The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

  Yet not so. Engineers are a breed hardly known for favoring opulence and vulgarity, and they care little for ankle-deep carpets or butter-smooth leather. They would rather employ their skills to push the boundaries of mechanical possibility, and in terms of making motorcars, that means the use of better materials with a goal of ever-increasing lightness and efficiency, and with the achievement of ever-finer machining tolerances, greater smoothness, more polish, better fit.

  Up to 1906—and yes, this was still early days in the company’s history, but Rolls-Royce was self-evidently moving itself along very fast—every one of the company cars had been based on that original Decauville ten-horsepower car from France. Henry Royce had made all too many versions of this—the Ten, the Twenty, the Heavy Twenty, the six-cylinder Thirty. They were well received by the motoring press, and they sold handsomely, but in engineering terms, they represented to the envelope-pushing technicians something of an intellectual dead end.

  What was needed now was an entirely new car, one based solely on Henry Royce’s imagination and which owed very little to a now-somewhat-outdated Gallic import. So the company’s small band of craftsmen—with their sand-brown grease-stained overalls, their wads of cotton waste, their oil-grimed fingers, their hooded eyes and furrowed brows; with their loupes on lanyards, their slide rules, micrometers, calipers, verniers, and pressure gauges; and with their well-bitten pipes clenched between tobacco-yellowed teeth—stayed late into the 1906 nights, poring over blueprints and log tables, over lists of new alloys and charts that told of the density and flexibility quotient of possible ashwood chassis frames, over screw threads and tappet clearances and potential cylinder diameters . . .

  The model that resulted from all this ferment was to be the original Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which was first made in 1906 and continued in production until 1925. Nearly eight thousand were built, and most of them are still running today. The car was enormous and, to power it along, had a truly massive six-cylinder side-valve engine, drawing more than seven liters (seven and a half liters from the 1910 models). Everything about the engine was massive, solid, had heft. The cylinders were arranged in two cast-iron blocks of three, rounded at the top and finished in brass. There was a single camshaft, exposed tappets; there were copper pipes bringing in the fuel, a twin-jet carburetor with a governor that could be set from a control on the steering wheel; and there were enormous copper tubes to carry the exhaust away to the tailpipe. The crankshaft was polished steel and had seven bearings. Even today, a Ghost engine manages to look both sophisticated and elephantine, as though a marine turbine has been bolted onto a motorcar frame, offering it much more power and endurance than it could ever need.

  The car is regarded still today as the nonpareil, the exemplar of all that is right about engineering accomplished to the very highest of standards, and with the highest level of precision. What sets this one model of car apart had more to do with endurance and reliability, quietness and speed, than with excess. “Perfection,” begins one of Royce’s better-known apothegms, “lies in small things.” But perfection is no small thing, and from radiator to tires, carburetor to brakes, the Silver Ghost amply reflected this.

  The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost remains the iconic version of the famous marque, and was the only model that, for a time, was also manufactured in the United States (in Springfield, Massachusetts). Almost eight thousand were hand-built between 1906 and 1925.

  Photograph courtesy of Malcolm Asquith.

  The car was originally called the Rolls-Royce 40/50. The decidedly unromantic notion embodied in this first-chosen name has all to do with regulation, and with that direst enemy of motoring joy, vehicle taxation. Cars in the early part of the twentieth century were taxed according to their horsepower, a calculated number that was decreed by the mandarins of the Inland Revenue in London as being “two-fifths of the square of the engine’s cylinder diameter in inches, multiplied by the number of cylinders.” This car had six cylinders, each with a diameter, or bore, of about four inches. Four squared is sixteen, six times sixteen is ninety-six, and two-fifths of that number is more or less forty, lending the machine the taxable horsepower figure of forty.

