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.
No matter in what town you live, something has been delivered at your
door by a motor-driven wagon or truck. These vehicles at work to-day
are only the forerunners of what many conservative makers believe will
be the great body of the business. Here is a field that is as yet
practically unscratched. Now that the pleasure-car has practically been
standardized, vast energy will be concentrated on the development of
the truck. Wherever I went on a recent trip through the
automobile-making zone, I found that the manufacturers had been
experimenting in this direction, and were laying plans for a big output
within the next few years. This year's production will be about five
thousand vehicles.
The ability and efficiency of the commercial truck for hard city work
are undisputed. It has had its test in New York, where traffic is dense
and most difficult to handle. Here, of course, are the ideal conditions
for the successful use of the motor-truck--which are a full load, a
long haul, and a good road. In a city, a horse vehicle can make only
about five miles an hour, while a motor-truck makes twelve miles, and
carries three times the load.
Some idea of motor-truck possibilities in New York may be gained when
it is stated that there are nearly three hundred thousand licensed
carrying vehicles there.
The amount of work to be got out of a motor-truck is astonishing. John
Wanamaker, for instance, gets a hundred miles of travel per day out of
some of his delivery-wagons. The average five-ton truck, in a ten-hour
day, can make eighty miles, and keep constantly at work. On the other
hand, a one-horse wagon can scarcely average half that mileage.
Already your doctor whirls around in an automobile, and he can make
five times more visits than with a horse. So, too, with the contractor
and the builder. The drummer carries his samples in a gasoline
runabout, and, in addition to seeing twice the number of customers, he
can get their goodwill by taking them for a spin. Fire-engines,
hose-wagons, and police patrols race to conflagrations propelled by
motors, and get there quicker than ever before.
Just as practically every great American activity ultimately harks back
to the soil and has its real root there, so, in a certain sense, may
the farmer be regarded as the backbone of the automobile business. We
have six million farms, and more than forty-five millions of our
population live on the farm, or in communities of less than four
thousand people. To these dwellers in the country the automobile has
already proved an agency for uplift, progress, and prosperity.
It began as a pleasure-car; now it is a necessity on many farms. In
Kansas you can see it hitched up to the alfalfa-stacker; in Illinois
and Iowa it is harnessed up to the corn-cutter; in Indiana it runs the
dairy machinery. But these are slight compared with the other services
it performs for the farmer.
For years the curse of farm life was its isolation. Its workers were
removed from the shops, the theaters, the libraries, and good schools.
More farm women went insane than any other class. The horses worked in
the fields all week, and had to rest on Sunday, so that the farmer
could not go to church.
The automobile provided a vehicle not excessive in cost, and able to
provide pleasure for the farmer's whole family. It annihilated the
distance between town and country. Contact with his coworkers and
proximity to the market made the fanner more efficient and prosperous.
More than this, the motor-car has made the whole rural life more
attractive, and offers the one inducement that will keep the boy on the
farm.
A hundred instances could be cited of the automobile's aid to the farm.
One will suffice. In times of harvest, when a big gang is at work, the
breakdown of a thresher will stop operations for a whole day, if the
farmer has to drive to town behind a horse to get needed parts. With an
automobile, he can dash in and out in a few hours.
No one expects the automobile to replace the horse on the farm. But for
work that the horse can not do efficiently--such as the quick transit
of milk, butter, and garden products to the markets--the motor-car has
a future of wide utility. Incidentally, the farmer may be the first to
solve the fuel problem, for by means of cooperative distilling he could
produce denatured alcohol for almost nothing.
The more you go into the study of the automobile on the farm, the
bigger becomes its significance. In the United States, four hundred and
twenty-five million acres of land are uncultivated, largely on account
of their inaccessibility. The motor-car will make them more accessible.
Through the wide use of automobiles by the farmer we shall get, in
time, that most valuable agency for prosperity, the good road.
One emerges from an investigation of the automobile industry in wonder
over its expansion, and with admiration for the men behind it.
Clear-cut youth, fresh vigor, compelling action galvanize it. Yet what
seems to be a miracle at the end of less than ten years of growth may
only be the prelude to a vaster era.
Meanwhile, each day records a new chapter of its triumphant progress.