Читать книгу Story of the automobile - H. L. Barber - Страница 8

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With the new era of development in the early nineties came into prominence farseeing manufacturers who paid heed to the thought that the best way to put a fit and efficient motor car into the hands of the public was to test the car, its material and its mechanical practices, in some officially conducted series of reliability contests. Besides, it was urged there was a “romance of business” attached to the motor car industry that would lead to a greatly increased amount of publicity in the press.

The national annual reliability competitions grew into wonderful favor. Makers strove hard to win the reliability titles. The “Glidden” tours became the tests that attracted not only the attention of every automobile man, but the general public. The whole country became the testing ground. For several years these national events did well the work they were expected to perform. Automobile building received, perhaps, its most practical aid. Makers learned. They took advantage both of the mechanical data and the publicity. A complex but valuable adjunct of the national tours became popular—every region in which the American Automobile Association was a factor, and this organization continues to be a powerful aid to the industry, had its reliability or its endurance classic.

It has been said that the manufacturers of automobiles lost interest in national reliability tours after the test of 1911. Perhaps many did. But the truth, as told by a wonderfully efficient engineer, is that there remained nothing more that a national tour could teach the car builder. He had measured the power of his steel to withstand shock, he had calculated the efficiency of his motor to stand its daily tasks on a strenuous schedule, he had learned of the troubles of his rivals and he had spent his money liberally, at the direction of his engineering department, to make a car that would do anything a less skillful driver than a national tour pilot could ask of the machine. The national tour became a luxury. It was revived in 1913 on the long and strenuous grind from Minneapolis to the Rocky Mountains, and an immense amount of valuable information was the result. But the national tour seems to be now chiefly remembered by the occasional discourse of an engineer who tells of the long struggles in the mud and the hardships of sand and dust storms.

With the added development of the plants, came another reason why the national tour was not necessary. Testing tracks were added to the maker’s plant assets. Testing on the roads followed the block tests of the motors, and it began to be accepted as an axiom in the industry that the engineer knew to a hair’s breadth what his engine could do before it went out of the secret room where the chief engineer worked.

Meanwhile prices constantly were beaten down. The field of opportunity to own a car widened. It was, even then, so much bigger, in comparison to that in the Old World, that even the clerk and small salaried man in general looked with a smile toward the day when he would own a car.

It is recalled that when the manufacturer began boldly to put the farmer in the class of available prospects—openly declared his idea of building a car that he could sell in the agricultural districts as readily as cars were sold in the city districts, one man who this year is making 750,000 automobiles, gave to the world his edict which resulted later in the United States court sustaining his contention that the “Selden patent” under which the organization of makers was maintaining its official life, “was not basic, in fact was not worth the paper it was printed on,” and he would refuse ever to recognize the right of the national organization to grant licenses to make the internal combustion engine and the chassis that went with it.

The public read with a strange feeling, the record of the great litigation against the “basic patent.” It seemed like a battle of Titans, and ordinary folk thought it might result in danger to the industry. But only the lawyers were strenuously engaged. They argued and submitted briefs for more than two years, the national organization of the makers who accepted the license of the “Selden patent,” honoring their national organization by paying to the treasury their pro rata on the amount of cars made.

An enormous fund grew. But the man who wanted to make from 200,000 to 750,000 cars a year was determined. He won in the Federal court and almost immediately the “licensed association” began to break up. The contributions of license fees ceased and soon the association was a thing of history. It was succeeded by the National Chamber of Commerce which has become the senate, house of congress—the parliament, if you please—of the automobile industry in the United States. Some, there were, who had a very poorly defined idea of the actual mission of the “licensed association,” believing that it was a “trust,” called its function destructive. They thought that the officers of the association would lay an embargo upon certain manufacturers and allot a more liberal figure on annual output to the larger and stronger firms in the organization.