MECHANICAL EVOLUTION OF THE AUTOMOBILE.
The history of every advance toward greater perfection in the
achievements of mankind, whether moral or physical, has been one of
slow and laborious development.
We speak carelessly of the wonderful advance the automobile has made in
a short time.
As a matter of fact, it has taken the automobile a hundred and fifty
years to arrive mechanically at the point it has reached today.
We thought the development of the motor car was speedy, but we find
that the measure of time required for its evolution, when put beside
the span of human history, lengthens as the shadows grow longer in the
dying day.
It is astonishing what stages this development has had to pass through,
what problems have confronted it, and what apparently insuperable
obstacles it has had to overcome.
In the light which our knowledge of the automobile now sheds on the
present day mechanism of this invention, it is difficult for us to
realize why these persistent struggles toward development of the
mechanical ideas summoned to the aid of the inventors did not produce
speedier results.
We can hardly conceive as we look upon the perfect limousine, skimming
over the smooth asphalt with a motion that contains no more vibration
than that in the glide of the expert ice skater, the crudeness,
cumbersomeness and racking joltiness of its first forbear, which was
the original expression of the mechanical idea involved in making
wheels revolve by a motive power other than that exercised by man, the
bullock or the horse.
If we want to relieve our minds of the strain of comprehending the
difference between the automobile de luxe, as we of today know it,
and the first automobile ever produced, and, by putting the two
pictures side by side, span the period of the development of the art of
automobile making, we must journey to Paris.
For, although internal combustion to drive a piston in a cylinder was
produced with gun-powder in 1678 by Abbe D’Hautefeuille, and a carriage
to be driven without the horse was a chaise propelled by human foot
work, first conceived by John Vevers of England in 1769, there is no
record that the two ideas were combined until it was done in France
somewhere between 1760 and 1770.
The first automobile ever made was that produced by Nicholas Joseph
Cugnot, a Frenchman, and it is today on exhibition in the Conservatory
of Arts and Trades in Paris.
There is no record of how Cugnot came to conceive the idea of his
invention, but it is surmised that he had read about James Watt, in
England, having discovered the principle of steam as motive power. This
was about 1755.
The history of Watt’s experiments in applying steam to run engines does
not, however, disclose that any engines he produced were ever seen by
Cugnot, or that any adequate description of them was published at the
time when Cugnot could have taken advantage of it.
So all we may actually know of Cugnot’s reasons for thinking he
could make an “animalless” road vehicle is locked up in the rickety
century-and-a-half-old Cugnot invention which we may see in the Paris
Conservatory.
And what we would see would be:
An object which might make us laugh, did we not soberly reflect, in the
light of our superior knowledge of today, that it was the first step in
the long, laborious journey, extending over 157 years, that inventors
had to travel to produce our luxurious limousine, our satisfying
touring car and our terrifying speed demon of the oval racing course.
Cugnot’s body returned to dust 113 years ago, but his idea went
marching on.
The visible expression of this idea which we can see in the Paris
Conservatory is in the form of a tractor for a field gun, Cugnot having
been a captain in the engineering corps of the French army.
The tractor has a single drive wheel actuated by two single acting
brass cylinders, connected by an iron steam pipe with a round boiler of
copper containing fire pot and chimneys.
Attached to this first motor-driven road vehicle is a wagon, on which
it was Cugnot’a idea to have a field gun mounted.
On either side of the single drive wheel of this clumsy contrivance are
located ratchet wheels. Pistons acting alternately on these ratchet
wheels revolved the drive wheel in quarter revolutions.
For the copper boiler of this first motor car, additional water was
needed after the machine had travelled a few feet, the exhaust of
steam quickly leaving the boiler dry. The speed attained was very
slow, by reason of the mechanical complications in transmitting power
to the drive wheel. As for running smoothly, the machine wobbled, and
bumped, and strained, and groaned, and finally ran into a wall. This
was because it was overbalanced by its boiler and engine and had no
steering gear.
