Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Henry Leland (right) and Robert Faulconer

  Although each was an unstinting perfectionist, the contrast between the make-it-up-as-you-go, trial-and-error Ford and the methodical, punctilious Leland was acute. Predictably, they couldn’t stand each other, though their skills were complementary and they might have made a superb team.

  Leland wasted no time weighing in—he was critical of Ford’s methods, his motor, and the practices in his shop. In order to be successful in marketing the automobile to a wide audience, Leland insisted, parts and components had to be engineered and fabricated so precisely as to be interchangeable. (Although Ford gave him no credit, this would become the first principle of assembly line production.) Although in theory the two men were to work together, Leland ensured there was no chance of that, probably with the board’s approval. Ford resigned.

  The 1905 Cadillac

  The investors were relieved to see him go—in their eyes, he had rewarded extreme forbearance by squandering large sums of their money, by this time more than $100,000 of it. And in Leland they had not only an able replacement but a man who took his commitments seriously. Ford got some cash—less than $1,000—the drawings to a racing car that had not yet been built, and the rights to a carburetor he wished to patent. He departed with a record of two failed companies and one no-decision.

  “The Henry Ford Company,” obviously, would no longer do as a corporate moniker. To replace it, Leland and his partners chose the name of the explorer who had founded Detroit. And so the Cadillac Automobile Company was born. While the company never approached the vast profits that Ford would accrue in the coming years, Cadillac established itself as the manufacturer of perhaps the finest-made and most reliable cars in the United States, and returned a tidy profit to its investors in the process.

  —

  Tom Cooper’s mining adventure lasted only a few months, after which he returned to Detroit to renew his race car discussion with Ford. Ford was taken with Cooper—although that would change—and they agreed to pursue the racing idea together. Details of the bargain they struck were never made public, but it is generally assumed that Cooper put up the money, or at least the lion’s share of it, so that Ford could build him the fastest race car in the world. And that is what Ford proceeded to do.

  Once again, Oliver Barthel was responsible for most of the basic design, which was revolutionary, although it was Cooper who suggested an extra-wide wheelbase and low center of gravity. Harold Wills drew up the plans and he and Ford spent long, cold nights in the shop refining them until they had just what they wanted.

  Their product was a 10-foot-long stripped-down monster with a wood-and-metal frame. Its massive four-cylinder motor could achieve as much as 100 horsepower. Neither the engine, the carburetor, nor the lubricating system was shielded, so not only was the machine deafening, it also spewed oil that covered the driver from head to foot. To steer, Ford had installed what he called a “two-handed tiller,” a horizontal bar with vertical extenders on either end, mounted crosswise on a post that rose from between the driver’s legs. The driver would steer by means of the extenders, much as a bicycle racer might. The hand and forearm strength required just to keep so powerful a machine steady would be prodigious, to say nothing of keeping it from flying off in the turns. “Controlling the fastest car of today was nothing as compared to controlling that car,” Ford wrote later. “The steering wheel had not yet been thought of. Holding the car in line required all the strength of a strong man.”16 (Ford had obviously forgotten that Sweepstakes, his own racer, had been fitted with a steering wheel donated by Alexander Winton.)

  But the speed the racer could generate was unprecedented: all it needed was a driver sufficiently skilled—or foolhardy—to take the tiller and propel it to glory. And it wasn’t going to be one of the builders. Ford drove his new creation on a test run and later described the experience: “The roar of those cylinders alone was enough to half kill a man. There was only one seat. One life to a car was enough. I tried out the cars. Cooper tried out the cars. We let them out at full speed. I cannot quite describe the sensation. Going over Niagara Falls would have been but a pastime after a ride in one of them.” There would be no repeat performance. “I did not want to take the responsibility of racing [it]…neither did Cooper.”

  But Cooper thought he knew someone who would. “He said he knew a man who lived on speed, that nothing could go too fast for him.”17 Cooper’s man was a former water boy on a railroad gang and kitchen helper in an insane asylum who had turned to bicycle racing, where he had acquired a reputation as a ferocious and fearless competitor. His name was Berna Eli Oldfield, but he went by “Barney.”

