Story of the automobile: Its history and development from 1760 to 1917 / With an analysis of the standing and prospects of the automobile industry

by H. L. Barber

When all farmers learn the full facts of the superiority of motor mechanism over horses, only one instance of which is that their cost per mile haulage is 16²⁄₃ cents, against 30⁷⁄₁₀ cents for the horse, a wider use will result. It is only the highly developed efficiency expert who yet can count a minute of time in its equivalent of cents, and an hour in its equivalent of dollars. The automobile industry has had the benefit of the highest quality of efficiency generalship.

Chalmers was making $70,000 a year with the National Cash Register Company when an automobile company secured him by promising more. Flanders was offered by Ford, in addition to his salary, a bonus of $20,000 if, in the first year of his administration, he would turn out 10,000 cars. By installing the first automatic machine tool system, which itself was mechanical co-operation, Flanders collected the bonus.

No industry, except perhaps oil or steel, has paid men such salaries, bonuses and commissions as has that of the automobile.

Co-operation by the automobile industry has been pursued in its public shows for seventeen years—the period of the industry’s greatest strides—beginning with the first one in 1900 in Madison Square Garden, New York. The Seventeenth annual auto show was that in New York and Chicago in January, 1917.

There are many lines of industrial production in which to this day the factors have not gotten together in co-operation, lines in which each producer is working alone, and it is noticeable in many of them that development is slow and advancement tardy.

The automobile makers early applied the principle of co-operation by formal association. They organized the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers to advertise automobiles at the first auto show in New York, and to “encourage general practices of mutual benefit,” a statement of principles that is brief but sweeping.

Stimulating influences in the formation of this, one of the earliest, and one of the most comprehensive and sincere co-operative industrial associations, were the necessity for presenting a united front, which legislation adverse to the automobile created, and of popularizing and inspiring confidence in an innovation. Co-operation was further made imperative by the necessity for better roads. Had the roads of the United States been better than they were when the automobile first came into being, the industry might by now be able to write its annual production in larger figures than 1,600,000 cars made in 1916.

That the automobile associations have the true principle of co-operation and not the semi-true or false variety, is evidenced by the fact that their co-operative efforts have been from the start for the benefit of the industry as a whole and not for the benefit of members of the associations alone. They have always admitted to their councils all manufacturers, whether association members or not, and co-operated on a free and full basis.

Broad liberalism has been practiced. The many young men engaged in the industry have been credited with this. Coming into the business arena at a late date, they were not handicapped by prejudices and hardening of the arteries of open-minded thought. They believed in the principle of “one for all, and all for one,” which is the keynote of co-operation.

As the world has these men to thank for the constantly enlarging pleasures and comforts of the automobile, so it has them to thank for such good roads as there are, for it is as certain that automobiles have improved roads as it is that automobiles exist.