Having run into a wall and been partially wrecked, that was the end
of the forerunner of the automobile, except for its subsequent rescue
from a junk heap and its installation in the Paris Conservatory; for,
disheartened by what he regarded as his failure to make a successful
steam-driven tractor to relieve men and other animals of the burden
of transporting field guns, Cugnot turned his attention to devising a
cavalry gun, at which he was so successful that when he died in 1804 he
was enjoying a pension of 1,000 livres a year, given him by Napoleon.
Cugnot could not, of course, have visioned what his first crude
automobile would develop into in the next century and a half. He
probably never thought of a car holding seven passengers—much less of a
speed for it of 60 miles an hour and more. In truth, since he abandoned
his efforts, he probably concluded the obstacles in the way of even a
practical fulfillment of his idea were insurmountable.
The one fact remains to keep company with the Cugnot motor tractor
in the Conservatory of Paris, that Cugnot was the father of the idea
out of which the automobile was evolved. He was the first to invent a
motor-driven road vehicle.
ENGLISH MAKE AUTOMOBILES ALMOST PRACTICABLE.
The English people have an enviable record for successful mechanical
inventions, and they were early experimenters on lines similar to those
of Cugnot. About the time that Cugnot ran his machine into a wall,
William Murdock, a mechanic, was working for Watt, the English inventor
of steam. Whether he knew of Cugnot’s automobile attempt or not, there
is no evidence extant. The idea of an engine-run road contrivance may
have come to him through inspiration, or in some other way, as it did
to Cugnot.
Murdock was quite familiar with Watt’s engines. He helped to build
them, and he was curious to know the different forms in which they
could be used, especially as to a road vehicle. He talked to Watt,
but was sternly discouraged by the latter. Just as Cugnot, no doubt,
concluded that his automobile would never get anywhere, Watt opposed
applying his engine to a road travelling machine, because he was firmly
convinced that no vehicle that could be invented could successfully
negotiate, at a speed to make it worth while, the execrable roads of
that day.
In this we have a fine illustration of the peculiarities and uncertain
nature of the human mind. It is an organism that astounds by its
perception of possibilities in one direction, while numb of any
sensation whatever in glimpsing the possibilities in another direction.
Watt could invent steam, but he could not imagine good roads. Had
he possessed the vision, he might have seen that roads, which he so
abhorred as to see nothing good in them, would be reformed if he but
encouraged applying his engines to road travelling mechanism.
In William Murdock’s way of taking the doleful discouragement of Watt,
we see an illustration of that mental attitude that man has universally
adopted in mechanical advance, toward the lugubrious prophet of
failure. He has matched hope and optimism against despair and pessimism.
Despite Watt and his mournful views of the impossibility of building an
engine-run road carriage that would advance over English roads, Murdock
went ahead and built a model of an engine-run road carriage; but when
he had it finished, Watt’s discouraging views prevailed, and Murdock
did not attempt to enlarge his model to a full sized form. He stopped
with the model, which is at the present day in the British Museum.
Murdock’s invention was tested, and the tests showed that an advance
in efficiency over the creation of Cugnot had been made. The model
was driven by a single cylinder of three inch bore. It had a one and
a half inch stroke. A crank converted the reciprocating motion of the
steam engine into rotary motion, the service performed in the Cugnot
invention by the quarter revolution ratchet drive. Murdock’s idea was
patented by a man named Pickard, in 1780.
The first automobile known to have been constructed and put on the road
was built by Richard Trevithick at Camborne, England, in 1801. It was
in the form of a stage coach, accommodating six or seven persons. The
engine, boiler and firebox were at the rear. The engine was one of the
first high pressure engines. A single cylinder motor was employed, and
spur gear and crank axle were used to transmit the motion of the piston
rod to the drive wheels.
With this coach Trevithick carried six or seven men over hills for a
mile the first day of the trial. The second day it made six miles. Even
with these performances, the invention’s impracticability must have
been decreed, because it was not continued in operation.
Trevithick himself felt, no doubt, that it must be improved upon, for,
in 1803, he built another contrivance driven by a horizontal single
cylinder with 5-1/2-inch bore and a 30-inch stroke. But the driving
wheels were ten feet in diameter. Fatal were these great clumsy wheels
to popular approval of the invention, and no further advance was made.
