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

  Advance praise for

  DRIVE!

  “In suitably fast-paced prose, Goldstone tells the enthralling story of the fraught early days of the ‘Horseless Age.’ The cast in the high-stakes battle includes brilliant engineers, Gilded Age tycoons, and reckless daredevils both on the track and in the boardroom—a heady mix of motors, money, and testosterone. Silicon Valley’s billionaires have nothing on these guys for either ingenuity or ruthlessness.”

  —ROSS KING, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome

  “Drive! is an exquisite treasure. Titanic court battles; personal feuds among robber barons; hair-raising, death-defying early automobile races; and a slice of history, beautifully researched and written, that shaped the country in the early twentieth century—there is something in this book for all lovers of epic, transformative struggles.”

  —DALE OESTERLE, Reese Chair, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University

  “A wonderful, story-filled saga of the early days of the auto age…While aspects of Goldstone’s book will be familiar to auto buffs, the story is so compelling and well-crafted that most readers will be swept up in his vivid re-creation of a bygone era. The book abounds with detailed accounts of races, auto shows, and heroic cross-country journeys and explains in plain English the advances in automotive engineering that transformed early vehicles from playthings of the wealthy to functional, low-cost cars for the masses. ‘Horse Is Doomed,’ read one headline in 1895. This highly readable popular history tells why.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  Copyright © 2016 by Lawrence Goldstone

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All photos courtesy of the Library of Congress unless otherwise indicated.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Goldstone, Lawrence, author.

  Title: Drive! : Henry Ford, George Selden, and the race to invent the auto age / Lawrence Goldstone.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016002581 (print) | LCCN 2016010457 (ebook) | ISBN 9780553394184 (hardback) | ISBN 9780553394191 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Automobiles—History. | Automobile industry and trade—History. | Automobiles—Design and construction—History. | Automobile driving—History. | Transportation, Automotive—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | TRANSPORTATION / Automotive / History. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Science & Technology.

  Classification: LCC TL15 .G645 2016 (print) | LCC TL15 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/762922209041—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002581

  ebook ISBN 9780553394191

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson

  Cover photographs: Henry Ford, courtesy of The Henry Ford; George Selden © PhotoQuest/Getty Images; velodrome photos by Maurice-Louis Branger © Roger-Viollet/The Image Works

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: A Day in Court

  Chapter 1: Power in a Tube

  Chapter 2: The Man Who Would Be King

  Chapter 3: Made in Germany . . .

  Chapter 4: . . . Perfected in France

  Chapter 5: An Uneasy Romance with the Horse

  Chapter 6: Early Americans

  Chapter 7: The Self-Created Man

  Chapter 8: Speed

  Chapter 9: A Road of One’s Own

  Chapter 10: The Once and Future Car

  Chapter 11: Selden Redux

  Chapter 12: Ford Begins His Alphabet

  Chapter 13: Man and Dog Over the Rockies

  Chapter 14: Willie K. Comes Home

  Chapter 15: Collision

  Chapter 16: Willie K.’s Road

  Chapter 17: Palace Coup

  Chapter 18: The First Shot of the Revolution

  Chapter 19: Mr. Selden Comes to New York

  Chapter 20: Ford Motor Comes of Age

  Chapter 21: Around the World in 169 Days

  Chapter 22: Ford’s Phenomenon

  Chapter 23: False End of a Long Trail

  Chapter 24: It’s Never Over . . .

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Books by Lawrence Goldstone

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  On November 30, 1900, a ruling was handed down in United States district court in Buffalo, New York, that seemed certain to alter the landscape of America, both literally and figuratively. It would propel a few to wealth rivaling that of the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Belmonts and perhaps even approaching the Croesian heights of Pierpont Morgan himself. But for the majority of Americans, the decision foretold higher prices for a potentially inferior version of an item soon to become a necessity.

  On that day, Judge John R. Hazel affirmed that, according to a patent granted in 1895, the gasoline-powered automobile had been invented by one and only one man, George Baldwin Selden of Rochester, New York. As a result, each and every gasoline vehicle produced in the United States could be sold only with the permission of the inventor and must include tribute in the form of licensing fees, the amount to be determined by the patent’s owners.

  Any edict of this magnitude was bound to generate controversy, as Hazel’s did, but this decision featured a particular oddity that made the ruling positively bizarre: George Selden had never and would never attempt to build any form of the device he had claimed as his exclusive property.

