Life of Automobile, The Read online

  The Life of the Automobile

  ALSO BY STEVEN PARISSIEN

  Assassinated!: Assassinations that Shook the World

  Georgian House

  George IV

  Station to Station

  Palladian Style

  The Georgian House in Britian and America

  Regency Style

  Adam Style

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Steven Parissien, 2013

  The moral right of Steven Parissien to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 9781848877054

  Ebook ISBN: 9781782390213

  Paperback ISBN: 9781848877078

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WCIN 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Contents

  List of illustrations

  1

  Pioneers

  2

  Snakes and Ladders: Europe between the Wars

  3

  The Big Three

  4

  The Age of Gasoline

  5

  The People’s War

  6

  Austerity Britain

  7

  Flight of the Phoenix

  8

  The Golden Age

  9

  Zenith

  10

  The Swinging Sixties

  11

  Heroes and Villains

  12

  Crisis? What Crisis?

  13

  Eastern Promise

  14

  Big Beasts

  15

  Merge In Turn

  16

  Futureworld

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  1 Karl Benz driving his 1885 Motorwagen (©Bettman/Corbis)

  2 Gottlieb Daimler riding in the world’s first four-wheeled automobile, 1886 (©Bettman/Corbis)

  3 A 1910 poster by Henri Thiriet for De Dion-Bouton (SSPL via Getty Images)

  4 Henry and Clara Ford in 1946, riding in Henry’s 1896 Quadricycle (Keystone Features/Getty Images)

  5 René Panhard and Emile Levassor in their licensed Daimler, 1886 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  6 The tiny Austin Seven of 1922 (SSPL via Getty Images)

  7 Woolf Barnato and his Speed-Six Bentley at Brooklands in 1930 (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  8 C. S. Rolls in one of the first cars to be produced by Rolls-Royce (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  9 Alfred P. Sloan, Charles F. Kettering and Nicholas Dreystadt (©Bettman/Corbis)

  SECTION TWO

  1 A Bugatti Type 41 Royale, 1930 (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

  2 Lord Nuffield, Leonard Lord and the Prince of Wales at the Olympia Motor Show, 1935 (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  3 Ferdinand Porsche shows the Führer his new Kraft durch Freude people’s car, 1938 (Heinrich Hoffman/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  4 Wolfsburg’s Volkswagenwerk in May 1949 (Walter Sanders/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  5 The Traction Avant of 1934 (Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  6 Morris Motors attempts to sell the Minor to the world in 1949 (©Corbis)

  7 Harley Earl and a scale model of his Buick Le Sabre concept car of 1950 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  8 The Ford Thunderbird of 1955, endorsed by Frank Sinatra (Frank Worth, Courtesy of Emage International/Getty Images)

  SECTION THREE

  1 The Citroen DS at the 1955 Paris Motor Show (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

  2 British racing driver Stirling Moss drives an export model Jaguar XK120 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  3 Ferdinand Porsche with an early Porsche 356 (©dpa/dpa/Corbis)

  4 The Ford Edsel of 1957, with William Clay Ford, Benson Ford and Henry Ford II (©Bettman/Corbis)

  5 One of Virgil Exner’s ‘New Look’ Chryslers for 1957: a Dodge Custom Royal (Bob D’Olivo/Source Interlink Media/Getty Images)

  6 The taillights of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado (©Bruce Benedict/Transtock/Corbis)

  7 A 1959 promotion for the Mini (R. Viner/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  8 An Aston Martin DB5 of 1963 (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)

  SECTION FOUR

  1 The Ford Mustang of 1964 (FPG/Getty Images)

  2 The Jaguar E-Type of 1961 (magiccarpics.com)

  3 The Ford Pinto (magiccarpics.com)

  4 The VW Golf of 1974 (Hubert Fanthomme/Paris Match via Getty Images)

  5 The BMW E30 of 1983–6 (©Transtock/Corbis)

  6 John DeLorean, his third wife Christina Ferrare, and the DMC-12 (©Tony Korody/Sygma/Corbis)

  7 The new BMW Minis in 2001 (Sion Touhig/Getty Images)

  8 The new Fiat 500 at its 2007 launch (Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)

  9 The Chevrolet Volt at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

  1

  Pioneers

  Henry Ford died, with exquisite irony, during a power failure on the dark and stormy night of 6–7 April 1947, whilst sleeping fitfully at his vast Dearborn, Michigan, estate. On the 9th, his body lay in state in his mansion’s cavernous ballroom while almost one hundred thousand people filed by to pay their last respects. The next day, twenty thousand spectators gathered in silence, and in the pouring rain, outside St Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. Inside the cathedral were assembled not only every leading figure from the global automobile industry but also key members of Harry S. Truman’s administration. It was as if a great international statesman had passed away. Outside, the whole of the city of Detroit came to a halt. Detroit City Hall hung a thirty-foot portrait of Ford outside its doors, and thousands of citizens lined the route of Ford’s funeral cortège as it made its way to Dearborn’s Ford Cemetery, stoically ignoring the rain. The only jarring note, aside from the disappointing weather, was the car chosen to act as the hearse: it was, for some inexplicable reason, not a Ford but a Packard. Someone had clearly blundered.

