The manufacture of motor trucks almost doubled in one year. The number produced in 1915 was 50,366. In 1916 the number made was 92,130.
The above table, showing the rate of increase in passenger cars made in seven years, makes it clear that the greatest growth in the passenger car business has been since and including the year 1911.
That was the year in which the largest number of medium and low priced standardized cars with refinement of detail and added equipments, selling from $1,500 down to $500, was first put on the market. Ford almost doubled his output in that year. The next years, 1912 and 1913, also he more than doubled each year his output of the previous year. And in 1916 he made nearly one-third of all the passenger cars produced in the entire United States in that year.
Could anything demonstrate more conclusively than these facts, that if you have an article within the price of the mass of the people, it will sell, if the people want it? The one idea of Henry Ford—quantity sales—saved to the United States the premiership in automobile making. For other manufacturers adopted it, some radically, others in a modified form. Its influence was unquestioned in putting the price of motor cars at a figure at which a person happening to have less than the income of a millionaire could afford to buy one, so that when every one of the many values and benefits of the existence of the modern automobile is scheduled, let us, in giving credit for them, place the name of Ford at the head of the list.
When we have arrived at our destination, or have attained an object much desired, our satisfaction is such that we are in a forgiving mind and prone to forget the sacrifices we had to make, the difficulties we had to overcome, the strenuous work we had to do. The end justified the means, and we don’t think long about the hardships in the means.
Preëminence of the United States in the motor field has not been gained without hardships, sacrifices and disappointments by those engaged in it, nor was it reached by the immediate and uninterrupted success of all companies organized to commercialize the invention.
While, as we have stated before, the number of final failures of companies was small compared with those in some other avenues of enterprise in the development stage, the number of individuals and corporations in the automobile business that started on the wrong road and found it impassable, was not small. But here again it was fortunate for humanity, reckoning the automobile as one of the greatest boons vouchsafed the human race, that the mechanical perfection of the automobile was reached at a date coincident with more enlightened thought, a liberalism of view and a clearer vision of the possibilities of the future by our men of business.
For automobile enterprises that took the wrong road and got mired in the mud of mechanical and management difficulties and financial complications were, most of them, lifted out of the slough by men who knew the right road and were better drivers. Had the automobile developed mechanically to near-perfection a score of years before it did, not only would the people as a mass not have been ready for it, but it is doubtful if business at that period had developed to the point of efficiency where it could recognize the possibilities latent in the motor car as a money-making machine. Where money is, the best brains go. Capital is timid. But brains and capital want only to be shown.
Some of the most successful motor cars and motor car companies of today were deeply mired in financial difficulties a decade ago, but were pried and towed out and made great successes by new brains and new capital administered by a new set of men.
Nor was the industry immune from the bane of all invention industries—the patent right. The man who gave it the most trouble was the man whose name is far up toward the head of the list of men who were responsible for the inventive ideas involved in the motive feature of the automobile—Selden.