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.