  That gives the first number. The second (in this case, the fifty) is the actual horsepower that the carmakers (in some cases boastfully, but usually not) believe or claim their machine is capable of generating. So the two numbers together, the taxable horsepower followed by the actual horsepower, give us, for this particular car in 1906, the number name “40/50.” A more tedious name for a motorcar of such pretension could scarcely be imagined.

  Then came a moment of inadvertent marketing genius. After making the eleventh chassis for the new series, the managing director at Cooke Street, the “broad shouldered extrovert and party-giver” Claude “CJ” Johnson,* ordered that the coachwork of the twelfth (numbered 60551) be painted in silver enamel and all its brightwork made of solid silver, with the intention that the machine be used as a demonstrator. Johnson then named this one particular model the Silver Ghost because of the car’s appearance, he said, of “extraordinary stealthiness.” The name was hammered onto a plaque, repoussé-style, and mounted on the rear of the car’s scuttle.

  Matters might have rested there, with merely one car sporting the name, but the influential motoring paper Autocar took the view that the entire line could and should have the same name. So, while the factory—and within a year, Cooke Street had been abandoned in favor of a brand-new purpose-built plant in Derby—continued to hand-make 40/50s, both the buying and the admiring public took the Ghost name and formally entered it into motoring history.

  The demonstration car performed wonders. It was taken from the production line on April 13, 1907, driven for eighty miles by the company’s chief tester, and then, with all declared shipshape and Bristol fashion, sent on by road to London and into Claude Johnson’s custody. He then arranged for it to be subjected to a series of witheringly difficult trials with ever-vigilant men from the Royal Automobile Club observing, looking for any moments of failure. There were, essentially, none—except that there were punctures every few dozen miles, tire failures that were regarded by motorists as little more inconvenient than having to stop for fuel.

  On one run over the five hundred miles from London to Glasgow, the car was kept in third or fourth gear only. There were two reasons for this. The first was to test the power of an engine that was being asked to climb great hills, most notably the immense pink-granite lump of Shap Summit, in Westmorland, a notorious grind of a climb back when the A6 was still the main highway to Scotland, then a narrow road to the deep north, indeed. The Ghost glided up it with consummate ease, and then swept down the northern slope at sports car speed. The second reason for keeping the car in one gear was to show Edwardian drivers how easy it was to drive it—a startling number of car buyers had no idea how to change gears, and were terrified at the prospect of having to do so. (Until quite recently, a Rolls-Royce owner’s manual would assume the presence of a chauffeur. “In the event of a flat tire, instruct your man to pull over to the side of the road.” Almost certainly “your man” would know how to change gears, and tires.)

  The Silver Ghost expedition that truly impressed the reading public, however, and that inarguably made Rolls-Royce famous up and down the country, and for all time following, was an endurance test, a trial to see just how far the car could be driven without stopping. It began in June 1907, and was almost casually tacked onto the end of a previously organized romp through the Scottish Highlands, where the car, with Claude Johnson at the wheel, two passengers, and the RAC observer, bumped and ground its way in drenching rains across eight hundred miles of unpeopled scenic majesty. There was a hiccup here: on day one, coming up from Glasgow en route to Perth, the car successfully negotiated the infamous Rest and Be Thankful Pass, but in attempting to round the Devil’s Elbow on day two, the tiny brass gasoline tap shook itself shut and promptly starved the engine of fuel, stalling it to a dead stop. A moment’s mystif
ication, and then a swift turn of the tap, and all was well again—a foolish embarrassment, but hardly much cause for dismay.

  Otherwise, all was faultless, and the car collected an omnium gatherum of awards and medals after its five days in Scotland—whereupon Johnson, eager to make as much of a splash in the papers as he could, persuaded the hapless RAC man to stay aboard, and turned south for Glasgow, bound for London yet again. They went, by way of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Darlington, Leeds, Manchester, and Coventry, to the RAC clubhouse on Piccadilly. Then they turned around and headed back north once more, eventually doing so no fewer than twenty-seven times more. The car seemed to love it, simply refused to quit. The RAC inspector and various members of the motoring press stopped by to see the machine slide its way back and forth across England and Scotland like a shuttle on a lanolin-slicked loom, back and forth, back and forth.

