At any rate, Ford was ready to move on. He sold the quadricycle for $200 to a willing buyer named Charles Ainsley (or Annesly), who would be the first of tens of millions around the world to purchase a Ford vehicle, and then got to work on a new design, announcing his intention, for the first time, to produce a cheaper, lighter, more reliable car.*5
At this point, Ford, although remaining at Edison, seems to have attracted outside capital, some from Detroit’s new mayor, William Maybury—although none from Edison himself, who certainly could have afforded it. At this point, however, no contract was signed or agreement entered into. By July 1899, Ford had completed his second car, the one that R. W. Hanington would extol in his report, and one that would result in Ford acquiring even more capital from local men drawn to the idea of a simple, solid, reliable, and affordable car.
Ford took the money, but, to his investors’ consternation, instead of working on his automobile for the masses, he spent almost all of his time building cars for a far different purpose.
* * *
*1 Reden’s name is not mentioned in My Life and Work, although the incident is recounted in detail. Ford provided additional details, including the operator’s name, as part of his testimony in a lawsuit, which, like the autobiography, came decades later.
*2 There are numerous eyewitness accounts cited as well, particularly in Nevins’s work, all of which support Ford’s own story of his upbringing. Most were originally obtained by Ford employees, notably Simonds, or were otherwise gained under Ford Motor Company auspices after Ford had established himself very definitely as a man on whose good side one would choose to remain. By the time the later biographies were being researched, most of the remaining witnesses to Ford’s upbringing were in their eighties or even nineties and Henry Ford had become a mythical figure. Ford critics, who were vociferous and abundant, were not given nearly the same exposure.
*3 In addition to his mechanical achievements, King would become known as an artist, musician, poet, and mystic. He was generous, helping other would-be inventors, such as Ransom Olds, without asking anything in return, and was extraordinarily well liked. There are no reports of him ever conducting himself in business with the ruthlessness that characterized most industrialists.
*4 It lacked, for example, a bench seat for two. Ford had installed a bicycle seat instead.
*5 Ford bought the quadricycle back a few years later for $60, thus being perhaps the first man to demonstrate the depreciating value of used cars.
CHAPTER 8
Ford famously quipped that auto racing began five minutes after the second car was built. It took longer than that, but not much. If one accepts 1886, the year Karl Benz introduced his Motorwagen, as the dawn of the gasoline automobile age, and 1888, the year of the first sales, as the dawn of the industry, it took only six years for the first race to occur.1
From there, to meet the demands of the wildly popular new pastime of auto racing, the top speed of a gasoline-powered automobile had increased from approximately 15 miles per hour to more than 100 by 1904; six years after that, a Blitzen-Benz drove at more than 140 miles per hour. And while the view, commonly held in the United States, that the automobile was largely a creation of American ingenuity is fanciful, it was an American, albeit an expatriate, who made building a faster—and better—motorcar a matter of national pride and sent innovation off at a dizzying pace.
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James Gordon Bennett Jr., freewheeling and larger than life, was a human catalyst: a man who invented nothing, perfected nothing, and personally participated in almost none of the events he sponsored, but whose vision and patronage flung automobile technology and then aviation to a level of early sophistication it could not have achieved without him.
Bennett’s father founded The New York Herald and was one of the initial sponsors of the Associated Press. Bennett senior made the Herald such a magnet of controversy that he secreted a veritable arsenal in the walls behind his desk at the newspaper’s offices on lower Broadway to repel the crowds that often gathered outside and threatened to storm the building. As a result, the younger Bennett was sent to Europe for his education, though he returned to serve in the Union Navy during the Civil War. When he took over the Herald from his father in 1866, he focused on the sort of breathless, splashy journalism that could always be counted on to sell scads of newspapers. Bennett, for example, personally sent Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to search for David Livingstone, a journey that was followed meticulously and melodramatically in the pages of the Herald.
But Bennett’s greatest notoriety sprung from a series of outrageous personal incidents that were gleefully reported in every newspaper but his own. In the most celebrated of these, he arrived roaring drunk to either his own engagement party or a New Year’s fête at the New York townhouse of the couple who were slated to be his future in-laws and proceeded, in full view of the guests, to urinate into either the fireplace, a grand piano, or a punch bowl, depending on which account one believed. To no one’s surprise, the engagement was broken off, after which Bennett repaired to his three-hundred-foot yacht and sailed it to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. He didn’t marry until 1914, four years before his death at age seventy-seven.*1
In Paris, abandoning none of his eccentricities, he established a foreign edition of the Herald, which later evolved into the International Herald-Tribune.2 With thousands of wealthy Americans then spending most or all of their time in Europe, the Paris paper was a great success. Bennett also continued to run the New York paper, relying on shuttling staff or communicating both news and orders via transatlantic cable.*2 Unwilling to pay the exorbitant usage rates demanded by Jay Gould’s monopolists, Bennett created his own cable company, partnering in a cable-laying vessel that in 1912 was used to recover bodies from the wreck of the Titanic.