  The lack of an actual product, however, promised to have as little impact on George Selden’s bank balance as it had on his lawsuit. In an era when monopoly interests were defended by the courts and venerated by large segments of the ruling elite, the granting of sweeping licenses on minimal evidence of utility was not considered outlandish. The beleaguered patent office, drowning in applications both serious and frivolous, had become little more than a way station on the road to riches. For the next eleven years, George Selden and the savvy financiers who had hitched their wagons to his paper star collected fees from virtually every major manufacturer of motorcars in the United States. Many of the companies who had been on the wrong side of Judge Hazel’s decision soon banded together to form a sort of sub-monopoly, funneling fees to the Selden cabal while they extracted even larger fees from their customers. And so might it have continued, except for the energy, conviction, and out-and-out stubbornness of one man, a prototypical revolutionary, seething with contempt for an established order that had rejected him and willing to take any risk to wrench away its power.

  In an irony that only two decades hence would elicit wonder—or guffaws—that man was Henry Ford.

  Ford, who would come to epitomize the very interests that he fought with ferocity in the Selden case, was, as his decade-long war of attrition began, a maverick with a dream—to bring the motorcar, then largely a plaything of the wealthy, to the villages and farms of America.

  Many Americans believe that Henry Ford invented the modern automobile, or at least the assembly line and mass production. He did neither. In fact, there is no significant invention in automotive technology for which Ford
could personally take credit. Nor was he the first man to consider the egalitarian possibilities of automobile marketing. Ford’s genius—like that of Steve Jobs a century later—was in his ability to improve and to adapt to the demands of the marketplace virtually any process or component with which he came in contact. To produce an automobile within the financial reach of the common man meant it had to be cheaper, lighter, and more reliable, so that was what Ford set his mind and his prodigious energies to create. Then, since the common man needs to be informed of the newest miracles of which he can avail himself, Ford, again like Jobs, also had both the ear and the flair for controlled overstatement that characterize the consummate salesman. That he projected cold sobriety in his public pronouncements made Ford’s self-promoting homilies that much more credible. Henry Ford might not have been the brilliant inventor of legend, but he was a man whose skills were the perfect match for his ambition.

  But inconsistencies and exaggerations should not eclipse achievement. Henry Ford succeeded where others failed. He envisioned and then created a product that fundamentally and profoundly transformed American society—and this from a man who left school at seventeen and, like many of the other great engineers of the period, was completely self-taught. He acquired some technical knowledge through books or pamphlets, but he developed his ideas almost exclusively through trial-and-error tinkering. From the day he began, he envisioned crisp, elegant solutions to problems of structure, function, and style. And unlike some of his contemporaries—Wilbur Wright, for example—Ford knew when to bring in associates and how to delegate tasks he either could not or should not undertake himself. He also knew when to abandon financial backers who were not up to his vision and to begin afresh. Ford’s business acumen was every bit as formidable as his skill as an engineer, quite possibly more so.

  When, toward the end of his life, Ford proclaimed, “I invented the modern age,” the statement did not prompt a great deal of skepticism and has not since. To understand how accurate the assertion is, however, one must place Ford’s work in the context of the development of the vehicle that he sold in such staggering numbers, yet such a portrait has remained elusive. Ford was obsessed with his public image. Biographies written by employees or sycophants, and one faux “autobiography” written with a publicity man, were ceaselessly promoted, while any article or book that delved into the darker corners of the Ford legend was mercilessly suppressed. His sense of public sentiment was acute—he knew never to whitewash. He was therefore painted not warts and all but rather with just enough strategically placed warts to render him both believable and touchingly human. In the end, Henry Ford marketed himself even more effectively than he did his Model T, and rendered himself a figure of such fascination and incongruity that, like a brilliant light shining in the dark, anyone looking into it would be blinded to the surrounding landscape.

  Of course, a man of Henry Ford’s stature cannot totally control what seeps into public view. The contradictions are renowned—the anti-Semite who freely employed Jews; the pacifist who hired thugs to repress his workers; the family man who hounded Edsel, his only son, to an early grave. But a key element of Ford’s great talent was in neutralizing the negative and even turning it to his advantage. (His apology to Jews in 1927—totally insincere, as it turned out—seemed so heartfelt that even Jewish leaders applauded his contrition.) Then there was pure mythology—the philosopher who was illiterate (Ford merely couldn’t spell); the engineering genius who could not read a blueprint (he could, and quite well).

  But of greater significance are the contradictions in the Ford factories, and these receive surprisingly scant discussion. Ford is almost universally credited with “democratizing” the workplace—employing whites, blacks, women, immigrants, the disabled, even criminals, and paying each of them the famous five dollars a day for eight hours of toil. As Charles Sorenson, forty years a Ford executive, put it, while comparing Ford to Abraham Lincoln, “One preserved the Union and emancipated the slaves. The other evolved an industrial system which revolutionized American life and work and emancipated workers from backbreaking toil.”1 But Ford’s workers were hardly emancipated, and their toil was as deadening as was a slave’s in the cotton fields. In fact, in democratizing the workplace, Henry Ford dehumanized work.

  Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, differentiated between “labor,” which she defined as mindless repetition to produce the bare necessities of life, and “work,” in which human beings produce something durable and lasting, using tools to create from the natural world objects that advance the species through pleasure and beauty. Work is prideful and creative and contributes to human progress; labor is, in essence, servitude. While members of Ford’s assembly line may have been part of a process that resulted in a “creation,” none produced anything as an individual, and thus his workers became, in fact, regressions in the human experience. Even worse, any employee who performed his or her task slower—or faster—than the regular, mind-numbing pace of the assembly line was dismissed. That the survivors were paid, even paid well, did not give them dignity or otherwise alter the bankruptcy of their working lives.

  Preoccupation with the man has, then, overwhelmed a study of the process—not only the process that created the Ford Motor Company but also the process that created the automobile age as a whole. Henry Ford, despite another common perception, came onstage not in Act I, Scene 1 of the automobile saga but when the drama was already well under way. Nor, when he did appear, was he alone onstage. Although Henry Ford capitalized on the immense demand for automobiles that allowed millions to be sold, he did not create it. That was done for him, mostly by an amazing array of race car drivers and adventurers who kept the dizzying advances in automotive technology on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Misstating his place in the evolution of the automobile distorts not only Ford’s contribution to its development but the nature of the innovative process itself, and of those who ultimately exact from it the greatest profit.

  —

  George Selden presents a different problem—how does history assess the contribution of an idea, especially one that neither was translated into practical reality nor became the direct inspiration for the innovations that followed? Selden is portrayed in most accounts as no more than an opportunist, a fraud, an unscrupulous lawyer who used his father’s wealth and political connections to subvert the patent system. Through chicanery, it is said, Selden was able to maintain rights to a device that he never intended to build but which secured him licensing fees from those who did the work he declined to undertake.

  But George Selden was not a fraud, at least when he originally filed his patent application in 1879. He was, at that point, a visionary, the first American to apply a nascent technology—internal combustion—to a vital and original purpose: a self-propelled “road carriage.” And gaining a patent for an unrealized theory was the last thing on Selden’s mind. With the assistant he had hired with funds from his own pocket, Selden fabricated a prototype three-cylinder motor and had every intention of building a vehicle to house it. Had he been able to access the wealth and political connections he is accused of relying on, George Selden almost certainly would have succeeded.

  But Selden’s father, rather than being an ally, refused to either contribute a dime to help his son achieve his dream or provide even a cursory introduction to any of the many wealthy and powerful men who were his intimates. Quite the reverse: Selden’s father contributed only ridicule and derision to his son’s efforts, so Selden was left to use his lawyer’s skills to at least profit from an idea he had before anyone else. If George Selden had secured sufficient funds to experiment and then build his machine, formative and with an inferior technology though it may have been, he might now be remembered with the same veneration as the Wright brothers. Instead, he is little more than one of history’s footnotes.

  Even as he was finally granted his patent in 1895, both Selden and his idea seemed doomed to oblivion. Then, in a stunning turnabout, the
Selden patent was rescued and used as a lever to create what might well have been the largest and most profitable monopoly the world had ever known. That edifice Henry Ford brought down and, in doing so, not only claimed much of those riches for himself but also created the culture that has been both America’s boon and its curse.

  —

  George Selden is not the only player in the automobile saga obscured by the blaze of Ford’s light. Almost a certainty, for example, is that not one American in ten thousand knows the name of the man who built the first modern automobile—and that he was neither American nor German.

  In fact, the odyssey of Selden and his patent, from obscurity to fame and back again, is a unique and enthralling drama played out on a stage populated by a cast of outsized and compelling personalities. In addition to Ford and Selden, there are Selden’s partners, William Collins Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan, voracious Wall Street speculators who could have been plucked from today’s headlines; myriad visionaries, including Isaac Rice, the chess master who is considered the father of the electric car and who founded the company that today makes America’s nuclear submarines; hustlers and swindlers; political bosses and political hacks, sometimes on the federal bench; impresarios such as William Kissam Vanderbilt II, heir to a great fortune, who began promoting car races in his teens, built Motor Parkway—the nation’s first road designed specifically for automobile traffic—and founded the Vanderbilt Cup, America’s first great annual road race; daredevils and race car drivers, including Barney Oldfield, who went from being a kitchen helper in an insane asylum to becoming the most famous driver of that or perhaps any era, who drove before crowds that sometimes exceeded a quarter million and would race against not only other cars but horses, locomotives, airplanes, and, in one case, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson; and master manipulators such as William Crapo “Billy” Durant, whose idea for a consortium of carmakers—which he called General Motors—became the model for automobile manufacturing and marketing for almost a century, and who, but for the shortsightedness of his bankers, would have persuaded Henry Ford to sell his company at what would have later proved to be a fire sale price.