  Stunts that now seem routine were performed for the first time: a penny piece was balanced on its edge on top of the radiator, the engine was revved to full power, and all professed awe as the coin remained upright, imperturbable and undisturbed. Likewise, a brimful wineglass, together with a freshly made martini lapping its meniscus against a frosted rim, were positioned on the radiator’s pediment. The driver was instructed to press the accelerator to the floor and let the full thrashing power of the six-cylinder monster do its worst. In the glassware: not a ripple, not a swish, not a spill. The martini was neither shaken nor stirred by the wrath of the engine, and was afterward said to have tasted fine.

  The 40/50’s engine was so quiet, said the man from Autocar, that it was as though a sewing machine had been hidden beneath the hood. Even though it had the looks of a thumping marine engine, its full-throttle sibilance suggested that within the bowels of the car there lurked a device made for threading slivers of waxed cotton through a chemise of light silk. It most certainly was not the sound of a juggernaut built to power six thousand pounds of automobile and four bearded and burly passengers uphill through a drenching nighttime downpour at eighty miles an hour.

  Claude Johnson called a halt to the driving test only on August 8, after forty days of nonstop running, after 14,371 miles had been run without a single involuntary stop—aside from the shut-gasoline-tap stall back up in Scotland, and aside from the halts caused by blowing tires, which had a tendency to fail interminably and inevitably. Servicing of the car had to be accomplished at night, when the drivers were asleep. The only serious work, scheduled before the team left, had been to grind the valves—it was a job that took eight and a half hours, and like most of the procedures that involved Rolls-Royce cars, it was done by hand, slowly, meticulously, and perfectly.

  And then the marathon test was over. Now, with the car cooling and creaking and resting in London, Johnson demanded it to be stripped down to its essentials and rebuilt, as new. So every panel and portion of fascia and marquetry piece was removed, RAC men hoisted the enormous engine from the chassis, the transmission linkage was disassembled from the wheels and the gearbox, the brakes were dismantled, and the electrical equipment disconnected. Then a small army of men with micrometers fanned out. Each measuring device had its calipers set to the exact dimensions of the Ghost when it had been delivered on April 13, some 117 days before.

  In the engine, the gearbox, and the brakes there was not even the slightest evidence of wear. There was no measurable difference between the engine’s condition back in April and now in August; between the state of the car’s most crucial components when they were new and now, after they had been hard driven and manifestly well used. Bringing the car back to its original condition required only “the replacing of two front wheel pivot pins, a steering rod tie pin, the ball tip of the steering lever, the magneto driving joint, a fan belt and a petrol strainer. The steering ball joint’s sleeve was refitted and the valves were reground.”

  The RAC report stated unequivocally that had this car been in the possession of a private owner, none of the work would have been either needed or undertaken. As it had now been done for the RAC, however, a bill had to be sent: the total cost of the necessary parts and labor after the Silver Ghost’s fifteen thousand miles of arduous travel was a scant twenty-eight pounds, five shillings. A Rolls-Royce, headlined the newspapers, was so indestructibly well made that it might almost be said to be economical to buy, its purchase an investment. There was much fuss in the magazines, with pictures and eyewitness accounts seemingly everywhere.

  You could buy a Ghost chassis alone (the frame, wheels, and machinery) for £980, initially. Over the twenty years when Ghosts were manufactured, the price rose to an eventual £1,850 in 1923. A total of 7,876 Silver Ghost chassis were manufactured. So popular were the cars among American buyers that a factory was opened in Springfield, Massachusetts—the city where, one might recall from earlier in this story, mass production began, though of guns, not cars—and in both factories, in Derby and Springfield, the actual method of making the cars was much the same, time-honored, customary. It was a method of making that would be profoundly different from the way Ford motorcars would be made, at almost exactly the same time.