  Sadly, few of the mourners who came to Ford Cemetery that day had much personal affection for the late magnate. His obituaries were generally polite and kind; only New York’s P.M. dared to describe Ford’s philosophy as ‘a jungle of fear and ignorance and prejudice in social affairs’. In truth, even most of Henry’s family were relieved that he had finally passed. Nevertheless, the motor mogul had become the most famous man in the world. In Russia, the word for ‘Americanize’ was, literally translated, ‘Fordize’, while in Hitler’s Third Reich, so recently laid waste by the allied bombers that Ford’s plants had helped manufacture, Henry Ford had been revered almost as a god.

  Henry Ford left his vast automotive empire to be a
dministered by the Ford Motor Company’s board, then still dominated by the Ford family. Notoriously frugal and miserly, Henry also left his heirs a cash windfall of $26.5 million, which he had kept hidden for decades in a private bank account. Yet in his pockets on the day he died were found not the prized possessions of the world’s most famous industrial magnate but, as historian Robert Lacey has observed, ‘the paraphernalia of a little boy’: a comb, a penknife and a simple Jew’s harp.

  Despite much subsequent American mythology, Ford did not actually invent the car; that honour properly goes to the German engineers Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler. Indeed, Ford did not even create the first American gasoline-powered vehicle. Three years before Ford’s first car appeared, Charles and Frank Duryea were demonstrating their gasoline-powered ‘motor wagon’ around the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, and it was not until 1896 that the young Henry Ford launched his revolutionary, if fragile, Quadricycle. But Henry Ford is rightly lauded as the man who created and developed the key to modern mass production, the assembly line. Ford’s early years of struggle saw the transformation of the car’s curious but prescient Victorian forebears into the most important mass-marketed phenomenon of the twentieth century. In many ways, the inherent contradictions of Ford’s character mirror the history of the car itself: daringly innovative, yet at the same time intrinsically conservative; brashly aggressive, yet apprehensive and hesitant; socially progressive, yet politically reactionary.

  …

  The men who were responsible for the creation and development of the global car industry were, for the most part, enthusiastic experts or fast-talking salesmen – or, like Henry Ford, a bit of both. Many of the first auto pioneers were larger-than-life characters, perpetual chancers who drove their cars as fast as they could and took vast risks with other people’s money. It was only in the 1930s, when the automotive industry reached its respectable maturity and the weaker firms had gone to the wall, that the salesmen were edged out (or went bankrupt) and the money men took over.

  The father of the modern car was Karl Benz, an engineer from the province of Baden in south-western Germany. In 1885, at the back of a Mannheim bicycle shop, he created the first petrol-powered motor vehicle. Equipped with three bicycle-like wire wheels (not carriage-like wooden ones), a revolutionary four-stroke engine, an equally advanced electric coil ignition, and a transmission comprising two chains connecting the engine to the rear axle, Benz’s invention was patented on 29 January 1886 and was known thereafter as the Benz Patent Motorwagen. Subsequent road tests proved very successful. Indeed, in 1888 his wife, Bertha, took their two sons (supposedly without Karl’s knowledge) on the first long-distance car trip, a 65 mile journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim. Bertha Benz dealt adeptly with minor breakdowns on the way, bought more gasoline fuel at pharmacies she passed, and calmly telegraphed Karl to announce her arrival at Pforzheim in the evening.1 Benz’s Model 3 impressed visitors at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle – an event that also showcased the brand-new Eiffel Tower – and over twenty-five Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893. In 1894 sales soared and Benz sold 136 Model 3s. The age of the car had arrived.

  Benz was not the first man to invent a horseless carriage. All previous experiments had, however, been steam-powered and distinctly uncommercial. In 1704 the French physicist Denis Papin – a refugee from Louis XIV’s persecution of the Protestant Huguenots, who had moved to Kassel in Germany – invented a rudimentary steam piston engine which he used to power a small boat, thus creating the first mechanically powered vehicle. Sadly, Papin’s achievement was never recognized and he died destitute in London in about 1712. Over fifty years later, his fellow Frenchman, army engineer Captain Nicolas Cugnot, used the motion of a steam piston engine to power a ratchet-operated driving mechanism which in turn drove a small but heavy three-wheeled car, which Cugnot called a fardier à vapeur. (A fardier was a sturdy, two-wheeled, horse-drawn cart for transporting bulky equipment; Cugnot’s nomenclature thus became the first example of the automotive industry borrowing equine etymology.) Cugnot’s two-ton vehicle of 1769, which was allegedly capable of just over 2 mph, was the first mechanically powered automobile. It may also have been responsible for the first mechanized road accident: in 1771, it was reported to have gone out of control and demolished a wall. This accident did not help convince the French army of its usefulness, and development of the fardier was discontinued. Cugnot survived on a royal pension, but this evaporated with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Cugnot would have emulated Papin’s fate, dying penniless and forgotten, had he not been invited back to Paris by a sympathetic Napoleon, shortly before his death in 1804.

