Birth of the Auto Industry Part 1

This comprehensive article regarding the birth of automobile transportation has been scanned from October 1923 National Geographic magazine. It is very long and contains many photos so please be patient while the page loads. If you find this article anywhere else on the Internet, it came from us.

FROM: Vol. XLIV, No. 4 October, 1923 issue

The National Geographic Magazine

THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY

An American Art That Has Revolutionized Methods in Manufacturing and Transformed Transportation

By WILLIAM JOSEPH SHOWALTER

The following article presents a careful survey of the economic consequences of the development of the motor vehicle and a layman's impressions of the highly technical automobile manufacturing industry. The latter were gained during months of observation and inspection in the largest automobile factories in America, under the guidance of automotive engineers and manufacturing superintendents.

WITH thirteen million motor cars and trucks now running on the roads of the United States, and with the annual demand for new ones in excess of three millions, America is both literally and figuratively "stepping on the gas" in the making of transportation history.

A quarter of a century has brought a development in the automobile industry that has outrun the dreamers, confounded the prophets, and amazed the world.

In 1898 there was one car in operation for every eighteen thousand people, each of them a hybrid creation secured by crossing a bicycle with a buggy, and in-stalling in the product a noise, sputtering little engine that startled the people in the streets and sent the horses on the high-ways into panic.

To-day there is one motor vehicle to every eight people, and the worst of them is a marvel of silence and service as cornpared with the best of its early predecessors.

Thirteen million motor cars! Who can visualize them! Five for every freight and passenger car on all the railroads of the United States! Enough to carry half the people of America in a single caravan!

The Lincoln Highway, from the banks of the Hudson to the Golden Gate, is 3,305 miles long. To put them all on that highway, even in traffic-jam formation, would require that it be widened so that fifteen cars could stand abreast!

"These terrific tests have always brought the engineering talent of the country together. Under the lessons learned there, cylinder displacement has been reduced, fuel economy has been evolved, and safety has been forged into every element of your car and mine, on the mighty anvil of a speedway and under the powerful hammer of high speed. Harmony, balance, dependability, tire mileage, and studiness have come from the flaming forge of a hundred miles an hour."

Despite the fact that a third of a million carloads of cars were shipped from factories last year, and 75,00o more from assembling plants, and still other thousands by Great lake steamers, it has been necessary to send many cars to distribution centers in drive-away fleets. One manufacturer maintains a corps of drive-away men, sending the cars out in fleets of ten, each with a captain and a mechanic. Drivers are not allowed to raise the hoods of their cars and must keep their assigned positions in the fleet. The speed is held down to 25 miles an hour.

These boards, in the production department of a major plant, control the passage through the factory of material and parts, bringing them together at the right time and showing the status of operations all the way through to the finished product.

The service they render is proportionately large. Assuming that the average car is operated only ten months in a year and runs only twenty miles a day, their aggregate travel amounts to seventy-eight billion miles annually.

Such a mileage figure being so vast, we might conclude that ten months a year and twenty miles a day overestimated the average car's performance, but both gas and tire data tend to justify an even greater mileage.

It is estimated that the gas consumption by the motor cars of the country will exceed six billion gallons this year. It is generally held that, taking every type of car, the average driver is able to coax fifteen miles out of each gallon of gas he puts into his tank. But even on the basis of thirteen miles per gallon, a little arithmetic gives the enormous total mentioned above.

It is also believed that the average tire, fabrics and cords, delivers more than 8,000 miles of service. On the basis of the number of tires put on automotive wheels annually, the aggregate motor-car mileage would be eighty billions.

Three times as many motor-miles on the highways as car-miles on the railways is a marvelous record for so youthful a competitor of rail transportation.

Counts at the New York City ferries and elsewhere indicate that the average car carries 2 passengers. This means that more than thirty million people take to automotive wheels every day, or more than nine billion annually eight times as many as are carried by all the railroads.

The transformation in the lives of the people which these figures indicate stands almost, if not quite, unparalleled in any quarter of a century of human existence.

Starting out as a plaything, trans-formed into a luxury, and then becoming, in turn, a definite element in our standard of living, the motor vehicle has assumed the role of a highly efficient factor in our ransportation system, touching the lives and promoting the welfare of America as few developments in the history of any nation have done.

A San Francisco distributer decided to show the world what his cars could do on a heart-breaking hills. Ten owners, once a woman, came to the scratch at the foot of the hill and not a gear was shifted after the start. The power of the American-built motor represents an outstanding engineering achievement.

The truck on the right is the regulation army truck widely used by our Expeditionary Forces in France. In the middle is the new six-wheel truck recently devised (see page 404). By the use of oversized tires, the ratio of weight per square inch on the road surface is reduced from 7 to 217/2. The truck at the left is also a new design, built at Camp Holabird and having a four-wheel drive. This truck will go almost anywhere that a caterpillar tractor can operate, and some places it cannot, and at the same time it has a high road efficiency.

The Birth of Automobile Industry