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.