For, strange as it may seem to us in this country, which Emerson epitomized as another name for opportunity, the English horse owners and people generally resented, as early as 1840, the progress represented by the automobile, and stifled all development of it from that time to a date when France, Germany and the United States had made it a real factor in transportation.
If, therefore, Franklin had not helped to free this land from the British yoke, the automobile industry might have been in the United States what it is in England today. France and Germany might now have been doing the automobile business of the world, with England and this country buying from them, as England and France are now buying from the United States, whose automobile supremacy at this date is unquestioned.
While the gasoline type of automobile today is the most popular, this is not to say that the electric type is not a success scientifically and commercially. Indeed, the future extent of the automobile’s use for commercial purposes is said by experts to depend largely on the electric driven type.
And who will deny that but for Franklin the electric motor would not have been, for it was he who wrested the thunderbolt from heaven, as well as the sceptre of dominion over our land from the tyrant. Franklin as the discoverer of electricity may well be accorded the credit for the electric automobile, which has played no small part in the development of the automobile industry, a fact which every student of automobile history will concede.
It is, however, on an even firmer foundation than either of the causes mentioned that Benjamin Franklin stands as contributing to the success of the automobile industry. The inventors could invent and the manufacturers could make the automobile, but who, pray, was to buy it, if it was to be in general use, if not the common people? And how, may we ask, were the people going to buy it without money?
As the great teacher of frugality and thrift, Franklin laid the cornerstone, 150 years ago, on which the superstructure of the American automobile industry has been erected. For, assuredly, had the seed planted by him failed to germinate and ripen in the American consciousness, we could as well have been today a nation of spendthrifts as a people self-denying, thrifty and frugal. He inculcated those principles of temperance and economy in the lives of our forefathers which have been handed down to us from one generation to another, to our advantage and as an aid to our saving habits, by which we are enabled to buy automobiles.
Many a motor car today owes its ownership to the teachings of Franklin. Many an automobile buyer would never have become one had he not heeded Franklin’s injunction, to “Remember, a patch on your coat and money in your pocket is better and more creditable than a writ on your back and no money to take it off,” and the investor would not have put money in stocks of automobile companies if he had not learned the truth of Franklin’s teaching that “Money makes money, and the money that money makes, makes more money.”
Franklin having done what he could to prepare American citizens to economize and save against the day of the automobile, and to invest their money in its manufacture, and the American citizen having followed his teachings and accumulated enough to buy at least a Ford, and perhaps a few shares of automobile company stocks, the man appeared who produced the first gasoline automobile in the United States. That man was Charles E. Duryea. His reputation rests on the fact that, though there were steam and electric automobiles in existence, and the gasoline motor had been developed, he was the first to put gasoline motor and buggy body into co-ordination and make the first run the second. To Duryea, the constructor of the “buggy-aut,” is accorded the credit, by automobile history, of being the father of the American gasoline car.
Following Duryea by only one year, came the genius who put into general circulation the universal car.
A reading of Henry Ford’s biography discloses that his first idea, that the big money was in production in quantity—that a million articles sold at a profit of 50 cents each was a better paying transaction than ten thousand sold at $3.00 each—was in connection with a watch. Watches and clocks were the first things that Ford subjected to the mechanical promptings of his boyish mind, and he had it all planned out to make a 50-cent watch before Ingersoll had conceived the commercial possibilities of a dollar one.