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

by Lawrence Goldstone

  For a good part of the journey, especially in the West, there were still no roads on which an automobile could travel. Like Jackson in 1903, the automobiles bumped along railroad tracks, sometimes for hundreds of miles. Even then, not all the contestants ran under equal conditions. The Thomas was sometimes granted right-of-way on a stretch of track while the foreign contestants were denied the same privilege. In Indiana, large volunteer crews showed up to help dig the Flyer out of deeper snowdrifts than were encountered in New York, while the foreign crews were forced to get by with limited hospitality from the locals. On still another occasion, the Flyer was allowed to use a tunnel cut through a mountain, while the Italians were required to navigate a much longer route around.8

  For each of the four survivors, the trip across the United States, the first ever in winter, was dismal. Cars broke down regularly or were disabled in unforgiving terrain. Drivers were frequently injured in crashes or making repairs. The entire trip in the West was a series of ruts, chuckholes, knee-deep mud, and shoulder-high snow. In Wyoming, temperatures rarely rose above zero. More than once, drivers discovered that thieves had relieved them of personal possessions or spare parts. Even celebrations were not always to be savored, such as when arriving automobiles were pelted with oranges in Los Angeles. And except for the final jaunt across Europe, the United States leg was considered the least challenging on the course.

  That became clear as the Alaska run commenced. On March 28, the Flyer left by steamer for Seattle, where another vessel would transport the car to Valdez, a deepwater port on the southern coast, for what George MacAdam, the reporter that the Times had sent to replace Williams, termed “the most hazardous part of the whole 20,000 mile journey.” Insanity or no, MacAdam would ride in the Thomas for the remainder of the race. And MacAdam was not the only replacement on the Flyer. Roberts quit in frigid Wyoming, and neither of the two replacement drivers E. R. Thomas engaged would go farther than San Francisco. So George Schuster doubled up, becoming both driver and mechanic for what promised to be the most grueling automobile ride ever attempted. Eventually he would be joined by another mechanic, George Miller, so that the Flyer would cross Asia with a crew of three Georges.

  Tens of thousands of cheering San Franciscans had lined the streets when the American automobile arrived and tens of thousands saluted them as they left. But Alaska was an unexplored wasteland. The attempt to cross the vast expanse “is regarded as foredoomed to failure, but Schuster said the same predictions were made…after Indiana blizzards, Iowa mud, and trackless Wyoming, so he was not prepared to accept what anyone said of an automobile’s possibilities until he had tested them himself.”9 So remote was much of the route mapped out by the organizers that sending dispatches by telegraph would be impossible and the only means of communication would be by carrier pigeon.

  On April 6, Schuster, MacAdam, and the Flyer arrived in Valdez. They had traveled 4,836 miles, less than one-quarter of the planned total, in fifty-four days. The Züst had arrived in San Francisco, traveling 4,090 miles, but was forced to wait for a vessel to carry it north. The De Dion had just entered southern California, 3,586 miles, where it stopped for repairs. The Protos, also stopped for repairs, had not made it across Utah, a mere 2,616 miles from the start.

  The Flyer’s lead over the Züst might have been only 800 miles, but because of sailing time, that translated into an advantage of almost two weeks, an enormous edge in the Alaskan spring. “If the freezing weather continues on the trail, it might be possible for the Thomas car to go where the others could not follow a fortnight later.” But if the thaw had already set in, “it might necessitate stopping in the interior, out of reach of assistance that could readily reach the other cars coming later.”10

  Theories of the relative advantage or disadvantage of the Alaska trails turned out to be moot. Four days later, with the De Dion by then in San Francisco with the Züst, and the Protos still mired in Utah, Schuster concluded an inspection of the first leg of the mail trail to Fairbanks and declared it impassable. Not only was the trail too narrow for an automobile, something no one had thought to measure, but the “unprecedented” early spring thaw meant that the “crust of snow” that was supposed to support two- and three-ton automobiles had melted into a sea of mud.