The one sport in which Bennett participated personally was yachting. He won the first transatlantic race in 1866, and then decided to offer a prize for his own yacht race—called, of course, the Gordon Bennett Cup—the progress and results of which would be prominently featured in the Herald. While the yacht race attracted some interest, seagoing contests aroused limited fervor, since spectators could view the boats only at the start and the finish. Bennett soon abandoned the yachting competition to seek a better idea.
In 1899, he found one. He combined his fascination with innovation, his love of adventure, and the constant search for new ways to sell newspapers in one grand sweep by sponsoring a Gordon Bennett Cup race for automobiles. The idea did not spring fully formed but rather was built on the wreckage of a previous scheme that Bennett could not coax to fruition.
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In 1894, Parisian Pierre Giffard, who owned Le Petit Journal, offered a hefty prize, 5,000 francs, to the winner of a 78-mile Paris-to-Rouen “reliability test” for voitures sans chevaux. The purse would not necessarily go to the driver who recorded the fastest time but rather for the best performance by a “practical road vehicle.” More than one hundred competitors sought entry, but Giffard’s minions selected only twenty-one to take part—thirteen gasoline-fueled vehicles and eight steam-powered. All but one of the gasoline vehicles were built by either the Peugeot brothers or Panhard et Levassor and used engines licensed under the Daimler patent. While the basic engine design might have been the Germans’, the race cars themselves were distinctly French. Émile Levassor had created a lightweight version of his front-engine road car whose sleek, aerodynamic lines made previous designs seem anachronistic.
Even had he not invited both Gottlieb Daimler and his son Paul to be guests of honor, that Giffard favored the gasoline cars was obvious. When a De Dion steam tractor chugged across the finish line first, it was not given the prize. Its bulk and weight, according to the organizers, rendered it “impractical”—it did, in fact, exceed the vaguely defined specifications in both categories—and so the prize was split between the second- and third-place finishers, a Panhard and a Peugeot. De Dion, a man one thought twice
about insulting, was awarded an “honorary” second-place finish. He grumbled but accepted the decision. To win their 2,500 francs, the winners had averaged a heady 11.5 miles per hour.
The public acclaim that accompanied the Paris-Rouen test begat a far more arduous event the following June. For this race, 732 miles from Paris to Bordeaux and back, there would, in theory, be no subjective criteria—the car with the fastest time would be the winner. Among the patrons contributing to the 30,000-franc prize were Gordon Bennett and another American, an extremely wealthy teenager named William Kissam Vanderbilt II.
Once again, gasoline-powered vehicles predominated—only one steam car was entered—with Émile Levassor’s high-speed, front-mounted-motor blueprint now used almost exclusively by the twenty-three entrants. Levassor himself had entered in a specially designed, 4.5-horsepower two-seater, capable of 18 miles per hour, on which he had fitted encased candles for headlights, making him the only entrant who could drive at night.*3 (All racers needed at least two seats because each driver was accompanied by a riding mechanic whose assignments included not only on-the-fly repairs and adjustments but also watching the rear for other vehicles.)*4
The organizers had estimated that four days would be required to complete the circuit, but Levassor, driving almost nonstop, reached the finish line in two. His friend and fellow race car driver Marquis Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat reported that Levassor “remained on his machine for fifty-three hours, and nearly forty-nine of these on the run.”3 After the arduous journey, Levassor seemed little the worse for wear. “He did not appear to be over-fatigued,” Chasseloup-Laubat observed. “He wrote his signature with a firm hand; we lunched together at Gillet’s, at the Porte Maillot; he was quite calm; he took with great relish a cup of bouillon, a couple of poached eggs, and two glasses of champagne; but he said that driving at night was dangerous, adding that having won he had the right to say such a race was not to be run another time at night.”
But Levassor’s satisfaction would be short-lived. Once again, the judges insisted on awarding prizes according to their whim, and Levassor was disqualified for using only a two-seater rather than the four-seat machine that the rules seemed to stipulate—although no one had thought to point that out to him earlier. The prize was awarded instead to a Peugeot that cruised into Porte Maillot a full eleven hours after the Panhard. In the true French spirit, however, the official result was ignored. In the press, Levassor was widely reported to have won, and when a plaque was placed at the site of the race’s end ten years afterward, it was Émile Levassor in his “Number 5” who was featured, not Paul Koechlin, the driver of the Peugeot.
The Paris-Bordeaux race brought automobile travel to the front pages of American newspapers. The publisher of one of those newspapers, Herman H. Kohlstaat of the Chicago Times-Herald, decided it was time to bring the thrill of racing to the United States. Kohlstaat, who had amassed a fortune in baked goods and restaurants, was one of the breed of gentlemen newspaper owners that were common at the time. On July 9, 1895, he announced sponsorship of an auto race from Chicago to Waukegan and back, a distance of 100 miles, to be run that November 2. (Kohlstaat’s original plan was to go all the way to Milwaukee, but the roads in southern Wisconsin were simply too primitive.) As Horseless Age announced:
With a desire to promote, encourage, and stimulate the invention, development, perfection, and general adoption of motor vehicles, the Times-Herald offers the following prizes, amounting to $5,000, divided as stated: First prize—$2,000 and a gold medal, the same being open to competition to the world. Second prize—$1,500 with a stipulation that in the event the first prize is awarded to a vehicle of foreign invention or manufacture, this prize shall go to the most successful American competitor. Third prize—$1,000. Fourth prize—$500. The third and fourth prizes are open to all competitors, foreign and American.4
There would be an additional contest to come up with a name for the machines that would be racing. At the time, vehicles were referred to by any number of terms, including “horseless carriage,” “motor carriage,” “motor car,” and “motor vehicle.” The Times-Herald’s readers submitted a number of entries, of which, on July 15, “motocycle,” the brainchild of the general manager of the New York Telephone Company, was declared the winner. It would not be for long, however—within months, “motocycle” had withered into disuse.
