Story of the automobile: Its history and development from 1760 to 1917 / With an analysis of the standing and prospects of the automobile industry

by H. L. Barber

Removing Obstacles to Automobile Production.

One objection the old philosopher has to the automobile is an objection that is strengthened by the fact that he does not own one. It is that the automobile contributes toward making the age one in which a really short time appears to be and is generally regarded as a long time. It destroys proportions as it annihilates space.

Seventeen years is a shorter time in the view of the philosopher of 60, accustomed to reviewing events in his past life half a century back, than it appears to a man of 34. It is just half the length of this young man’s years. Time, as to duration, is thus comparative to different views.

Seventeen years is not long for a commercial industry to take the place which the automobile business now occupies in a country as great as this. It is a short time in which to build up a business representing the figures of two billion on the mark of the American dollar.

But this business, which has not been a business for even a score of years, did not arrive at its present estate without vicissitudes, and without strenuous work in removing obstacles in the way of its progress.

The seventeen years in which the industry made its record, saw the rise and the fall of the steamer type of car, the wresting of an Old Man of the Sea, in the form of a discouraging patent holder from the shoulders of the manufacturers, the electric car largely depopularized and the gasoline car established in wellnigh universal favor.

The procession of the more important earlier pioneers in the commercialization of the automobile started with the Pope Manufacturing Company at its head. In 1897 this company, which had successfully made bicycles, manufactured electric cars at Hartford, but was unable to find a market for them in the United States. An effort was made to get the Newport set to take them up, but the wealthy owners of Newport villas could not be induced to be even mildly interested.

So the Pope company decided to send them abroad, and shipped them on the steamer La Bourgogne. But this ship sank at sea and the cars were lost. The Pope company then made electric cabs, many of which appeared on the streets of New York in 1898 and 1899, and finally sold its electric vehicle business to the Columbia Automobile Company of New Jersey.

This corporation was formed by a party of capitalists headed by William C. Whitney of New York, and included P. A. B. Widener of Philadelphia, A. F. Brady of Albany, and Thomas F. Ryan of New York. All were interested and actively engaged in street electric traction development in the East. Whitney, who was in public life as Secretary of the Navy under Cleveland, was a man of far vision in industrial possibilities, and recognized early in its development stage that the automobile had a future. He was as quick to see, also, that the gasoline motor drive was the coming means of propulsion, and he caused the Columbia Automobile Company, whose name was changed to the Electric Vehicle Company, to negotiate for and finally secure complete rights to the Selden patents for gasoline motors.

Having a sweeping license agreement with Selden, the Electric Vehicle Company undertook to enforce its rights, and one of the first concerns sued for infringement was the Winton Company, whose gasoline car, sold in 1898, was the first gasoline car disposed of by a manufacturer in this country. The United States court upheld the patent, and nine of the then leading automobile manufacturers, finding they must pay royalties, formed an association under the title of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.

For thirteen years thereafter, until 1911, gasoline automobile manufacture in the United States was under tribute to a royalty of from four-fifths of one per cent to 1¹⁄₄ per cent of the retail price of all cars sold. The beneficiary of this license fee was the Electric Vehicle Company, which “split” the fees with Selden, and the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers itself. The fees amounted to very large sums, and the licensees wriggled and squirmed; but the United States District Court having upheld the Selden patent, there was no way out, unless a deliverer appeared.

And such a deliverer did appear.

It was none other than Henry Ford.

For a pacifist, Henry Ford is about the greatest fighter the American industrial ranks have ever produced. His history has been a succession of fights—fights to make a motor that would go inside a hat box, fights to get anybody to believe in him and invest money with him, fights to convince people that nearly everybody would buy an automobile if the price was low enough, and finally the fiercest and most prolonged fight of all—the fight to break the Selden patent monopoly and free the industry from serfdom, give it free rein and relieve it of the incubus of tribute.

Ford had refused to join the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers and had gone on making his engine and adapting it to a car which he put out, as has before been said, in 1903. The Electric Vehicle Company, which held the reins and was driving all the gasoline car makers except Ford, cracked its whip in Henry’s direction and brought him up standing, and bristling as well.

In the suit for infringement against Ford the Electric Vehicle Company won in the lower United States court, but it reckoned without its Ford. That product of a strain of Irish-English fighting blood didn’t consider he was whipped because one court decided against him, as all the other manufacturers, who submitted their necks meekly to the Selden patent yoke, had done.

He promptly appealed and fought the case like a wildcat up to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and through that tribunal, and with such success that, in 1911 this court reversed the finding of the lower court and gave the decision to Henry Ford.

The original suit in the lower court was begun against Ford in 1903, so that his fight against the first and only automobile “trust” was an eight year war.

But during it all, he never faltered in his activities in perfecting his car and making his elaborate preparations to build and market it. His confidence in his final victory was not affected in the slightest degree. He went on, pursuing his object with unruffled mien.

It must have been a trying brand of chagrin that the gasoline car manufacturers, who had tamely submitted to their first setback in the effort to slip the fetters of patent rights, had to wear around with them. They had looked askance at Ford. They feared he was likely to kill the automobile “game” by putting out a car that would make automobiling common, and put a damper on the purchase of the cars they made, by people who could afford to buy them. At best, he was calculated to be a disturbing element in the business—probably driving down prices to a point where there would be no profit in them.

And here he had been the savior of the automobile business.

Many men have written letters that have been their undoing. Selden had made an entry in a personal notebook or diary that brought about his downfall and the loosening of his grip on automobile manufacturing.

The ground on which the United States Circuit Court of Appeals decided for Ford and against the Selden patent was that the intent of the inventor had been to patent a motor designed after the type of a motor invented by Brayton of which the Ford motor was not an infringement, and not after the type of the gas engine of Otto the German, of which the Ford motor would have been an infringement, and that Selden had clearly disclosed this intent, as evidenced by a slurring entry in his diary regarding the four-cycle Otto engine, characterizing it as “another of those d—d Dutch engines.”

The Otto engine for stationary purposes was in use before Selden filed his application for the patent, and if he did not intend the patent to cover an engine of that type he had no hold on the manufacturers who, with scarcely a single exception, were making automobiles, with motors patterned after the Otto type. These manufacturers could have done what Ford did—taken the case up and got the same decision, but they didn’t do it, thereby making Henry Ford the emancipator of the automobile industry.

This delivery by Ford of automobile manufacturing from patent restraint and his quantity production idea, without any other of the many things he has done, would have made Henry Ford what he is—the most commanding figure in the automobile industry today.

There can be no doubt that the very existence of the Selden patent with the rights it conferred to tax every single automobile, was a deterrent to the growth of the business, because with the wiping out, through Ford’s court victory, of the right of William C. Whitney’s Electric Vehicle Company to take toll of all gasoline autocars produced, encouragement was given to capital to invest more largely in the business.

If, in the springtime, the season when the grass begins to sprout, you remove an old door that has lain flat on the grass all winter, the grass in the space covered by that door will literally spring up.

So when the lid—the Selden patent—was lifted from the automobile industry, it sprang to the front. The year 1911 was the epochal year in volume of production in the business. From that year dates the present era of automobile high production. It wasn’t that many new companies entered the field. It was that those already in it expanded and increased their output. There was no longer an Old Man of the Sea, in the form of a tax on production, clinging to their necks and shoulders. The age of standardization had come, and the soundness of Ford’s quantity production idea had been demonstrated. Thence on, the automobile industry had a clear course, if not in all cases easy sailing, and it has traversed it on a straight line, with a current of popular demand running strong in the direction it has been headed.