  The Thomas had no choice but to return to Seattle and from there sail to Vladivostok. When the Flyer arrived in Washington State on April 17, Schuster discovered that the De Dion and the Züst had departed three days earlier, not for Alaska but for Yokohama, whence they would motor across Honshu and then sail to Vladivostok for the beginning of the run across Asia and Europe. E. R. Thomas telegraphed to formally ask for a time allowance, since his car, which could not depart until April 21 because of visa complications with Russia, had wasted more than three weeks in a fruitless journey north. The Protos had yet to leave Utah, but the head of the German team decided that his automobile should leave with the Flyer, which meant driving to Idaho and then packing the automobile on a railroad flatbed. As it turned out, the Protos did not depart until the following day, but it procured direct passage to Vladivostok—the Germans were the only crew able to locate the Russian legate before entering their territory—meaning that the car that was last and had driven only 2,966 miles would arrive five days before the lead car, which had driven 6,036 miles.

  During the passage across the Pacific, the committee refereeing the contest, made up entirely of Frenchmen, assessed a fifteen-day penalty to the De Dion, the Protos, and the Züst to account for the extra time the Thomas had taken on the detour to Alaska, and the Germans an additional fifteen days for shipping their car by rail from Pocatello, Idaho, to Seattle. They also required the other three entrants to await the Flyer’s arrival, so that they would all leave Vladivostok on the 10,000-mile race to Paris together.

  This was too much for the ever-excitable Albert de Dion, who was convinced he had been betrayed by his own countrymen. He promptly withdrew on the grounds that the remainder of the race was so similar to the Peking-Paris run—which he had lost—that it “has no longer any attractions for his firm.” The Züst was also said to be withdrawn at Vladivostok, a rumor that was quickly scotched from Milan by R. M. Vollmoeller, chairman of the Italian firm. What was more, a Züst would be entered in another cross–United States race, this one from New York to San Francisco and back, planned for the following summer. (Such was the passion the New York–to–Paris race had incited that no fewer than twenty automakers from the United States and Europe—though not Ford—immediately announced their intention to enter.)

  The racers left Vladivostok on May 24, and it became immediately apparent that whatever hardships had been encountered in the race across America would be dwarfed in Siberia. Spring thaw was in full flower, and only two days out the Times correspondent, traveling in the Thomas, wrote, “We have traversed an endless stretch of mud, save where the pools were so liquid that they no longer may bear the name of mud. The trans-Siberian post road, of which we talked so glibly while on route across the Pacific, has been untouched since the Trans-Siberian Railroad line has been opened, and its condition is simply execrable.” In order to allow horses to pass, “huge boulders and great logs” were thrown in the road and submerged just below the effluent surface. “Each time the wheels strike one of these sunken obstructions, it is hurled in the air, and we have all we can do to prevent ourselves from being thrown into the ditch. The fearful racking the machine gets is worse than anything that America affords by a thousandfold.” Bridges were rotted or washed away and the auto had to ford “stream after stream,” on each occasion requiring the crew to either lead the car across the mud bottom, often over their boot tops, or push from the rear. The crew ate hard-boiled eggs and canned meat for days on end, and the mud was so deep and persistent that for some stretches, progress for a day was measured in feet rather than miles. “We will push on with all dispatch to reach Irkutsk,” the correspondent wrote glumly, “but Irkutsk is still 1,884 miles away. It is more than 5,000 miles t
o Moscow.”11

  Over the next weeks, among other mishaps, the Thomas crew broke through a rotted bridge, stopped inches short of the edge of a 200-foot precipice, encountered wolves and bandits, scaled mountains, pushed the Flyer through mud and water, ate terrible food, baked and froze, and spent day after day being tossed about on bone-jarring stretches of nonexistent road. But every hardship in the automobile made for more compelling headlines at home. Americans awaited news of the Flyer’s progress with the same breathless anticipation devoted to cliffhanger serials.

