Читать книгу Story of the automobile - H. L. Barber - Страница 10

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It would lead to the exhaustion of the reader were many details to be given showing how the makers made quantity production and economy of factory operation an assured thing. The largest rooms of wholly automatic machinery were equipped, so that a large amount of crude steel wires, rods, etc., practically go into a factory at one end and come out at the other, fully machined and ready to go into the assembly of a machine. Cylinder boring, all with one operation, takes the place of operations that required many hours. Progressive types of assembly of the finished components of the cars make factories look like the “last words in manufacturing.” Machining crankcases and work of that nature that required hours, is done in minutes. Aluminum, that magic metal of the early days of the automobile industry, when it was comparatively cheap, now enters so largely into engine and other parts that at its greatly increased price it is more than a magic metal. It is no uncommon thing to find in an automobile factory that a machine costing more than one hundred times the maker’s cost of an automobile, has been installed to hasten production.

In all the field of manufacturing there has not been wrought such magic as in gear cutting. Forges pound out tons of steel forms, but the most important machinery of a plant soon has these forms turned into gears and other machined parts for the assembly.

The medium priced car of today stands as the best exemplification of the approval of the Society of Automobile Engineers. This is an organization that has done so much for the manufacturer that most of the makers of cars are members. They point to the self-starter and the electric lighted car as the triumph of the Society of Automobile Engineers. And certainly from the original starter and the early lighting effects, enormous strides have been made in the industry. Fully equipped cars predominate now, where only a few years ago even tops were not provided with the car as sold on the floor.

The self-starter is considered one of the greatest of the improvements added to a good automobile. With this feature the car has become so useful to women that the manufacturers have realized big returns. Better than that, say some critics, is the verdict that the self-starter returned—the chauffeur is no longer an indispensible feature in car driving. Women master the handling of a car and with the machines requiring less mechanical attention, one might say, every season, woman accepts the gasoline car as her own. The number of women drivers has grown so wonderfully that the makers of cars have registered the woman driver as a constant factor. There’s no cranking of the car necessary, and the wearing of fine raiment and white shoes is Milady’s prerogative, even if she drives her car to the party herself. She handles a multi-cylinder car quite as readily and with the confidence of a man. The tires, always a problem, have demountable rims, or they may be set in spare wire wheels, and troubles on the road from blowouts and punctures no longer deter the woman driver. It would be difficult to get the details on the number of women drivers added to the list each season, but one of the best known automobile makers says that it is so large that he would make his fortune safe if he only made cars henceforth for women pilots. The entrance of the woman in such an important manner in the automobile driving situation has made the gas car maker lose all fear of the greater development of the electric car. Woman has played an important part in the real estate world, distinctly due to her eagerness to drive cars, by starting a movement towards suburbs. The suburbs are “farther out and yet closer” as one maker put it.