Trevithick had made one further step, and there the matter rested. He
had developed the high pressure steam engine, and he had really made
the first automobile, if such it could be called.
AMERICA’S EARLY EFFORTS IN AUTOMOBILE MAKING.
Just as the English, represented by Murdock and Trevithick, were
laboring on the steam propulsion idea, and France, in the person of
Cugnot, was experimenting with it, so America was groping to find the
solution. Cugnot’s activities began about 1760 and ended with his
death in 1804. Trevithick’s period was from 1780 to 1803. The American
experiments started about 1784. The man whom records show to have been
the pioneer in practical excursions into the realm of carriages driven
by steam, was Oliver Evans, born in Delaware but living in Philadelphia.
He developed the high pressure, non-condensing engine, although his
only knowledge of steam was derived from reading what little was then
printed about it, and his own discoveries. It appears as if Evans,
who is known to have had knowledge of Cugnot’s construction of a
road carriage, or, more properly speaking, a gun carriage, connected
in his mind his engine with a road travelling vehicle, because in
1787, four years before Trevithick built his steam coach at Camborne,
England, Evans secured a patent from the State of Maryland, giving him
the exclusive right to make and use, within its borders, carriages
propelled by steam.
That he immediately built a steam carriage in pursuance of this
authority is doubtful. The only authentic record of an attempt is of
one that he constructed in Philadelphia seven years later and under
peculiar circumstances. It is likely that his act in securing the
Maryland patent was done on the spur of a determination to build
an automobile, but it was not immediately carried out. He went on
perfecting steam engines up to 1804, when he accepted an order from the
city of Philadelphia to build a steam flat boat for dock work.
His mind appears to have then reverted back to the time seven years
before when he contemplated applying an engine to a road vehicle and
got the Maryland patent for that purpose, for, after building the steam
flatboat and installing a 5-horse power engine on it, he announced his
intention of mounting the flatboat on a wagon, on which he proposed to
drive the boat about Philadelphia.
A horseless carriage, no doubt, had been a hobby with him for years,
and he saw in the steam driven wagon, carrying a steam driven flatboat,
an ocular demonstration of the practicability of the horseless carriage.
The four wheels of the wagon he built were connected by belts and
gearing with the engine on the boat, and the vehicle was driven up
Market Street by steam, bearing the flatboat and its engine in triumph.
It circled the squares on which the City Hall and the statue of William
Penn now stand, and proceeded to the Schuylkill river. Here flatboat
and wagon were separated, and the former launched on the river. A
paddle wheel was affixed to the stern and connected with the engine.
The boat ran as well as the wagon had done. It steamed down to the
Delaware river and all the way to Trenton. The wagon, divorced of
engine and gearing, became only a wagon again, and whatever became of
it, history does not say.
The skepticism, the derogatory observations, the pessimistic prophecies
and the contemptuous disapproval of the many persons witnessing the
Evans’ pilgrim’s progress up Market Street aroused the inventor’s ire.
Had he but been philosophical, he would have appreciated that such has
been the fate and greeting of all inventions. But Evans was choleric.
When a citizen said his wagon was only what might now be dubbed a
“flivver”—that it would never run over five miles an hour, and other
things that the minds of the unimaginative conceive of innovations,
the inventor drew from his wallet $3,000 that the city of Philadelphia
had just paid him for his steamboat, and said the carping critic could
transfer the “roll” to his own pocket, if he could produce a horse that
would run faster for five miles than a steam wagon that Evans would
build. The size of the roll was too much for the pessimist, and he
betook himself and his criticisms off.
So we see that as there was a first automobile, so was there a first
automobile enthusiast on automobile speed. Why it is that motordom
hasn’t erected a monument to Oliver Evans for his abiding faith in the
future of the motor car as a speed demon, is up to motordom to explain.
AUTOMOBILE APATHY CENTURY OLD.
Oliver Evans tried but was unable to get any one interested in
developing his wagon run by an engine into an improved horseless
carriage. The minds of that day regarded the practicability of his
invention with as much skepticism as we would regard an invention to
visit Mars, if exhibited in our day.