  Finally, on July 29, the Flyer and its crew reached Paris, driving through a series of cheering crowds yelling “Vive la voiture américaine” that began 25 miles outside the city limits. American flags flew in the streets of the French capital, photographs of which would run prominently in American newspapers. The Protos had arrived four days earlier, but every one of the thousands who turned out to greet the Flyer—including the crew of the German machine—knew the Thomas was the winner. The journey had taken 169 days. The Züst would not pull into Paris until the end of September.

  Motor Age captured the spirit of the race—and its legacy—in a long article written just as the Flyer was to make its grand entry down the Champs-Élysées:

  From the sunlight and gayety [sic] of Times Square, through the arctic wilds of the Empire state, over the rutty roads of Ohio and into the unprecedented blizzard-ridden Indiana, thence on through the mud of Iowa, the alkali of Nebraska and Wyoming, the spring floods in the Wasatch range of the Rockies, the awful silence of the Utah deserts, the parched plateau of the Goldfield district, the menacing grandeur of the treacherous Death Valley and up through the dust of California, through San Luis Obispo and the triumphant entry into San Francisco, the passage to Seattle and the lonely but demonstrative trip of the Thomas car into the snow-bound and rocky trails of Alaska—a futile sticking to the original route that contemplated motoring north of the arctic circle where no wheeled vehicle ever had gone in the memory of white man, Indian or Eskimo—the runaway confederacy of the foreign cars across the Pacific Ocean to the Orient; the pluckiness of the Thomas crew in hastening to Japan, crossing the big island and arriving in Vladivostok in time to make it an even race with the Protos and Züst, and then the most marvelous narrative of motoring the world has ever known—the story of crossing Siberia, the Ural mountains, flying through Russia and the German empire and the grand climax of the run through France and into Paris…the New York-Paris racing machines have created a series of chapters in motoring that not only are novel, new and thrilling, but they have breathing through them all the slogan, “the world needs more good highways.”*1, 12

  The New York Times was even more glowing, although, as a sponsor, it could be forgiven a bit of self-congratulatory hyperbole. “As a sporting event,” it declared, “the New York to Paris event takes precedence over any contest ever organized in the world. There is scarcely a part of this entire distance that lacks its dramatic interest, while reviewing the whole journey in its entirety, it seems incredible.”13

  The victory was billed as a national triumph, and on their return George Schuster and mechanic George Miller were feted as American heroes, with newspapers across the nation reporting in detail on the incredible odds overcome to complete a journey of more than 15,000 miles in a machine that just a decade earlier could barely complete a run 1 percent of that. E. R. Thomas told reporters that “the victory of the American flag was more important to him than the victory of the Thomas car.”14

  Schuster and the Flyer on page one

  And the Flyer was certainly as much a celebrity as its drivers, described almost as a hero of battle. When it was unloaded in New York,

  as the last cover dropped away and it stood revealed, it told its own story of the hardships it had withstood and overcome. It was battered and worn from front to rear, but its inner mechanism was uninjured, as it soon showed. The skids that it bore on either side when it started out from Times Square on Lincoln’s Birthday had disappeared. The treads of its tires were torn and snagged, and its hood was dented and bent….Parts of the body had been cut away as souvenirs, while the whole surface was covered by a countless number of autographs gathered in every part of the world which it circled. The blue body was so covered with mud that it looked gray from a distance, but the mud and grime exactly fitted it.15

  With the victory of the Flyer, the automobile had passed its final test, dispelling any doubts of both its efficacy and its desirability. True, the price for a car such as the Flyer was prohibitive for the majority of Americans. But the automobile was no longer looked on as an affectation of the rich. The automobile was heroic, unconquerable, pioneering—so very American. There were few in the United States in that summer of 1908 who did not feel an urge, despite whatever economic hardships they might be enduring, to own an automobile of their own. For few objects in the history of this nation was there so much pent-up demand.*2

  Five weeks later, on September 27, 1908, the first Model T rolled out of the Piquette Avenue factory.

