THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 675 strument, the "electric knife," which is not a knife at all, hut a sort of pencil, one electrode of a high frequency circuit, with whose point diseased tissue can be cut away quickly, painlessly, without bleeding., with a minimum of shock and rapid healing.. A third marvel, and one that grows in interest, is the use of the invisible light rays found beyond the limits of the solar spectrum—the short ultra-violet rays and the long infrared rays. The former, familiar in sunlight as the rays which tan the skin and produce various healthful reactions in the body, including apparently the creation of certain essential vitamins, are made available in "sun lamps" or "health lamps" using either Brush's carbon arc or the more modern mercury vapor system, the latter being more powerful. The infrared or heat rays, obtainable from an open fire or a hot stove or a common electric heating coil, are provided more controllably and effectively in specially designed therapeutic lamps. They have great penetrating power and many uses, often serving as substitutes for old-fashioned hot water bags and poultices and more modern electric heating pads. The public is only beginning to appreciate the possibilities of ultra-violet light. Ultra-violet lamps are becoming part of the equipment of every progressive physician. Their uses multiply as medical science gains in knowledge and technique. The ancient Greeks seem to have been prescient in their designation of Apollo, the god of light, as also the god of healing. Some of the foremost pioneer work in the world has been done in Cleveland in the last few years in the utilization of ultra-violet rays, produced in mercury lamps and concentrated and applied through fused quartz lenses, to treat focal infections. Combined with this work has been the promotion of special and general immunity against infection, more rapid healing of wounds and fractures, and various other benefits not attainable so readily in any other way. Many kinds of electric machines are used for other thera-peutic purposes. Electricity becomes the great medicine. This suggestion recalls a curious incident in the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In 1759, more than 676 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS a century before the electric light and nearly two centuries before the therapeutic lamp and the philosophic theories of Millikan and Crile, he published a book called "Desideratum : or Electricity Made Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and Common Sense." He maintained that many ailments could be cured by the "electric fluid" and used such headings as "Electricity the Soul of the Universe" and "Electricity the Greatest of All Remedies." It may not sound quite so absurd now as it did to Wesley's contemporaries. TRANSPORTATION Cleveland led with electric street cars as it did with electric street lights. There has been confusion on this question, but the record seems clear. Some accounts give primacy to overhead-trolley experiments in Kansas City in 1884, to a third-rail line in Baltimore and a trolley line in Toronto in 1885, and to the thirteen-mile system installed in Richmond, Virginia, a little later, by F. J. Sprague for the Union Passenger Railway Company. Contemporary newspaper evidence refutes these claims. On July 27, 1884, an Associated Press dispatch carried this news from Cleveland : "The first electric railroad for public use in America went into operation in this city yesterday, in connection with the East Cleveland Street Railroad Company, which has just completed a mile road. The experiment was so successful that the company expects to change its entire system comprising over twenty miles into electric roads. The Bentley-Knight system was used, and the current was carried on underground conductors laid in conduits like those of cable roads. The cars were started and stopped with the greatest ease. Any number of cars up to five can be run at one time on a single circuit and from one machine, which is a result not attained by any of the European systems now in operation. The success of the new road has made a great sensation in both street railroad and electrical circles, and it is expected to greatly extend the field of electrical development, as well as enhance the value of street railroad properties." The Cleveland triumph was doubled by the fact that the THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 677 power for this transportation line was generated by a Brush arc light dynamo in the Euclid Avenue car barns. A full description of the feat and the equipment used, in an article entitled "First Electric Street Car in America," by E. M. Bentley, appeared in the Electrical World and Engineer on March 4, 1904. This pioneer car line started on Garden Street (Central Avenue) two blocks west of Willson Avenue (East Fifty-fifth Street) and ran eastward to New Street, thence into Quincy Street. It continued in use, and later was extended as the rest of the system was electrified. The tracks were the old type of strap rail laid on wooden stringers. A picture dated 1885 shows Car No. 1 of this system, roughly resembling the horse cars of the period, but differing from the modern electric car mainly in its small size. Apparently it would seat fifteen or twenty passengers. Early experiments with electric transportation had used storage batteries, which proved impractical for general use. The development of practical dynamos in central power sta-tions merely required the addition of a motor, which is a dynamo reversed, on the moving car, with a wire to supply the current. Electrical scientists had been working on this problem for half a century. Thus after the development of the Brush and Edison dynamos the rest was inevitable. After the local progress made in 1884, it is surprising to read of a meeting of electric light men held in