only fifty thousand yards a year; now we absorb ten million yards, worth seven and one-half millions of dollars.

Now take machinery, and you find that the automobile business has created a whole new phase of this time-tried industry. In many motor-cars there are three thousand parts. In view of the extraordinary demand for cars, the machinery to produce them must be both swift and accurate. The old standard tools and engine lathes were inadequate to perform the service. The automobile-makers had to have new machinery, and have it in a hurry.

This demand came at a heaven-sent moment for the tool-manufacturers. They were staggering under the depression of 1907, and many were tottering toward failure. Here came, almost out of the blue sky, a condition that at once taxed their brains, their resource, and their energy, and at the same time rescued them from bankruptcy.

You have only to go to any of the great factories in Detroit, in Cleveland, in Indianapolis, in Buffalo, in Flint, or elsewhere to see the result of this hurry call for tools and machinery. You find automatics cutting the finest gears by the score, while one man operates a whole battery; you see drills doing from fifteen to twenty operations on a piston or a flywheel; you see an almost human machine making seventeen holes at one time without observation or care.

Through these machines run rivers of oil. From them streams a steady line of parts. The whole scope of the tool business is broadened. In the old days--which means, in the automobile business, about ten years ago--an order for ten turret-lathes was considered large; now the motor-makers order seventy-five at a time by telegraph, and do not regard it as more than part of the day's work.

The whole effect of this revolution in machinery is that time is saved, labor is economized, and it is possible to achieve quantity production. This, in turn, enables the large manufacturer to turn out a good car at a moderate price.

So with steel, where likewise wonders have been wrought. Ten years ago the great mass of the steel output in this country was in structural metal and rails. We had to import our fine alloy and carbon steels from Germany and France. But the automobile-makers had to have the lightest and toughest metal, and they did not want to import it. The result was that our mills began to produce the finer quality to meet all motor needs, and it is now one of the biggest items in the business.

In half a dozen other allied industries you find the same expansion as you saw in rubber, steel, and machinery. For instance, the automobile-makers buy twenty million dollars' worth of leather a year. So great is the demand that a composition substitute was created, which is used on sixty per cent. of the tops. A new industry in colored leather for upholstery has been evolved.

Wood, too, has had the same kind of experience. Whole forest areas in the South have been denuded for hickory for spokes. A few years ago, aluminum was used on ash-trays and exposition souvenirs. Now hundreds of thousands of pounds are employed each year for sheathing and casings on motor-cars.

No essential of the automobile, however, is of more importance than gasoline. Here is the life-blood of the car. It is estimated that there are to-day three hundred thousand cars in the United States that travel fifteen miles a day. There are fifteen miles of travel in each gallon of gasoline. This makes the daily consumption three hundred thousand gallons. At an average price of fourteen cents a gallon, here is an expenditure of forty-two thousand dollars for gasoline each day, or more than fifteen million dollars a year. To this must be added the excess used in cars that work longer and harder, and in the host of taxicabs that are in business almost all the time, which will probably swell the annual expenditure for gasoline well beyond twenty millions.

As in the case of rubber, there is beginning to be some apprehension about the future supply of high-power gasoline, so great is the demand. Many students of this fuel problem believe that before many years there will be substitutes in the shape of alcohol and kerosene. The efficiency of alcohol has been proved in commercial trucks in New York, but its present price is prohibitive for a general automobile fuel. If denatured alcohol can be produced cheaply and on a large scale, it will help to solve the problem.

This brings us to the maker of parts and accessories, who has been termed "the father of the automobile business." Without him, there might be no such industry; for it was he that gave the early makers credit and materials which enabled them to get their machines together.

Ten years ago, the parts were all turned out in the ordinary forge and machine-shops; to-day there are six hundred manufacturers of parts and accessories, and their investment, including plants, is more than a billion dollars. They employ a quarter of a million people.

No one was more surprised at the growth of the automobile business than the parts-makers themselves. A leading Detroit manufacturer summed it up to me as follows:

"Ten years ago I was in the machine-shop business, making gas engines. Along came the demand for automobile parts. I thought it would be a pretty good and profitable specialty for a little while, but I developed my general business so as to have something to fall back on when it ended. To-day my whole plant works night and day to fill automobile orders, and we can't keep up with the demand."

What was looked upon as the tail now wags the whole dog, and is the dog. The volume of business is so large, and the interests concerned so wide, that the manufacturers have their own organization, called the Motor and Accessory Manufacturers. It includes one hundred and eighty makers, whose capitalization is three hundred millions, and whose investment is more than half a billion dollars.

There still remain to be discussed two phases of the automobile which have tremendous significance for the future of the industry--its commercial adaptability and its relation with the farmer and the farm. Let us consider the former first.