  Cooper wired to Salt Lake City, where Oldfield was engaged in some indeterminate pursuit. Oldfield agreed immediately and left for Detroit. “He had never driven a motorcar,” Ford noted, “but he liked the idea of trying it. He said he would try anything once.”

  Neither Ford nor Cooper realized that they had engaged a man who would become the most famous racing driver in American history. “It took us only a week to teach him how to drive,” Ford noted, with an uncharacteristic touch of awe. “The man did not know what fear was. All that he had to learn was how to control the monster.”

  Only Henry Leland could create machines that were truly interchangeable, but Ford had built two more or less identical models. One, painted yellow, he called the 999, after a record-setting New York Central locomotive, and the other, painted red, was christened the Arrow, but was later referred to in the press and trade journals as the Red Devil. Under the terms of their deal, Ford owned the 999 and Cooper the Arrow. Oldfield did most of his driving on the 999 and quickly confirmed the wisdom of summoning him from the west.

  For reasons never made totally clear, in early October 1902, Ford sold the 999 back to Cooper. Clara was pleased with the decision, declaring her husband “lucky to be rid of him. He caught [Cooper] in a number of sneaky tricks. He was looking out for Cooper and Cooper only.” She added a final, damning condemnation. “He thinks too much of low down women to suit me.”18 Despite the intensity of Clara’s denunciations, however, there was no indication from Ford of dissatisfaction with Cooper’s input or the partnership. And he certainly wasn’t dissatisfied with Cooper’s money. In My Life and Work, where Ford was happy to take shots at anyone he felt had wronged him—and the list wasn’t short—the dissolution of the Cooper partnership is not mentioned at all.

  Ford, Oldfield, and the 999

  Whatever the cause, the timing was curious. By the end of September, Oldfield was demonstrating the sort of open-throttle proficiency that would make him almost unbeatable. He drove 999 all out, even through the turns, which perhaps no other man would have had the skill or daring to do. And two weeks after the sale, on October 23, 1902, during the second running of the Grosse Pointe Sweepstakes, the 999 was scheduled to go up against Alexander Winton, who would sport a new and powerful machine he had called the Bullet.

  Rain forced two consecutive postponements of the race. Finally, on October 24, the track was deemed sufficiently dry to begin the two-day event. As in the previous year, the first day belonged to Winton. His 2¼-ton Bullet completed 5 miles in 5 minutes 20 seconds, the last mile of which was 1:04.8, breaking Ford’s record. Oldfield, in the equally weighty 999, completed a 2-mile run in 2:13. Winton also triumphed in a 10-mile race that Cooper and Oldfield hadn’t entered. In that victory, Winton kept the Bullet on track after another car, driven by J. D. Maxwell, collided with his during an aborted attempt to pass and then went somersaulting across the infield, “dashing the machine to pieces.” Maxwell was thrown free—otherwise he almost certainly would have been killed.

  The crash was widely covered in the press, but it was the next day’s confrontation that thousands of Detroiters had waited to see. Although this time Ford and Winton would not meet in a match race, none of the other competitors, including a Benz, was considered a threat to the two main combatants.

  As Motor World r
eported, “The Cooper racer, a huge, ungainly looking monster with no compensating gear, roaring and pounding in a fearful way, was driven wildcap fashion by Barney Oldfield, who tore off miles at a terrific clip, establishing a track record of 1.04⅕ and doing the five miles in 5.28.”

  Winton’s improved racer was once again every bit as fast and powerful as Ford’s creation—the 999 could not match the Bullet’s time from the previous day—but Winton seemed cursed when racing against Ford-built machines. Oldfield, off the mark at full throttle and never braking, jumped to an early lead, but soon the Bullet was closing the gap. After the first mile, the Winton began to misfire and overheat. Oldfield pulled away, and eventually the Bullet was forced to retire. The Benz finished a distant second.