Chicago in February of 1885. According to the report, the presiding officer, introducing. a speaker named W. H. Johnson, who was to discuss the use of electricity in motors, begged the indulg-ence of those electric specialists, remarking that "it would do no harm to listen to what Mr. Johnson had to say." And Mayor Carter Harrison declared : "As the father of over 600,000 people, all looking to me for protection, I say we want electricity, but we do not want death dashing like a horrid monster through our streets." In the year 1929, only forty-four years later, when the electric street car had already passed its heyday, yielding in turn to a superior form of transportation, there were in this 678 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS country 67,489 cars operating. over 39,475 miles and carrying 14,435,000,000 passengers. Transition of the Cleveland street car system, already extensive, from horses and cables to electricity, was rapid. A prominent figure in this development was Tom L. Johnson, who came to the city in 1879, bought the Brooklyn Street Railway, brought it through the Square to Woodland Cemetery, built branches on both sides of the river, then bought the South Railway and made it a part of his system, long before the days of three-cent fare and the gospel of a "city set upon a hill." His competition hastened modernization throughout the city and its suburbs. After a few years he vanished from the scene. Cleveland's modern transportation era may be said to have begun in 1893. The Cleveland Electric Railway Company, a new corporation, unified the East Cleveland, Broadway, Newburgh and South Side companies, while by another mer-ger the Cleveland City Railway Company took and combined the Superior, St. Clair, Woodland Avenue and West Side lines. Thus nine original grants passed into the hands of two competing companies, which came to be known as the Big Consolidated and Little Consolidated. They were united in 1900 as the Cleveland Electric Railway Company. There followed the famous street car war, when Johnson, returned to Cleveland from his outside street car adventures and his Lorain steel mills and was elected mayor on a thre-cent-fare platform, organized his low-fare companies and fought with political and leg-al weapons and business competition for many turbulent years, until finally peace came in 1910 through arbitration and the franchise known as the "Tayler plan." By this unique combination of public and private interest, street car transportation is furnished at the cost of service, this cost including interest on the company's floating and bonded debt and a six per cent return on its stock, which was taken over at an agreed valuation. The company is virtually agent of the city, with its rights guaranteed. Fares rise and fall automatically to provide the necessary income. THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 679 The city has authority to control service, equipment and ex-penses, limited by the company's ability to finance, and may purchase at any time on six months' notice, paying "capital value" plus ten per cent. This is an extreme example of public control over a private corporation in the public utility field. The plan has worked admirably, and Cleveland has long been regarded as enjoying, on the whole, the best street railway service among large American cities, at the lowest cost. This system has naturally suffered its share of the decline that has come in American street railway transportation with the rise of the automobile and motor bus. During the depression years beginning in the fall of 1929 it has become harder than ever to maintain satisfactory service at a moderate rate of fare. Meanwhile local trolley service has been largely abandoned in the smaller cities of northern Ohio and elsewhere. In hundreds of communities the deserted tracks, with rails ripped out or paved over, tell their mute story. Interurban transportation has been especially affected. Of the five interurban companies which in 1920 operated six electric lines running into Cleveland, bringing 7,729,000 passengers, only one remained in 1932. This was the Lake Shore Elec-tric, whose service, formerly extending from Cleveland to Detroit, now terminated at Toledo. There have been large investment losses in these enterprises. Steam railroads, with the advent of electric traction, soon began using it at their terminals to relieve congestion and avoid smoke. It was found that electric locomotives made better switching engines, handling trains and single cars easily, quickly and cleanly, with smaller crews and reduced costs. The first American railroad utilizing such motive power was the Baltimore and Ohio, which substituted electricity for steam in 1895 to haul trains through a tunnel under the city of Baltimore, avoiding the usual fumes. Other roads adopted the idea, and soon extensive electrification plans developed for tunnels, terminals and steep grades that were difficult for steam. One of the most notable installations is in the Union Terminal at Cleveland, which handles 680 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS all its trains in this modern way, with silent and cleanly efficiency, by the use of two dozen 204-ton, 3,000-volt locomotives. At present there is a big movement for complete electrification of railroads, especially in the populous East and in the western mountain country. The electric locomotive is not only more powerful than steam locomotives of the same weight, but more economical to operate, more easily controlled and capable of greater speed. It has the advantage of regenerative braking, by which it develops power going down hill, pouring it into the transmission line to help other trains at the same time, instead of wasting power and wearing out brakes. SUPER-POWER When Frank J. Sprague had invented his motor to produce current for general power use, and built his railway in Baltimore, he said