AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY. Though small and of doubtful stability until about the year 1903, the automobile industry has not only grown to be the first in financial magnitude among all the industries in the United States which turn out finished products, and to a simi lar position in the leading European countries, but has exerted the strongest formative and stimulating influence in several other metal working industries and arts which were laid under contribution for materials and parts and driven to efforts the results of which were found so widely applicable as to be at once exploited eagerly and broadly in many other directions, to the effect of greatly increasing and improv ing the world's productive facilities in all com modities adapted to be made by automatic machinery wholly or in part. These influences, and especially the widening of the use of jigs, working-jigs, gauges, machine tools and special ized machinery, have been incalculable. They have revolutionized all previous methods in factory organization and have established a new standard for industrial accuracy as well as for the physical testing of materials.
In securing accuracy in the new sense, uni formity in results and method in producing them take precedence over painstaking measure ment; specific gauges take the place of adjust able instruments, and the need of subsequent fitting, previously the pride of skilled mechanics, becomes a fault.
In these respects the automobile industry has followed in the footprints of the bicycle industry, which however was not of sufficient magnitude or industrial scope to make the whole technical world take note and follow, besides representing an earlier stage of the develop ment. It has fallen to the lot of the automobile industry to work wonders, because science and art and finance were ready to be lavish with all their untried resources when this new corn modity of high price— the automobile—cap tivated the spirit of the age and promised to repay amply for all that might be spent on perfecting it, offering the first large opportunity of this order, and one which has proved even larger than the most far-sighted could have anticipated 20 years ago. Constantly stimulat ing initiative and enterprise in new directions, the successes of the automobile industry have inaugurated a new epoch in civilization: The Age of Motors. On land, on sea and in the atmosphere, in mines, in fisheries and on the farm, in sports and in utilitarian pursuits, in the rapid transportation of persons and mail as in the slower transport of heavy goods, for the requirements of peace as for the destruc tive activities of war, the engines, the super steels and the production methods introduced through the automobile industry have become indispensable.
The historical background of the automobile industry is, rightly seen, nothing less compre hensive than the entire scientific, technical, in dustrial and commercial development following in the wake of the steam engine, Bessemer steel, coal oil, electro-magnetism, metallurgical and organic chemistry, but it is customary to point to early efforts for producing road ve hicles driven by steam engines as the historical element of the automobile industry. A cur rently accepted list includes the following as the more important among these efforts : N. J. Cugnot's steam tractor, built 1769, intended for hauling artillery.
Richard Trevithick of England developed steam engine; built steam coaches 1801-03.
Oliver Evans of Philadelphia improved steam engines 1784, built vehicle 1804.
William Henry James, water tube boiler in 1823, vehicle seating 20 in 1824, another in 1829.
Pecqueur, 1828, built vehicle with rotary steam engine, chain drive, differential gear and Ackerman steering system (same as now used).
Goldsworth Gurney, 1825-30, Walter Han cock, 1830-36, F. Hills, and others in England built many steam vehicles, mostly coaches, which ran for thousands of miles without decisive failures but were hard on roads. In response to public opinion Parliament stopped the devel opment by taxation.
In the United States steam road vehicles were built in 1825 by Thomas Blanchard at Springfield, Mass.; by J. K. Fisher of New York in-1840 and 1853; by Richard Dudgeon of New York in 1857 and 1859.
S. H. Roper of Roxbury, Mass., about 1870 developed steam vehicles, tricycles, with fireflue boilers, which were used successfully and were Improved by his sons and others. And the steam plant in these vehicles, much lighter than any previously produced and much more easily started, with gasoline as fuel, formed the tech nical foundation for the steam carriages and runabouts of which several thousands were made from 1898 to 1903 and used both here and in Europe. With regard to this manufac ture and its continuation at the present day, see