  “It seems incredible,” Motor World exulted, “but it is asserted by Cooper that Oldfield had never driven any kind of an automobile two days before [actually two months] and the ex–bicycle rider certainly showed himself a man of nerve. His performance was a hair-raising one, and local pride in his victory made his win popular.”19 Oldfield “was carried from his machine to the judges’ stand on the shoulders of admirers who rushed out on the track by the hundreds.”

  Ford, who had not bothered to attend the race—it is a distinct possibility he thought the 999 would lose—was nonetheless happy to join in the celebration. In the same issue of Motor World, Ford issued a (paid-for) testimonial in an advertisement for the G & J Tire Company.

  GENTLEMEN—In reference to the automobile tires I ordered from you to be placed on my racer, I wish to state that the tires were placed on the machine the first of last June and I have not had to pump them up since that time. The machine entered the last races held here on the Grosse Pointe Track, October 25th, and being on the track with five other machines, it had to make some very sharp turns while passing some of the slower machines on the curves. The tires held the curves very well for such high speed. The machine broke the world’s record, on a circular track, for five miles, the time being 5 minutes, 28 seconds. Yours respectfully, HENRY FORD.20

  From there, Oldfield and Cooper barnstormed across the Midwest, racing against all comers—or if none were available, racing the 999 against the Red Devil, which often featured Spider Huff at the tiller. Oldfield would soon set world speed records for every distance from 1 to 5 miles, and six weeks after the race against Winton he came within a second of the mile-a-minute barrier.

  Just how difficult and dangerous the 999 was for anyone other than Oldfield to control was pointed out in September 1903 at the Wisconsin State Fair. With Barney recovering from injuries suffered in a race in Detroit, a twenty-two-year-old would-be racer named George Day took the tiller in a match against Spider Huff in the Red Devil.

  Day, who had been a car salesman and mechanic but had never before piloted a race car, nonetheless felt certain he could set a speed record. He wired his parents in Columbus, Ohio, to ask their permission to go against Huff. His parents refused, but Day decided to race anyway. The result was predictable.

  In making the turn around the north end of the track, Day’s machine turned a complete somersault, crushing the life out of the daring operator, and came to a standstill, a wreck. Day lay on the track with a fractured skull, his collarbone broken and his left arm fractured in four places and the flesh torn from his right hand. Blood gushed from his nose, mouth, ears and eyes as he gasped a few expiring breaths.21

  Barney Oldfield went on to unprecedented fame. During the course of his two-decade career, he had so many crashes, some at breakneck speed or around hairpin turns, that newspapers eventually called him “that specialist in averted suicide.” With a flair for self-promotion and the willingness, even perhaps eagerness, to risk his life, he became the most famous man ever to pilot a racing car. As Sports Illustrated observed in a retrospective:

  Even at his worst he was one of the most colorful figures the sport has ever known, a square-shouldered, loud-talking, lovable, brash ruffian with a strong flair for the dramatic and a canny knowledge of his public. He clenched an unlit cigar stub between his teeth as he drove—and that became one of his famous trademarks. He sent squads of publicity men ahead of him with large circus-type posters flamboyantly announcing the appearance of the “Master Driver of the World.”

  He was the first American to drive a mile a minute in an automobile; he claimed every world’s record from one to 50 miles in the Peerless Green Dragon; he set a new mark (131.724 mph) at Daytona Beach in 1910 in his powerful Lightning Benz; he became the undisputed king of the dirt tracks, winning hundreds of exhibition and match races; he tamed the deadliest racing machine in America, the front-drive Killer Christie, in which he set a new lap record at Indianapolis in 1916 the day before the classic “500.” Later, with the treacherous Christie, which had brought near-death to its inventor and injured many others who could not master its wicked fishtailing rear end, he engaged stunt flyer Lincoln Beachey in special exhibition matches billed as the Deadly Flying Machine vs. the Killer Automobile! In 1917, he went into semiretirement, the idol of his generation, having competed in over 2,000 events during his fabled career.22

  Oldfield survived in the public mind long after he ceased to drive. “Who do you think you are? Barney Oldfield?” became shorthand for fast, reckless driving, and the term was used for decades.