  A plan was first chalked out on the factory floor; the iron and ashwood parts of the car’s frame were then welded and bolted and riveted over the template, all the pieces propped and supported on stanchions until the moment that the axles were swung down from above and the wheels attached, after which the assembly could stand in one place on its own four wheels, wooden chocks preventing it from moving.

  An overhead traveling crane would then bring in the engine, already assembled, for the most part, by hand in a distant part of the same factory. It was a heavy thing, tricky to maneuver, but it would be lowered carefully into position just behind the front wheels, after which the transmission and the gearbox and the universal joint and the propeller shaft and the connection to the rear axles would be made to fit in behind it. The steering gear and linkage would then be hand-assembled and bolted into place on the front wheels and connected by worm gears to the steering wheel, which would be placed behind the engine and to the side of the great gearbox, with its shift lever and its three and, later, four forward gears. The brakes would be shimmied into place, and the levers and linkages and, in time, the slender hydraulic pipes would be connected and sealed and filled with fluid. The batteries would be connected; anacondas of electrical wires would be folded around the engine and along to where the lights and the horn and the various indicators were positioned.

  The radiator, that emblematically Greek columnar front end of the car that remains its most recognizable component still today, would have been welded and brazed and polished by a man who had been doing the same thing for all his time with the company. It would then be gently and lovingly and, in truth, reverentially brought to the front of the new machine and bolted into place, polished once again, and connected to the cooling systems, and with the fan to draw air through its silver vanes to keep the engine water from boiling. Lubricants of various kinds and viscosities would be pumped and poured and injected into a variety of locations within the fast-complicating mess of mechanicals, until the moment when fuel would be poured into the tank, the crank would be turned, and the new engine would cough and splutter and start, and then quiet itself to a low murmur. In the early days, all the workers in the factory would stop for a moment to hear its purr and think of it as a newborn, and they the parental team, proud and thrilled.

  And then the men from the coach-building companies (usually Park Ward, H. J. Mulliner, J. Gurney Nutting, Barker, or Freestone and Webb) would come take the chassis away and add the carefully sculpted body and the veneers and the carpets and the glass and all those additions that interest the engineers so comparatively little, but that attract the customers far more than the components that actually make the whole confection work.

  And all that was left were the chalk marks on the factory floor, and in due time, another set of hollow-steel struts would be laid out on top of the template they had made and would be bolted and riv
eted together as before, and then axles inserted and the assembly lifted onto its wheels and yet more parts would be brought to it and confected into yet another car—and the whole process, slow and painstaking and reverential and shipyard-like, would begin again, and in due course, another Silver Ghost chassis would slide through the doors, eight thousand of them over the subsequent four thousand working days of the eighteen years of that model’s production, at a rate of two cars a day. Just two cars a day.

  The year after the nonstop running experiment had been successfully conducted, and when all the fuss and bother of its achievement was dying down, Charles Rolls purred his explanation for the car’s success. Why, he was asked, did his factory, so fully equipped and manned as it was, not simply produce thousands of cars? Why just two, when it was possible to produce two hundred, or two thousand?

  In the first place the class of man who would be quite acceptable in ordinary engineering works would be quite unsuitable for us and for our standard of work . . . To produce the most perfect cars you must have the most perfect workmen, and having got these workmen, it is then our aim to educate them so that each man in these works can do his particular work better than anyone else in the world . . . We have always believed that the construction of a motor car which, while possessing every degree of necessary rigidity and strength, was of less weight than other similar cars, is largely a metal question. We consider that the success of the Rolls-Royce and its extraordinary durability and low cost of upkeep, as exemplified in the 15,000 miles trial of last year, is entirely due to scientific design, to the original research work and close study of metals which has been made by Mr. Royce and his assistants in the Physical Laboratory of this Company. We regard this as perhaps the most important department in the works.