So Evans gave up any idea of improving his self-running wagon, became
busy with an iron foundry which people could understand, and died rich.
There was a measure of justification for the lack of popular
imagination and vision toward the automobile in both England and
America when the first samples appeared. They were slow, noisy, erratic
in performance, and positively dangerous—threatening explosions,
collisions, and all sorts of dire things—and it was natural that people
should predict their failure.
So progress in the development of the horseless carriage lagged. It
was twenty years after Evans’ Philadelphia exhibition when it was next
heard from. Then the scene of operations shifted again to England.
In 1824, W. H. James, who had patented a water tube boiler for
locomotives, built a passenger coach, of which each drive wheel was
revolved by two cylinders receiving steam by means of a pipe from a
boiler.
A pressure of 200 pounds of steam to the inch was maintained. The
equivalent of differential action was supplied by independent
application of power to the two drive wheels. The coach accommodated
twenty persons. The contrivance ran satisfactorily on trials, and James
secured financial backing and built another coach weighing 6,000 pounds
which ran 12 to 15 miles an hour.
But the higher the rate of speed, the worse off the early automobile
builder was. Although James equipped his coach with laminated steel
springs, the road shocks and vibration stopped it every few miles.
Steam joints and connections were broken as fast as they could be
put together. The great need was a method of shock absorption, and
either no one knew that this was the key to the problem, or, if it
was realized, no one knew the remedy. So James failed to make the
auto-coach a success, and died in the poorhouse.
A year after James built his first motor-coach in England—in
1825—Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, Mass., revived the horseless
carriage subject which, in America, had been last experimented with by
Oliver Evans in 1804.
Blanchard built a road vehicle that was one of the best produced up to
that time. It was easy of manipulation and climbed hills successfully.
Blanchard took out a patent on it, but when he started to find people
who would buy a completed carriage he could discover none. Nobody
wanted it. And so Blanchard’s efforts ceased.
At the time James was building his two coaches, and after Blanchard had
given up trying to interest Americans in his invention, a Frenchman
named Pecqueur was experimenting on phases of the auto-carriage. He
discovered the principle of the “differential,” the balance mechanism
which enables one wheel to revolve faster than the other in turning
corners. He invented a planet gearing in this connection, which was
the origin of the idea of the differential, and applied it to a steam
wagon which he built in 1828. The differential of today is based on the
principle discovered by Pecqueur.
While Pecqueur was evolving this invention, Goldsworthy Gurney in
England made a car which was a practical failure in about everything
except that it demonstrated that sufficient friction between the drive
wheels and the road-bed could be created to produce propulsion. A trip
of almost 200 miles from London and return was made in 1828 by Gurney
in the second vehicle he built, in which the engine was concealed in
the rear. His car made 12 miles an hour for part of the trip.
From this time—1828 to 1840—the automobile really had a vogue in
England. A number of them were made and run as passenger carriers. For
four months a motor carriage made the nine mile trip from Gloucester
to Cheltenham four times a day. The “Infant” built by Walter Hancock
made trips between London and Stratford. The “Era,” also made by
Hancock, ran from London to Greenwich. To such an extent did the
auto-bus business develop, that speed of 30 miles an hour was claimed,
and one conveyance in 1834 ran over 1,700 miles without repairs or
readjustment. At least, that was the claim made, and as a claim it has
a familiar sound. The twentieth century automobile manufacturers who
claim a run of so many thousand miles without repairs to this and that,
have here a precedent for it that is as old as the industry.
But there was one feature about these early English motor busses that
was their undoing. They weighed three tons and over, and the wheel rims
were metal. The diameter of the wheels was six feet. The rubber tire
was unthought of. The effect on roads of running a 3-ton, metal rimmed
vehicle, carrying eleven to twenty passengers, was disastrous, and
parliament, incited by horse owners and others, legislated them out of
existence by making the toll charges prohibitive. Where the toll was
$1 for horse drawn vehicles it was made $10 for steam auto buses. The
consequence was that their manufacture and operation ceased about 1840.
