nothing to do but for the driver to dismount and lie under the machine on his back while he tinkered with wires, valves, batteries and carburetor, often using language appropriate to the occasion as blobs of grease and bits of harder substances dropped into his eyes and open mouth.

Those pesky things had a strong penchant for stopping over mudholes, and one could tell the owner of one a block away by the indelible mud stains on the back of his leather coat. Drivers of fine horse equipages would stop and watch the proceedings, sometimes with jeering remarks and at other times with a sort of sympathy that was maddening.

The terminology of inventions usually is an adoption from the language of the country which began their development, and because France was foremost in the revival of motor road vehicles we have such adopted words as "chassis” and “chauffeur," directly from the French. Scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions by people of many languages have served to fatten our English vocabulary by the addition of thousands of borrowed words.

CHAPTER CXVIII

AUTOMOBILE HISTORY-MADE IN DETROIT

H

ISTORY, philosophy, science, invention, language, and even religion, are each and all aggregates: the slowly accumulated products of human experience, reasoning, revelation and inspiration. It is beyond the capacity of the greatest minds to grasp the complete meaning and scope of any one of them. The best that can be done is to extend that grasp little by little during the period of each generation of men and, curiously enough, the more we extend our grasp the more profound and incomprehensible does the great mystery of the created universe become.

The simplest of all these things is history, which means, first, a fairly complete record of human events and experiences, and then individual reasoning and deduction applied to the known facts for the purpose of interpretation. This is fine in theory, but quite impossible in practice, because there is no such thing as a complete record and this partial accumulation is complicated and confused by a complex of disagreements regarding things of common knowledge which every person thinks he understands. One who attempts the writing of history seems to succeed very well while he deals with affairs of the remote past. The reason back of that apparent success lies in the fact that all witnesses who might dispute him have been dead for centuries and that recent generations have settled down to a pretty common acceptance of certain trains of fact and have agreed to eliminate and forget certain other trains of fact. One is hardly conscious of this curious condition until he attempts to write recent history. Then he discovers that there is endless confusion regarding the few simple facts of relatively common knowledge.

If one asks the question: "Who invented the automobile?" he will get a bewildering answer, because every man who has

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had anything to do with scientific discovery in all the ages has been in some measure a contributor to the invention. If one asks: "Who founded the automobile industry in Detroit?” he will be astonished at the confusion of opinions. As to what man has achieved the greatest success in the business of facturing there can be no dispute, but even Henry Ford did not accomplish his success without important contributions from many other men. For no man liveth to himself alone. The thoughts, the hopes, the aspirations, all the ideas or thought images that have occurred to man in the past, are still floating about in the air and those which escape detection in man's waking hours often come to him in his dreams. He may think they are all his own; but some part or germ of them has existed before and all that he is able to do is to add a little to the long aggregate. Men dreamed of flying through the air thousands of years ago, but it took the accumulated aggregate of all that time to make the dream come true in the dawn of the Twentieth Century. So it is with every human achievement down to the creation of the first automobile.

"The chariots shall rage in the streets. They shall jostle one against another in the broad ways; they shall seem like torches; they shall run like the lightnings." Those lines were written about 2,500 years ago by the prophet Nahum. Of course Nahum did not in his time have any clear vision of Woodward Avenue and the other "broad ways" of Detroit. He had never heard of Henry Ford, the Packard, Cadillac, Lincoln, Buick, Studebaker, or any other of the multitude of chariots that seem like torches with their blinding headlights; he never heard the raspy honks and whoops of a hundred Klaxon and other makes of horns; he never saw chariots capable of running like lightning and crashing into one another with fatal results at innumerable street intersections, but for all that Nahum had a vision of the future and gave it utterance, and more than 700 generations of men who came after him brought his dream to pass. Even in Detroit the name of the automobile pioneers is legion; and who can say: "I did it"? Some day historical acceptance may single out some individual, and that decision may stand like some of

our judicial decisions which try to limit the scope and application of law-for a time at least. But common agreements do not permanently fix the truth of facts any more than judicial opinions determine justice.

When one takes the backward trail of each man who has figured prominently in the development of Detroit's automobile industry, he can discover in each case some sort of preparation of which the individual was as unaware as were his associates.

Back in 1895 a vision of the automobile possessed two young men of Lansing, Michigan, Ranson E. Olds and Frank Clark. Mr. Olds' father was a manufacturer of stationary gasoline engines; the father of Mr. Clark made carriages, and thus two ideas were naturally merged. Each young man worked in his father's shop. They began experimental work with the idea that Olds was to furnish the engine and Clark the carriage it was to propel. Their fathers disapproved of their distracting experiments, so much of the work was done surreptitiously after factory hours.

In 1897 they had progressed far enough to enable them to secure backing for the organization of the "Olds Motor Vehicle Company," with the understanding that they were to concentrate their combined efforts upon the building of just one carriage as perfectly as possible and finish it at the earliest possible moment. Their first Oldsmobile was finished in 1898. It would run, but not so impressively. That machine is now housed with the curios of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington as an example of crude beginnings. Clark was discouraged and sold out to his partner and co-laborer. Then Mr. Olds enlisted in his scheme the financial support of S. L. Smith, who had made a fortune in copper and had capital to risk on long chance ventures.

Various improvements were made and in 1899 a company was formed in Detroit with Olds as manager, and presently he turned out the first Oldsmobile, with a curved dashboard. This machine ran quite impressively and it gave many convincing demonstrations of its efficiency, power and control, although it was a little machine designed to serve as a runabout on paved city streets and the better class of highways.

Demonstration led to demand.

In 1901, 1,400 Oldsmobiles were built and in 1902 the production was 2,500. They went out in all directions, even to far countries. Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea magnate, was soon steering one of them through the ruck of London street traffic, and Queen Helena of Italy was circling about the Quirinal, Capitoline and all the other seven hills of the "Eternal City" in an Oldsmobile. In 1903 a racing machine, the Olds Pirate, driven by H. T. Thomas, now chief engineer of the Reo Motor Car Company, at Lansing, made a world's record for a straightaway mile run on Daytona Beach, Florida, and that same year a similar machine won the "Tour de France."

Out of that experiment and achievement developed other ventures. Dodge Brothers made the transmissions and the Leland & Faulkner Machine Company built the engines and other parts of the mechanical construction. Out of that experience came the development of the Cadillac car at the hands of Henry M. Leland, and Dodge Brothers' contribution was the beginning of an experience which led to their early association with the Ford Motor Company, and later to the founding of their own huge plant with its production of the Dodge car.

In 1904, 5,000 Oldsmobiles were manufactured and two of the machines staged the first transcontinental road race, driven by Dwight Huss and T. R. McGargle, respectively, from Washington, D. C., to Seattle. In 1905 the curved dash was replaced by a straight one; production rose to 6,500 cars and the factory hoisted into view the sign: "Largest Automobile Factory in the World." In that year a two-cylinder engine was introduced, known as the "double-action Olds."

In 1902 a fire made it necessary to rebuild the plant and the factory was removed to Lansing. In 1906 the company produced a four-cylinder car. Several other men whose names are written large in automobile history were connected with the plant in its early days, among them Roy D. Chapin and Howard Coffin. The former rose to the position of sales manager and the latter to chief engineer, while F. C. Bezner became purchasing agent and James J. Brady traffic manager.