To Kohlstaat’s great satisfaction, he received nearly one hundred entries. But virtually all of them were from aspirants whose “motocycles” were still works in progress, including Charles King, who intended to adapt the machine he had piloted on the streets of Detroit to endure the rigors of a long-distance race. Eventually, however, King realized that he would never have it ready on time. He so informed the judges and was told that almost every other entrant had issued a similar communication. So few vehicles—a total of two—would actually be prepared to race on November 2 that the judges were forced to postpone the event until Thanksgiving Day, a four-week delay that could be problematic in often intemperate Chicago.
The two that were ready to go—an American-built Benz, driven by its manufacturer, Oscar Mueller, and a Duryea, driven by Frank, accompanied by Charles—staged an “exhibition run” on November 2, “in order not to disappoint the public.” A prize of $500 was offered, to be equally divided between them if they could complete the round-trip in less than thirteen hours. Mueller succeeded, but Duryea “was forced into a ditch by a careless farmer who swung his team of horses across the road, damaging the steering-gear and rear axle of his car and putting it out of the running.” Mueller therefore claimed the entire $500, while the Duryeas frantically attempted to repair their vehicle in time for the actual race.5
As Thanksgiving approached, the postponement appeared fortuitous, as more than thirty entrants announced their intention to compete—a gaggle, according to Hiram Percy Maxim, who was present as an observer, of “the most astounding assortment of mechanical monstrosities,”6 everything from the finely engineered two-cylinder gasoline automobile of the Duryea brothers to untried electric vehicles to hastily constructed motors attached tenuously to three-wheeled bicycle frames. To Maxim, the best-constructed vehicles were the Duryeas’ and Mueller’s Benz, which looked to him “like a machine shop on wheels.”
But conditions proved even more dreadful than normal for late November in Chicago. The night before the race, a storm deposited six inches of “wet, sticky snow” on the streets—drifts running to two feet—and temperatures dipped well below freezing. Although the day of the race dawned “bright and clear” and “a large snow plow drawn by four horses was hard at work clearing a place for the start,” the previous day’s weather and treacherous roads took their toll, and only six vehicles made it to the starting line.7 As a result, the course was shortened by almost half, with the run up the lakefront terminating at Evanston. King, who had been unable to meet even the extended deadline, was appointed an “umpire,” one of whom was assigned to each vehicle, King to Mueller’s Benz.
As the Times-Herald itself reported the next day, at the beginning of an enormous four-page spread, “Against tremendous odds, which perhaps demonstrated conclusively the practicability of the horseless carriage, the Times-Herald motocycle race was run yesterday. Through deep snow, and along ruts which would have tried horses to their utmost, six motocycles raced. Before half the course was covered three of the motocycles dropped out of the race, and the machine of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, of Springfield, Mass., arrived first at the winning post at 7:18 o’clock, after more than ten hours’ struggle through the snow.”8 The only other entrant to make it to the finish of the frigid, sometimes almost impassable course was Mueller’s Benz, which arrived a full ninety minutes later, with Oscar Mueller slumped next to Charles King, unconscious from the cold.
Charles Duryea and the winning car from Chicago
It might seem that a race whose entrants were winnowed down from almost one hundred to six, of whom only two completed the course, was a fail
ure. Precisely the opposite was the case. The Chicago race made an enormous splash, both for the event itself and for what Herman Kohlstaat wanted most—to prove the practicality of the automobile. Newspapers across the nation greeted the spectacle with enthusiasm, one offering a page-one headline that read, “Horse Is Doomed.”9 The significance of the race was affirmed by almost everyone who wrote about it:
The contest in every respect was most novel, and the performance of the winning vehicle the most remarkable in the history of motor vehicle contests….Thousands witnessed the fight of these vehicles against the fifty-four miles of slush which constituted the course from Jackson Park to Evanston and return. It was considered impossible that any motocycle would complete the course, and the prediction was freely made that not one of the contestants would make five miles….These tests have been in progress for ten days and have been followed with great interest by hundreds of manufacturers from all parts of the United States. These tests have proved of great value. The Paris-Bordeaux race is worthless from a scientific standpoint, but the contest just closed may result in the establishment of reliable data concerning what many consider the vehicle of the future.10
Hyperbole notwithstanding, the Chicago race was a turning point. Between the prize money and the spike of interest in automobiles, automaking suddenly became an enticing business opportunity, as Charles King so noted when he returned to Detroit and spoke with his protégé, Henry Ford.
Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age Page 9