In 1878 Bollee built a steam omnibus which ran between Paris and
Vienna, making 22 miles an hour. In this car was reached the highest
efficiency the art had attained up to that time. Practically an
identical car was built in 1880 by Bollee, which was entered by him 15
years later and won honors in the Paris-Bordeaux race.
In 1879 the automobile development germ returned to America.
In this brief sketch showing the struggle of auto-mechanism to advance,
from the very first inspiration of Cugnot about 1770, we must be
impressed by the determination with which the idea of auto-mechanical
perfection persisted. This persistence was so determined in the face of
all obstacles and opposition that it is almost eerie.
It was just as if some force of nature was struggling to break through
the crust of man’s consciousness. Or shall we credit it to man, and
say, rather, that it was man’s mind that was the impelling force in the
persistent attempts to read a mechanical riddle?
Whatever the impelling force, whether man or nature, man heeded its
behests and continued his efforts.
In 1879 an American did a thing which has had much to do with giving
the United States its long delayed start in the automobile industry.
This man was George B. Selden of Rochester, N. Y. He applied for the
first patent for the gasoline motor, as the driving force of a road
vehicle. This was before any automobile had been equipped with an
internal combustion hydro-carbon motor. This motor had, however, been
in use for some time in running stationary engines.
The bicycle had, at that time, been an acknowledged success, and in
considerable use for seven or eight years, and had had a great deal of
influence in improving roads. Better roads caused people to look more
favorably on the possibilities of the motor vehicle.
Selden built a gasoline motor under the specifications contained in
his application for a patent, and it performed satisfactorily in
experiments. But he did not build an automobile containing the gasoline
motor. He did not secure his patent until 1895, 16 years after he had
made application for it.
In those sixteen years he was endeavoring to interest capital, while at
the same time he was perfecting his motor. While the use of bicycles
had improved roads and this improvement caused a more favorable popular
view of the possibility that automobiles might be made successfully, a
new motive power appeared on the horizon just at this time.
It was electricity. It was in 1890, eleven years after Selden had
applied for a patent for a gasoline motor, and while he was still
wrestling with the problem of getting capital to aid him, that reports
that the storage battery had been more nearly perfected became rife.
Men to whom Selden went for financial aid feared that even if the
gasoline motor was feasible, it might be overshadowed by the storage
battery, and held off. Selden even went abroad to raise money, but had
no more success there than here.
Although an inventor and a skilled mechanic, Selden lacked salesmanship
ability. He was handicapped by impatience and irascibility, and his
predictions of the success of his gasoline motor, its general adoption,
and the extent to which automobiles would in the future be used, were
regarded by people with whom he talked as so extravagant that they
bluntly declared he was crazy, and avoided him.
He had proceeded so far on one occasion in interesting a Rochester
business man, that he had him in his store and was on the point of
getting him to put up $5,000, when he made a simple remark that
completely “spilled the beans.”
He said: “Jim, you and I will live to see more carriages on Main Street
run by motor than are now drawn by horses.”
The prospective investor looked at Selden for half a minute, and came
to a conclusion expressed in these words:
“George, you are crazy, and I won’t have anything to do with your
scheme,” and with this ultimatum the man stalked out of the store.
Twenty-five years later this man met Selden, and, extending his hand,
said: “Well, George, you were right years ago when you said there would
be more automobiles in Main Street than horses.”
But Selden ignored the man’s extended hand, and with passion thrilling
in his tones said: “Yes, and I wasn’t so —— crazy as you and the other
fools said I was,” and walked off. And he never spoke to the man
afterward.
Selden’s patent could have been issued any time within the sixteen
years that he let it lie dormant. He kept the application alive at the
patent office by legitimate methods, and his reason for not bringing
the matter to a head was that at no time in those sixteen years was he
ready to manufacture under it, and he put off the actual issuance until
such time as he was prepared to take full advantage of the privileges
it conferred.
He was alive to the fact that the years of a patent are numbered, and
he aimed to time the issue so that the patent would not expire before
he could derive the benefits from it.