  Cugnot’s breakthrough encouraged Regency innovators to experiment with steam cars. The talented and underrated Scottish engineer William Murdoch built two ‘road locomotives’ in Redruth, Cornwall, in 1784 and 1786 – inventions that his friend Richard Trevithick exploited to create the world’s first steam-powered railway locomotive in 1804. Trevithick’s steam locomotive, alas, proved too heavy to use on roads. And frequent boiler explosions, together with conservative health and safety legislation, made steam power seem unviable. Britain’s notorious Locomotive Acts of 1861 and 1865 stipulated that all steam cars should be occupied by at least three people, should be able to stop in an instant, and should be preceded by ‘a person walking at least twenty yards ahead, who in case of need shall assist horses … and who will carry and display a red flag’. Steam cars were thus condemned to a speed slower than walking pace and were regarded as inherently dangerous modes of transport, liable to explode at any moment and kill or maim both driver and passers-by.

  The quest for a safer, and faster, mechanically powered road vehicle gained enormous impetus after 1859 when the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir (surely one of the world’s most famous Belgians) patented the first petrol-driven internal combustion engine. Over the next thirty years, French and German engineers perfected Lenoir’s breakthrough. In 1880, Karl Benz himself patented a reliable, two-stroke, gasoline-powered engine, and five years later installed his petrol engine in the world’s first true motor car. While the vehicle was only able to travel marginally faster than walking pace – Benz’s 1885 machine would actually have gone quicker if it had been pulled by a pony rather than powered by its tiny engine – it was a landmark achievement.

  Benz was not the only German to be working on petrol-powered vehicles in 1885. In the same year the engineer Gottlieb Daimler – who lived in Schorndorf, in Württemberg, only sixty miles away from Benz in Mannheim, although the two men never met – harnessed a four-stroke petrol engine designed by his partner Wilhelm Maybach to a bicycle, thus creating the world’s first motorcycle.1 Daimler’s engine was far better than Benz’s – as the journalist L. J. K. Setright has noted: ‘800 rpm was very fast by the standards of 1884’. Daimler, however, used an antiquated incandescent tube to start the ignition, whereas Benz’s car had an electric ignition.

  In 1886 Daimler and Maybach fitted an even larger engine to a stagecoach, thus inventing the world’s first motor coach. Three years later, they exhibited their engines at the Paris Exposition. Then, in 1890, having obtained sufficient finance from a group of bankers and munitions makers, they formed a public company, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG), to build and sell gasoline engines, with Maybach installed as its chief designer. That same year, Daimler licensed the French firms of Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot to build DMG engines. The following year the company sold a similar licence to the US-German piano makers Steinway and Sons (who soon found that building cars was a little more difficult than building pianos), and in 1892 DMG sold its first four-wheeled car. In 1898 a Daimler car used the first-ever fourcylinder petrol engine, and two years later Maybach invented the first modern-style ‘honeycomb’ radiator, again for use in a Daimler car.

  DMG was soon helping to create the British car industry, too. Britain was not in the forefront of car manufacture in the early years, relying solely on French and Ger
man imports. In 1889, the Englishman Frederick Simms, British-born but brought up in Hamburg, met Daimler and was sufficiently inspired to import one of Daimler’s cars into England – probably the first car ever seen in Britain. Four years later Simms created a subsidiary of the Daimler firm in England, which sold German Daimlers and French Panhards. Simms then started producing the cars in Coventry, and successfully advertised them by running one from Land’s End to John o’Groats in seventeen days, with no mishaps. While the first British-built car was also made in Coventry, it was not one of Simms’s Daimlers or Panhards but a Bollée manufactured under licence by a subsidiary of the British Motor Syndicate, through which the crooked entrepreneur Harry Lawson hoped to control the embryonic British motor industry. Simms and his fellow automotive pioneers eventually managed to wriggle free of the strangling embrace of Lawson, who was trying to exercise legal ownership over all cars built in Britain. Lawson was eventually tried for fraud and served twelve months’ hard labour.

  Frederick Simms died in 1944, a successful and wealthy man. Daimler and Maybach, however, never enjoyed the riches their pioneer labours deserved. Maybach was forced out of DMG by the firm’s powerful banking trustees, although Daimler continued to use him as a consultant for a while. Daimler himself suffered a heart attack in 1892 and the following year was bought out by his fellow directors. It was only thanks to pressure from Simms, whose association with DMG provided them with badly needed financial stability, that Daimler and Maybach were reinstated to the board in 1895. Daimler, who never fully recovered from his heart problems, died prematurely in 1900, while Maybach left DMG after being demoted by the firm’s ruthless and shortsighted directors (in what today would be a straightforward case of constructive dismissal) in 1907. Maybach was replaced on the DMG board by Paul Daimler, his former colleague’s son, who proved far more amenable to the directors’ whims than Maybach had been. (It was Paul Daimler who commissioned, and perhaps designed, the firm’s three-pointed star logo in 1908.) Maybach, meanwhile, founded his own engineering company, which made engines for Zeppelin airships during the First World War and, after 1919, created large, luxury cars.