  At one point, Oldfield and Ford supposedly had this exchange, which Oldfield oft repeated but Ford did not. When Ford said, “You made me and I made you,” Oldfield replied, “I did a damn sight better for you than you did for me.”

  Race between Lincoln Beachey and Barney Oldfield

  Which man did more for the other is open to question, but what Barney Oldfield did do in the 999 was put Henry Ford directly in the path of George Selden.

  * * *

  *1 Winton also set a number of speed and distance records during the same period, winning purses as lush as $5,000.

  *2 Émile Mors was the first man to employ a V-shaped arrangement in his motors. By the time Fournier arrived in the United States, Mors racers had eclipsed all others, save the Panhard.

  CHAPTER 10

  The automobile saga overflows with incongruities. In one of the most glaring, the Selden patent was put into play only because of the failure of another technology, one that was originally seen as the future of motorized travel and which contemporary automakers are desperate to revive—the electric car. In fact, it was not George Selden who sought to enforce his patent on a “road-locomotive propelled by a liquid-hydrocarbon engine of the compression type” but rather a consortium of Wall Street opportunists who had gained control of a corporation known as the Electric Vehicle Company.

  Electric Vehicle manifested the sort of evolutionary gestation common to companies in eras of technological upheaval. Even by the Wild West standards of early twentieth-century business, the company qualifies as a unique case study in both forward-thinking entrepreneurship and gross mismanagement. At the apex of the steep upward trajectory and equally precipitous fall of the electric automobile was a remarkable German immigrant named Isaac Leopold Rice.

  Rice was born in Bavaria in 1850, but his family emigrated to Milwaukee when he was six, then moved to Philadelphia four years later.1 A chess prodigy and classically trained musician, young Isaac was sent to Paris and London for his schooling. As a teenager, he supported himself by teaching piano, a vocation he continued when he returned to America in 1869. Rice settled in New York and, in addition to teaching music and languages, wrote for local newspapers and published two books on musical theory, What Is Music? and How Geometrical Lines Have Their Counterparts in Music. Each was well received but hardly a boon financially. Deciding that he’d rather be rich than poor, at age twenty-eight Rice enrolled in Columbia College of Law, from which he graduated cum laude two years later. He established a practice that specialized in railroad law, immensely lucrative at the time, while also serving as a lecturer and librarian at Columbia’s new School of Political Science.2 In addition, he wrote schola
rly pieces for other journals, including a scathing critique of Herbert Spencer’s theories of “social Darwinism” in 1883 for the North American Review.3

  Rice’s railroad work was not confined to legal briefs. He insisted on investing in the companies he represented, and therein demonstrated a flair for creative financing that made him quite wealthy in only a few years. In 1884, he was appointed as sole attorney for the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad Company, which, after he supervised a financial restructuring, made him even wealthier. The following year, Rice married Julia Hyneman Barnett of New Orleans, one of the first women to practice medicine in the United States. Also in 1885, he founded Forum, a magazine that published highbrow articles on politics and finance, theater reviews, and political and literary commentary. Thomas Hardy, Jules Verne, and Henry Cabot Lodge would be among the magazine’s contributors. Rice continued to publish Forum until 1910.

  Although the demands on his time from the magazine and his various business dealings were extensive—he had resigned from Columbia in 1886 to work exclusively on corporate restructurings—Rice was never far from the chessboard. (He was never far from Mrs. Rice either: they quickly had six children.)*1 In 1889, he retired from the law to play chess full-time and became a patron of the game. He was elected the president of the Manhattan Chess Club—the most important in the United States—after he helped pay to move the club to new quarters. There he played a long series of practice games with world champion Wilhelm Steinitz, who had won the title in a tournament at the club three years earlier. In 1895, while experimenting with a series of moves called the Kieseritzky Gambit, Rice discovered a variation in which a knight is sacrificed. To tout the Rice Gambit, as he modestly dubbed it, Rice paid some of the world’s most eminent players, including José Maria Capablanca, Emanuel Lasker, and Mikhail Chigorin, to analyze his discovery—favorably, of course. He also sponsored chess tournaments with the Rice Gambit required in the opening. He ultimately spent some $50,000 on promotion.*2