A table giving a complete list of automobiles is printed elsewhere in this volume.
The earlier manufacturers of motor cars included many who had been engaged in manufacturing bicycles, and following them was a group that had successfully manufactured wagons and carriages. Still another set of manufacturers were machinery men.
In the list of names of automobile companies which have been organized during the period of the industry’s development, there are some which have gone out of business, but not many.
The industry, generally speaking, has had comparatively few complete failures. Mortality has been lower with it than with many other business enterprises.
This is chiefly due to the intelligence which the manufacturers brought to the business, plus the demand which sprang up for the automobile as soon as the people, instructed with great and liberal space by the press, realized it was the vehicle that could give what they wanted. Never was the value of a concerted campaign of education better demonstrated.
That unusually intelligent study of the subject of suiting the popular desire was given by manufacturers is evidenced in many ways, but in none that is so typical as was the standardization of motor cars.
At one stage of the industry its very life was threatened by a lack of uniformity in the mechanical construction of the various types of the automobile.
The big idea that has made Henry Ford’s millions was a combination one. It was the building of a motor and car combined which could be constructed at a cost that would command large quantity production. This conception by Ford, alone, simple though it was, proclaims him the genius he undoubtedly is.
The purchase of cars between 1898, when sales first began to be made, and 1903, when Ford put out his car, was practically confined to people of wealth and leisure. It required both to own and operate an automobile. Men bought them at a cost of $3,000 to $12,000 each. Purchasers were exhilarated by auto-intoxication—with little thought of the practical uses the invention could be put to. Snobbishness, social impression and display of superior wealth were back of many purchases.
But for the manufacturers’ quick recognition that the future of the automobile did not rest with the rich, that to be a great money-making industry, they must make automobiles for the mass and not for the class, the business would probably today be no further advanced than it was fifteen years ago. A parallel of what might have been may be found in yachting or motor boating—two methods of deriving pleasure and speed which are confined to the rich, largely because prohibitive in cost to the mass.