utomobile.
The responsibility as the actual "inventor" can probably be no more
definitely placed. However, had it not been for two developments,
neither of them immediately related to the motor car, we should never
have had this efficient method of transportation. The real "fathers"
of the automobile are Gottlieb Daimler, the German who made the first
successful gasoline engine, and Charles Goodyear, the American who
discovered the secret of vulcanized rubber. Without this engine to form
the motive power and the pneumatic tire to give it four air cushions
to run on, the automobile would never have progressed beyond the steam
carriage stage. It is true that Charles Baldwin Selden, of Rochester,
has been pictured as the "inventor of the modern automobile" because,
as long ago as 1879, he applied for a patent on the idea of using a
gasoline engine as motive power, securing this basic patent in 1895, but
this, it must be admitted, forms a flimsy basis for such a pretentious
claim.

The French apparently led all nations in the manufacture of motor
vehicles, and in the early nineties their products began to make
occasional appearances on American roads. The type of American who owned
this imported machine was the same that owned steam yachts and a box at
the opera. Hardly any new development has aroused greater hostility. It
not only frightened horses, and so disturbed the popular traffic of
the time, but its speed, its glamour, its arrogance, and the haughty
behavior of its proprietor, had apparently transformed it into a new
badge of social cleavage. It thus immediately took its place as a new
gewgaw of the rich; that it had any other purpose to serve had occurred
to few people. Yet the French and English machines created an entirely
different reaction in the mind of an imaginative mechanic in Detroit.
Probably American annals contain no finer story than that of this simple
American workman. Yet from the beginning it seemed inevitable that Henry
Ford should play this appointed part in the world. Born in Michigan in
1863, the son of an English farmer who had emigrated to Michigan and
a Dutch mother, Ford had always demonstrated an interest in things far
removed from his farm. Only mechanical devices interested him. He liked
getting in the crops, because McCormick harvesters did most of the work;
it was only the machinery of the dairy that held him enthralled. He
developed destructive tendencies as a boy; he had to take every