Names of automobile manufacturers who are prominent today were familiar names in the earlier stages of the industry, and more of the original automobile makers have survived than have fallen by the wayside.
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.