happy sense and in a larger measure than any military or political leader.1

1 For help in this chapter, the author is under obligation to many persons who were in contact with the events-some of whom supplied facts not easy to get, others who read the proofs at various stages-including:

General Leonard Wood, General R. E. Noble, General Walter D. McCaw, Colonel C. C. McCulloch, Jr., Doctor Juan Guiteras, Doctor Harvey Cushing, Doctor Theodore C. Lyster, Mrs. Marie D. Gorgas, Professor John H. Latane, Doctor Aristides Agramonte.

THE AUTOMOBILE EMERGES

A Popular Joke Which Marked a New Era. A Marvel
of the Nineties. Some Early Automobile Rides. Some
Pioneers of the "Horseless Vehicle." Steps in Its Develop-
ment. America's Debt to Europe. An Achievement of
Adaptation. Pioneers Who Survived. The Attitude of the
Public and of Bankers. Racing. Advertising and Salesman-
ship. Erroneous Popular Assumptions. The Beginnings of
"Quantity Production"; Its Social and Economic Effects.

SOME ten years or so before the period of this history began, in the childhood of persons who in 1925 had reached the age of fifty or so, there was current one of those popular jokes, an example of the type of humorous stories which are in themselves landmarks of popular history, and by which the arrival of new institutions can be marked. This particular joke went about by word of mouth, at the time the horse-drawn street-car began to pass, when the cable-car and the trolley-car were a novelty. Probably the circulation of this jibe was confined to word of mouth; for there was in the telling of it a slightly impish ribaldry which in itself is a mark of the passage of time, of the change in manners and point of view, which permits to be put to-day, in the most staid and respectable of print, a kind of slightly daring joke, such that, if it had been printed at all a generation ago, would have been printed only with the cautious use of chastely euphemistic dashes for words which, in a later generation, are not banned. This joke represented a Chinaman standing on the sidewalk, watching with inscrutable intentness the passage of a trolley-car; and

summing up the experience, from his point of view, in the remark: "No pushee, no pullee; but goee like hellee allee samee." For this and a world of similar jokes most of them, doubtless, adaptations of the remark with which primitive Mark Twains had epitomized the arrival of the floating log and the animal's back as means by which bold spirits facilitated their motions on the surface of the waters and the earth for this sort of popular humor there were several occasions during the decade or two preceding 1900 and since. A man who in 1925 was less than fifty years old had seen the invention of the trolley, its rise, and the beginning of its decline; had seen the rise of the bicycle, the peak of its use, and its decline; had seen the passing of the cable-car; had seen the passing of the horse-drawn street-car and bus; had seen the beginnings, the entire history so far of the automobile and of the airplane, as well.

On the streets of Chicago, in September, 1892, appeared a strange vehicle. "Ever since its arrival," said a contemporary account, "the sight of a well-loaded carriage moving along the streets at a spanking pace with no horses in front and apparently with nothing on board to give it motion, was a sight that has been too much, even for the wide-awake Chicagoan. It is most amusing to see the crowd gather whenever the vehicle appears. So great has been the curiosity that the owner when passing through the business section has had to appeal to the police to aid him in clearing the way."

The owner of this novelty of 1892, William Morrison, of Des Moines, Iowa, is credited with having been the first man in America to make an electric automobile electric as distinguished from steam and gasoline. In the automobile industry the word "first" is perilous to use; for there is no one person, as there is in the field of older inventions, to whom can be ascribed the credit of being

CREDIT FOR INVENTIONS

477

either the indisputable pioneer or, as yet, the popularly accepted one. If it were desired to set up a monument to the man primarily responsible for the presence, in the year 1925, of 17,000,000 automobiles in the United States, as there are monuments to inventors in other fields, it would be necessary, in this case, for the monument to be a composite figure, the features of which would need to be equitably distributed in the proportions of the claims made by many rivals and their partisans. If any schoolboy is asked who invented the steamboat, he replies Fitch"; if asked about the cotton-gin, he replies "Whitney"; if about the sewing-machine, "Howe"; if about the reaper and binder, "McCormick"; if about the steam-locomotive, "Stephenson." But no schoolboy, and not even any authority within the automobile world, is able, with equally instant certainty, or within the compactness of a single name, to say that any one man is the inventor of the automobile. Or, if any name is set up as entitled to priority of time or credit, the claim is hotly disputed by the partisans of others. Not only as to the automobile as a whole, but even as to most of its fundamental parts, there is no accepted certainty in the allocation of credit for invention.1

Doubtless one reason for the greater glibness with which we name the inventors of older mechanisms, like the sewing-machine and the steamboat, is the distance in time since the older machines were perfected. Doubtless it is partly due also to the fact that at the times when these older machines were invented there was less setting down of things in print-history was more generally in the custody of word-of-mouth tradition, and tradition usually exalts personality. Probably a more discriminating truth would say that in the case of these older inventions there were there, too, contributions 1 So far as any credit can be assigned, it must be to Europeans, not Americans.

from many different pioneers. And possibly, also, the schoolboy of a hundred years ahead of us, when asked who invented the automobile, may say "Henry Ford."

The best reason why no name is associated with invention of the automobile is that it was not an invention. Nobody invented it. Certainly nobody in America invented it. The automobile, in America especially, was an assembling, an adapting. Almost every adjunct to the automobile, as it was in 1900, had long been in use in other devices. The transmission, in one form or another, was an essential part of the lathes in every machine-shop and of the driving-wheel of most stationary engines. The frictionless bearing had been developed for the bicycle. The acetylene light was familiar to everybody. In short, the automobile was no more than a coordination and adaptation of old ideas and inventions, some of which, like the wheel, mingled their origins with the mists of antiquity. Possibly, in making such a comprehensive statement, we should except the electric spark used first by Benz in 1886 to ignite the explosive mixture in the cylinder of an engine, but even here it should be remembered that long before the human race had evolved intelligible speech, it was known that lightning could start fires: certainly Benjamin Franklin during a June thunder-storm in 1752 produced a real jump-spark with kite and key and his own good knuckles.

II

In the following table are a few of the mile-stones in the progress of what we know now as the automobile:

1678. The cannon. The modern gasoline-engine is mechanically and theoretically a development of the cannon, the chief difference being that in the automobile engine the place of the projectile is taken by a piston which returns on its path.