in 1887: "The distribution of power by electricity, so long looked upon as a visionary attainment, is now an accomplished fact. It is in its infancy, but it has a future second to no other enterprise in the world." That prophecy has been fulfilled quickly and amazingly. Myron T. Herrick, Cleveland banker, governor of Ohio and famous war ambassador to France, was another prophet in this field. Before the World war he became interested, as a financier and investor, in the possibilities of producing and transmitting electric pov,rer on a big scale, maintaining that it was the great industry of the future. He was attracted particularly by western opportunities for hydro-electric power. The war retarded progress in this field, but immediately afterward his vision began to be realized. Hydro-electric power fired the imaginations of engineers and captains of industry. Falling water had been the first source of power among our pioneers. Cuyahoga County is still dotted with old mill dams and water wheels. It was natural, when the dynamo appeared, to hitch it to a mill-race and then to a more effective turbine. A little hydro-electric plant was built at Appleton, Wisconsin, as early as 1882. It consisted merely of a shed housing a primitive Edison dy- THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 681 namo, furnishing current for 250 incandescent lamps, driven by a water wheel instead of the coal that Edison was using for the same purpose in New York. From that tiny plant have sprung the giant turbine generators of today, installed all over the country at natural waterfalls or in connection with storage and navigation dams. Since the creation of the Federal Water Power Commission in 1920, this movement has proceeded with growing mo-mentum. Today water supplies one-third of the country's electric power. It could not supply the whole demand because there is not enough water to meet the requirements of present day industry and much of it is not conveniently located. Most of the population and power demand is east of the Mississippi and most of the water power is west of it. Coal, moreover, is often cheaper than water, because of its proximity to great centers of industrial consumption ; and fortunately there is ample coal. Thus coal supplies Cleveland's electric needs, though some of our power may come eventually from Niagara Falls. Northern Ohio is blest with a comparatively short coal-haul and limitless water in Lake Erie for cooling the boilers that provide steam to turn the generators. Such progress has been made in the efficiency of steam-electrical plants like those on the local waterfront that in the last ten years the quantity of coal required to produce one kilowatt-hour at the switchboard has been reduced from two pounds to less than one. That is equivalent to doubling the coal reserve in West Virginia and Kentucky. So we come into the age of "super-power," wrested from coal and falling water, and ultimately from the sun itself, by our super-machine, the dynamo, which pours it into high voltage lines for long-distance transmission, with "hook-ups" which spread the electric force over wide areas and maintain an even flow almost as if it were so much water. Thus we illumine our cities and countrysides, feed our industries, lighten our toil, carry our messages and news, our goods and ourselves, brightening our leisure and turning the magic fluid to a thousand uses, only half a century from the time 682 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS when Clevelanders went timidly to the Public Square, wearing smoked glasses, to see Brush's arc lights. Now for a severely practical statement of Cleveland's importance in the electrical industry. The following facts are taken mainly from the Golden Anniversary Book of the Cleveland Engineering Society, published in 1930. When this distinguished society was organized in 1880, the local electrical industry was a tiny infant consisting of the Brush Electric Company, manufacturing arc lamps and small generators. There was as yet no electric street lighting and no central station. The latter came in the following year, through the organization of the Brush Electric Light and Power Company, with its generating station near the corner of Ontario Street and St. Clair Avenue. Two years later the Cleveland Electric Light Company was formed. The Brush Company used Brush arc machines ; the Cleveland Company started with Arnux machines, changing later to Thomson-Houston machines, of which there were two types, one for arc lights and one for Edison's incandescent system. About 1886 Gray and Barton established an electrical appliance industry here, making parts for telephones. In 1892 the Brush and Cleveland Companies were merged, forming the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. At this time both of the parent companies were using series arc machines, and the Cleveland Company was using direct current generators for the downtown district. Soon a model power house was constructed, one of the finest then in the world, on Canal Road between Ontario Street and the Cuyahoga River. This station used Brush arc light machines and General Electric machines for the Edison three-wire system, until 1898, when the company installed its General Electric three-phase alternating current system. The first electric motors made in Cleveland commercially were manufactured by the Cleveland Electric Motor Company, and were used to operate sewing machines, taking current directly from the arc light system. In 1916 the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company built its first 22,000-volt steel tower line, extending ten miles to Bedford. It installed pulverized-coal-burning equipment THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 683 in its Lake Shore station at East Seventieth Street in 1923, the first such installation in Ohio and second in the United States. This station, with its