  * * *

  *1 Those highways were begun almost immediately, including, in 1912, the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental road (paved with asphalt), which began in Times Square and terminated in San Francisco.

  *2 Victory and acclaim did not help E. R. Thomas. The race had cost him many thousands of dollars—one hundred thousand, he told the press—and his company went bankrupt in 1912.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is purported to have said, “Power was lying in the streets, waiting for someone to pick it up.” In the case of the automobile, what was waiting in the streets to be picked up in the fall of 1908 was vast wealth. That the notion of a car for the masses had so little permeated the awareness of most automakers, particularly ALAM automakers, at a time when automobiles could not have been more prominent in the public consciousness; when contests between automobilists, either around the world or at home, were drawing tens of thousands of onlookers; when automobile shows reported record attendance; when every major newspaper virtually every day had some tale of the glamour or appeal of the automobile, now seems unfathomable.

  It certainly was unfathomable to Henry Ford. So, while most of his competitors vied to make a more prestigious automobile, a more luxurious automobile, a more unique automobile, Henry Ford set about making an automobile that was plain, dull, and precisely the same as every other, right down to the color of the paint. But his car would also be supremely functional, simple to operate, and built not to impress but to get its passengers reliably from one place to another, even over channels of mud or rock-strewn paths. And, he was convinced, it would sell in the millions.

  To build his creation, Ford contributed few if any specific design elements but instead provided a steady hand and an unshakable vision. He had hired talented people to do what he could not and had not been too proud or too headstrong to refuse to let them exploit their talents. Nor had he been too loyal to discard them when their usefulness had run its course. Ford shamelessly trawled for ideas from competitors and thought nothing of expropriating any process that would improve either the product or the means to manufacture it. While the Model T would have many features that were genuinely innovative, virtually every detail of its construction had its genesis outside the Ford team. Realizing that European engineering was generally superior to American, for example, Ford ordered foreign-built cars to be shipped across the Atlantic, specifically so that they could be dismantled, studied, and, if an advantage was found, copied.1

  Sometimes Europe came to him. After a race in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1905, Ford claimed to have picked up a small piece of metal from a valve stem of a wrecked French car and noticed it was lighter than he expected. The metal seemed to be used throughout the car, including the engine block. He brought the piece with him to Detroit, assigned a team to analyze it, and imported a metallurgist from Britain to help. The group eventually discovered it was a vanadium steel alloy, whic
h was not only lighter than ordinary steel but also almost three times stronger. To successfully produce vanadium steel, however, a blast furnace was required to run 300 degrees hotter than most American steel producers could manage. So Ford financed a steel mill in Canton, Ohio, that was willing to run its furnace at the requisite temperature. As a result, the Model T became the only American automobile to employ an essential component that was superior to anything else on the market.*1

  Europeans also were more advanced in carburetion technology and gearbox construction, so Ford borrowed liberally from those designs as well. While in almost every case Ford engineers improved on what they had borrowed, each improvement was given a name to denote its Ford origins. The vanadium steel alloy, for example, was advertised as “Ford Heat-Treated Steel.” And the “Ford Planetary Transmission” that he and his engineers proudly claimed as their own invention, while excellently wrought, had been borrowed from Panhard and others, who had received their inspiration from William Murdoch’s design, developed in the days of James Watt.2

  Ford later sought to perpetuate the notion that the development of his automobiles had followed a straight and rigorous path—in other words, that he had always known what he was doing. In his description of the Model T’s evolution, for example, he wrote, “The big thing is the product, and any hurry in getting into fabrication before designs are completed is just so much waste time. I spent twelve years before I had a Model T—which is what is known today as the Ford car—that suited me. We did not attempt to go into real production until we had a real product.”3 This, of course, is transparently untrue, as the very fact that he got to the Model T attests. But what Ford did do was continue to tinker with even his most successful models, like the N, until he had produced a quality product that precisely intersected the point of greatest consumer demand—and then he was smart enough to stick with it.