It was in 1895 that the patent was issued, and in 1900 Selden disposed
of it to the Electric Vehicle Company of New Jersey.
In the meantime, the development of electric motor vehicles had begun,
and in 1885, Benz, a German, built the first road vehicle to be run
by the internal-combustion, hydro-carbon motor. It was a tricycle,
and its motor was single-cylindered, four-cycled, after the type of
an engine developed in 1876, in Germany, by Otto, and water cooled.
It had electric ignition and a mechanical carburetor. Benz secured
a patent in 1886 on his invention and it ran successfully, making
ten miles an hour. Benz was limited to the use of certain streets in
Mannheim, Germany, for running his machine, out of deference to the
tendency to nerves of horses and their drivers or riders. This tricycle
by Benz was the forerunner of the Benz automobile. This is one of the
most successful and popular cars in Germany—and before the war, in all
Europe. The first automobile imported into the United States was a Benz
car brought to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Up to 1917 the Benz
car was an entrant in most automobile speed contests.
While Benz was perfecting the gasoline motor in its attachment to the
tricycle, Gottlieb Daimler, another German, was producing, in 1885, the
motor-cycle. Daimler had devoted himself sedulously to the problem
of reducing the weight and increasing the power of the gas engine, in
order to adapt it to high efficiency road vehicles. He invented the hot
tube ignition to take the place of ignition by flame. By regulation of
the heat of the tube, the compressed charge of hydro-carbon vapor could
be fired automatically at a specific point in the cycle. Through the
increased speed thus produced the size and weight of the motor could be
reduced.
The Daimler motor was a big step in advance, as was proved by the
supremacy which the German and French automobile makers at once
attained. The French secured rights to the Daimler motor and operated
under them with such success that from 1889 to 1894, before the United
States had really waked up to motor car making, they were beginning to
put out gasoline automobiles successfully.
AMERICA BUILDS STEAM AND ELECTRIC CARS.
At this time, we, in this country, were following the steam and storage
battery fetishes. The first steam car in the United States that might
be called modern was built by S. H. Roper of Massachusetts, in 1889.
In 1900, steam car building in America gave promise of disputing the
gasoline car records then being made in France, but by 1905 the
gasoline car manufacturers had taken the cue from the European gasoline
successes, and this form of motor came to the front.
Contemporaneously with the activities in steam car building in the
United States, was the pioneer electric car construction era.
The first electric automobile was built in 1891, and made its first
exhibition appearance in the streets of Chicago in September, 1892.
The builder of this, the first electric driven vehicle, was William
Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa. It was bought by J. B. McDonald,
president of the American Battery Company, Chicago. Description of
the street scenes attending the showing of this car bring home to us
the extent to which an automobile was a novelty so short a time ago,
comparatively, as 1892. “Ever since its arrival,” said the _Western
Electrician_ of September 17, 1892, “it has attracted the greatest
attention. The sight of a well loaded carriage moving along the streets
at a spanking pace, with no horses in front, and apparently with
nothing on board to give it motion, was one that has been too much,
even for the wide-awake Chicagoan. In passing through the business
section, way had to be cleared by the police for the passage of the
carriage.”
To think that this description fits a scene enacted during the period
of the present generation! Eighty-eight years before in Philadelphia,
Oliver Evans’ steam propelled wagon, bearing in triumph a flatboat
surmounted by an engine, moved along Market Street with no horses in
front, and was a sight that was too much for the Philadelphian.
The world “do move,” but very slowly, and this 88-year span of time
is practically the measure of the period consumed by automobile
development to the point where a motor carriage would really run, and
keep on running.
The date of the building of the first American gasoline automobile that
ran was 1892. The man who performed the feat was Charles E. Duryea. He
had the assistance of his brother, Frank Duryea, but what was more, he
had the benefit of knowledge of what had been accomplished in Europe in
the gasoline motor field.
Panhard, Levassor, Peugeot, De Dion, Bouton, and Serpollet were
Frenchmen who had done things with gasoline cars, all (except Serpollet
and Levassor) principally through the manufacture of finished cars.
