My Life and Work
flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant
ambition. It was circumstances that took me first into the actual
manufacture of road cars. I found eventually that people were more
interested in something that would travel on the road than in something
that would do the work on the farms. In fact, I doubt that the light
farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm had not the farmer
had his eyes opened slowly but surely by the automobile. But that is
getting ahead of the story. I thought the farmer would be more
interested in the tractor.
I built a steam car that ran. It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it
developed plenty of power and a neat control--which is so easy with a
steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power
without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work
under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not
altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe required an excess
of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years
I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers--the engine and
control problems were simple enough--and then I definitely abandoned the
whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. I knew that in England
they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines
of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam
tractor for use on a large farm. But ours were not then English roads;
they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest
road tractor. And anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a
few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while.
But I did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. The work with
the Westinghouse representative only served to confirm the opinion I had
formed that steam was not suitable for light vehicles. That is why I
stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that the
big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to
waste time on something that would lead nowhere. A few years before--it
was while I was an apprentice--I read in the _World of Science_, an
English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming
out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus
intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was
concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as
even a possibility for road use. It was interesting to me only as all
machinery was interesting. I followed in the English and American
magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and
most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the
illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline.
The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time
that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market.
They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not
recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could
ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated
conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never
thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way
with wise people--they are so wise and practical that they always know
to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the
limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever
I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition
with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure
they would do little work.
The gas engine interested me and I followed its progress, but only from
curiosity, until about 1885 or 1886 when, the steam engine being
discarded as the motive power for the carriage that I intended some day
to build, I had to look around for another sort of motive power. In 1885
I repaired an Otto engine at the Eagle Iron Works in Detroit. No one in
town knew anything about them. There was a rumour that I did and,
although I had never before been in contact with one, I undertook and
carried through the job. That gave me a chance to study the new engine
at first hand and in 1887 I built one on the Otto four-cycle model just
to see if I understood the principles. "Four cycle" means that the
piston traverses the cylinder four times to get one power impulse. The
first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the third is
the explosion or power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the
waste gas. The little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch bore
and a three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did not
develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the
engines being offered commercially. I gave it away later to a young man
who wanted it for something or other and whose name I have forgotten; it
was eventually destroyed. That was the beginning of the work with the
internal combustion engine.
I was then on the farm to which I had returned, more because I wanted to
experiment than because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around
machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of
earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided
I gave up being a machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting
the timber gave me a chance to get married. I fitted out a sawmill and a
portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the
tract. Some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new
farm and in it we began our married life. It was not a big
house--thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high--but it
was a comfortable place. I added to it my workshop, and when I was not
cutting timber I was working on the gas engines--learning what they were
and how they acted. I read everything I could find, but the greatest
knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of
thing--it will not always go the way it should. You can imagine how
those first engines acted!
It was in 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite
impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation
purposes--the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the
first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double
cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. I
fairly knew my way about. The double cylinder I thought could be applied
to a road vehicle and my original idea was to put it on a bicycle with a
direct connection to the crankshaft and allowing for the rear wheel of
the bicycle to act as the balance wheel. The speed was going to be
varied only by the throttle. I never carried out this plan because it
soon became apparent that the engine, gasoline tank, and the various
necessary controls would be entirely too heavy for a bicycle. The plan
of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering
power the other would be exhausting. This naturally would not require so
heavy a fly-wheel to even the application of power. The work started in
my shop on the farm. Then I was offered a job with the Detroit Electric
Company as an engineer and machinist at forty-five dollars a month. I
took it because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and I
had decided to get away from farm life anyway. The timber had all been
cut. We rented a house on Bagley Avenue, Detroit. The workshop came
along and I set it up in a brick shed at the back of the house. During
the first several months I was in the night shift at the electric-light
plant--which gave me very little time for experimenting--but after that
I was in the day shift and every night and all of every Saturday night I
worked on the new motor. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work
with interest is ever hard. I always am certain of results. They always
come if you work hard enough. But it was a very great thing to have my
wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that way.
I had to work from the ground up--that is, although I knew that a number
of people were working on horseless carriages, I could not know what
they were doing. The hardest problems to overcome were in the making and
breaking of the spark and in the avoidance of excess weight. For the
transmission, the steering gear, and the general construction, I could
draw on my experience with the steam tractors. In 1892 I completed my
first motor car, but it was not until the spring of the following year
that it ran to my satisfaction. This first car had something of the
appearance of a buggy. There were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch
bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. I
made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought.
They developed about four horsepower. The power was transmitted from the
motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the
rear wheel by a chain. The car would hold two people, the seat being
suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There were two
speeds--one of ten and the other of twenty miles per hour--obtained by
shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in front of the
driving seat. Thrown forward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown
back, the low speed; with the lever upright the engine could run free.
To start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with
the clutch free. To stop the car one simply released the clutch and
applied the foot brake. There was no reverse, and speeds other than
those of the belt were obtained by the throttle. I bought the iron work
for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The
wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The
balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more
delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered
necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be
applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine
altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held
three gallons of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small
pipe and a mixing valve. The ignition was by electric spark. The
original machine was air-cooled--or to be more accurate, the motor
simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more
the motor heated up, and so I very shortly put a water jacket around the
cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car over the
cylinders. Nearly all of these various features had been planned in
advance. That is the way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work
out every detail on the plan before starting to build. For otherwise one
will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and
the finished article will not have coherence. It will not be rightly
proportioned. Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish
between planning and experimenting. The largest building difficulties
that I had were in obtaining the proper materials. The next were with
tools. There had to be some adjustments and changes in details of the
design, but what held me up most was that I had neither the time nor the
money to search for the best material for each part. But in the spring
of 1893 the machine was running to my partial satisfaction and giving an
opportunity further to test out the design and material on the road.
CHAPTER II
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS
My "gasoline buggy" was the first and for a long time the only