Yet when, a few years before, the English referred to the American automobile as a "glorified perambulator," the characterization was not unjust.This new method of transportation was slow in finding favor on our side of the Atlantic.America was sentimentally and practically devoted to the horse as the motive power for vehicles; and the fact that we had so few good roads also worked against the introduction of the automobile.Yet here, as in Europe, the mechanically propelled wagon made its appearance in early times.This vehicle, like the bicycle, is not essentially a modern invention; the reason any one can manufacture it is that practically all the basic ideas antedate 1840.Indeed, the automobile is really older than the railroad.In the twenties and thirties, steam stage coaches made regular trips between certain cities in England and occasionally a much resounding power-driven carriage would come careering through New York and Philadelphia, scaring all the horses and precipitating the intervention of the authorities.The hardy spirits who devised these engines, all of whose names are recorded in the encyclopedias, deservedly rank as the "fathers"of the automobile.The responsibility as the actual "inventor"can probably be no more definitely placed.However, had it not been for two developments, neither of them immediately related to the motor car, we should never have had this efficient method of transportation.The real "fathers" of the automobile are Gottlieb Daimler, the German who made the first successful gasoline engine, and Charles Goodyear, the American who discovered the secret of vulcanized rubber.Without this engine to form the motive power and the pneumatic tire to give it four air cushions to run on, the automobile would never have progressed beyond the steam carriage stage.It is true that Charles Baldwin Selden, of Rochester, has been pictured as the "inventor of the modern automobile" because, as long ago as 1879, he applied for a patent on the idea of using a gasoline engine as motive power, securing this basic patent in 1895, but this, it must be admitted, forms a flimsy basis for such a pretentious claim.
The French apparently led all nations in the manufacture of motor vehicles, and in the early nineties their products began to make occasional appearances on American roads.The type of American who owned this imported machine was the same that owned steam yachts and a box at the opera.Hardly any new development has aroused greater hostility.It not only frightened horses, and so disturbed the popular traffic of the time, but its speed, its glamour, its arrogance, and the haughty behavior of its proprietor, had apparently transformed it into a new badge of social cleavage.It thus immediately took its place as a new gewgaw of the rich; that it had any other purpose to serve had occurred to few people.Yet the French and English machines created an entirely different reaction in the mind of an imaginative mechanic in Detroit.Probably American annals contain no finer story than that of this simple American workman.Yet from the beginning it seemed inevitable that Henry Ford should play this appointed part in the world.Born in Michigan in 1863, the son of an English farmer who had emigrated to Michigan and a Dutch mother, Ford had always demonstrated an interest in things far removed from his farm.Only mechanical devices interested him.He liked getting in the crops, because McCormick harvesters did most of the work; it was only the machinery of the dairy that held him enthralled.He developed destructive tendencies as a boy; he had to take everything to pieces.He horrified a rich playmate by resolving his new watch into its component parts--and promptly quieted him by putting it together again."Every clock in the house shuddered when it saw me coming," he recently said.
He constructed a small working forge in his school-yard, and built a small steam engine that could make ten miles an hour.He spent his winter evenings reading mechanical and scientific journals; he cared little for general literature, but machinery in any form was almost a pathological obsession.Some boys run away from the farm to join the circus or to go to sea; Henry Ford at the age of sixteen ran away to get a job in a machine shop.
Here one anomaly immediately impressed him.No two machines were made exactly alike; each was regarded as a separate job.With his savings from his weekly wage of $2.50, young Ford purchased a three dollar watch, and immediately dissected it.If several thousand of these watches could be made, each one exactly alike, they would cost only thirty-seven cents apiece."Then," said Ford to himself, "everybody could have one." He had fairly elaborated his plans to start a factory on this basis when his father's illness called him back to the farm.
This was about 1880; Ford's next conspicuous appearance in Detroit was about 1892.This appearance was not only conspicuous;it was exceedingly noisy.Detroit now knew him as the pilot of a queer affair that whirled and lurched through her thoroughfares, making as much disturbance as a freight train.In reading his technical journals Ford had met many descriptions of horseless carriages; the consequence was that he had again broken away from the farm, taken a job at $45 a month in a Detroit machine shop, and devoted his evenings to the production of a gasoline engine.