Levassor conceived the idea of a central frame to carry the power
plant, and thus solved the problem of road shock.
Serpollet had done more. He had invented the flash boiler, reviving an
art the English had previously discovered, which made the use of dry
or superheated steam possible. Higher pressure could be used, water
economies effected and weight reduced.
When Duryea and others, about 1892, gave concentrated thought to
gasoline propulsion, all the problems of automobile making had found
solution, except two. They were a method of cushioning wheel rims, and
some method by which the motor could be so placed that it would be
immune from shocks and vibrations.
So, when Duryea, in 1892, built the first American gasoline car that
would run successfully, he merely “assembled” the ideas that had then
accumulated.
The first auto-race in the world was run from Paris to Rouen, about 80
miles. It was run in July, 1894. There were 46 cars entered, of which
twelve only were steam cars. The Petit-Journal, a Parisian newspaper,
was the organizer and patron of the race. The winners were all equipped
with the Daimler gasoline motor.
A little over one year later—Thanksgiving Day, 1895—the first American
automobile race was run from Chicago to Waukegan. The organizer and
patron was a newspaper—the Chicago Times-Herald. Of two entrants, the
“Buggyaut” of Charles E. Duryea was one.
Duryea built his first car in 1892.
Henry Ford built his in 1893.
Elwood Haynes built his in 1894.
There were but four gasoline cars in the United States in 1896—Duryea,
Ford, Haynes, and Benz, the last being the German car which was
imported.
With the accomplishments of the builders of steam, electric and
gasoline motored vehicles at this time—1895—the practical success
of horseless carriages had been definitely settled. Practically all
fundamental problems had been solved. To make them finally an accepted
addition to the world’s methods of transportation in general use, two
things only were needed.
One was the development of perfecting devices, such as rubber tires,
the production of which began about 1889; and the other was the general
acceptance of automobiles by the people—a cordial, popular approval,
manifested by their purchase and use. And while the development to
greater perfection could be left to work itself out, the popular
approval to the point of enthusiastic general adoption was another
matter.
Inventors could develop, even if it took over a hundred years, a
complete, perfect machine, finally. But human doubts, mental apathy,
and man’s opposition can be overcome by only one means—enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm is to man’s opposing mind what the oxyhydrogen flame is to
steel, and it is one of the potent forces that will burn itself into
mentality.
Around the period of 1893-1898, the attitude of the mass of the
people in this country toward the automobile was one of good natured
toleration, but indifference. A few of the “class” were interested and
convinced that the automobile had arrived, but the “mass” believed it
was a passing fad, and from its practical side, of particular interest
chiefly to mechanics. If, in its opinion, the automobile had any
future, it was as a luxury of the rich.
The people could not sense what they feel now—the value of the
automobile in time, health and recreation, and in its possibilities
as a factor in economics. They saw the disadvantages of owning an
automobile, but were without appreciation of its benefits.
So one of the most interesting facts in the history of the development
of the motor car is that the first American made gasoline automobile
sold in the United States was disposed of March 24,1898. The sale of
steamers and electrics had been going on for several years before, but
not very extensively.
This fact of the date of the first sale of a gasoline motor car fixes
clearly that the use of automobiles in the United States practically
increased from one car to over three million, in less than twenty years.
The first American gasoline car thus sold was disposed of by Alexander
Winton to Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pa.
So that, while Duryea completed his car in 1892, Ford his in 1893, and
Haynes his in 1894, it was six, five and four years, respectively,
later, that the first gasoline car was purchased in the United States.
From 1898, the time of the sale of the Winton car, dates substantially
the development of the automobile industry in this country.
Beginning with this date, the first real enthusiasm was put into the
sale of cars.
Enthusiasm had not existed before. Confidence, which is the mother of
enthusiasm, had hesitated and halted. But now confidence believed the
automobile was a reality—all doubts had been resolved—and confidence
bade enthusiasm run, not creep, crawl or walk; and we see how
enthusiasm obeyed. In the enthusiasm displayed in the manufacture and
sale of automobiles today, we are disposed to think it does more than
run, that it actually flies.