generating capacity of 284,000 kilowatts, was the largest steam-electric plant in the world. Construction of the Avon Station, on the lake shore about twenty miles west of the Public Square, began in 1925. In the next four years, four great turbo-generators were placed in operation, raising the company's total capacity to nearly 600,000 horsepower. By 1930 work was well under way in the company's newest and largest generating station, on a site just east of Ashtabula, with an initial capacity of 200,000 horsepower and an ultimate capacity of more than 500,000 horsepower. The company's 132,000-volt steel tower transmission lines now form a power belt serving the metropolitan area. The operation of this system, says the Engineering Society account, has resulted in "a present standard of electrical service at low rates which has gained Cleveland world-wide fame and has brought to the city engineers from every civilized country to study and emulate." As the central station demand has grown, so have other phases of the industry. Starting from the manufacture by the Brush Electric Company of arc lamps and parts for them, the appliance industry has expanded until Cleveland is known as the most important electrical center in the world. Cleveland is the world's greatest manufacturer of batteries and electric welding. equipment. It leads the world also in production of outdoor lighting fixtures, and is second only to New York in the manufacture of indoor lighting fixtures. It is the world's center for production of incandescent light bulbs. It is one of the world's largest producers of electric railway cars, large and small industrial motors and portable industrial tools. Several vacuum cleaner companies have their factories here, also many manufacturers of electric washers, ironers, sewing machines and other small electric appliances. The electrical industry of this city employs normally about 34,000 persons, with an annual payroll of $50,000,000. The electric light and power industry employs 4,000, electric railways 5,500, jobbers, 500, equipment manufacturers 684 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS 17,000, manufacturers' agents 500, telegraph and cable companies 1,500, and telephone companies 5,000. Among the local electrical plants known the world over are those of the General Electric Company, especially its great lamp factory at Nela Park; the Westinghouse Electrical and Manufacturing Company, the National Carbon Company, the Willard Storage Battery Company, the Lincoln Electric Company, the Apex Electric Manufacturing Company and the White Sewing. Machine Company. The manufacturing. branch of the industry has steadily turned out better products at lower cost. Production of electrical machinery, equipment and supplies in Cleveland, in a normal year, will approximate $60,000,000. The power branch has provided an absolutely dependable supply of power with service at rates so low as to make Greater Cleveland a magnet to general industry. As for the scope of the industry in the United States, electrical manufactured products have come to exceed $1,000,000,000 a year. The production of electric energy by public utility light and power plants in 1929 reached the vast total of 90,084,000,000 kilowatt-hours. In 1930, despite the business depression, 24,351,000 ultimate consumers, including 20,000,000 domestic consumers and more than 4,100,000 commercial users, plus municipalities, street railways, electrified railroads, and so on, bought nearly 75,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours, for which they paid $1,991,000,000. The total was only about $20,000,000 less in 1931. In 1930 two-thirds of the people in the United States were living in electric-lighted homes and there were 644,000 farms with electric service. The total valuation of the light and power industry was over $12,000,000,000. Its installed horsepower was 41,500,000. The number of incandescent lamps sold was 563,788,000. UNIVERSAL Electricity is more than an industry, more than a science, more than an art. It is becoming a philosophy. The highest thought of the present day, bent on explaining the operation of the Universe and the ultimate nature of things, has THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 685 resolved matter into ninety-two combinations of positive and negative particles of electricity. It seems to be concluding that everything is electrical, a living cell being a low-voltage battery and life itself an electric phenomenon. Thus laboratory science supports the surmise of Wesley, the theologian. And thus this industrial sketch concludes, as does Ernest Greenwood's "Amber to Amperes," with a quotation from Cleveland's most famous physician and surgeon, Doctor George W. Crile, founder and head of the unique medical institution known as the Cleveland Clinic. In his "Bipolar Theory of Living Processes" he writes : "Since in its last analysis all matter is electric in nature and all force is convertible into electricity, it would indeed be difficult to find any other form of energy that could ration-ally form the basis of life. If life originated through the action of the forces which engulf us, then the one force that could conceivably account for the atom, the compound, the solution, the colloid, could surround particles of matter such as form the colloid with films, could aggregate and limit forces and forms from the minutest to the most massive, must be the universal force which is everywhere present, in every form of living matter from the atom to the man." So the prophets and metaphysicians of the future may be super-electricians. CHAPTER III MOTORS The automobile has as many birthplaces as Homer. As an industrial fact, Cleveland's claim is at least as valid as any other. Commercial production of the internal-combustion motor car began in a little shop operated by Alexander Win-ton at the corner of East Forty-fifth street and Perkins Avenue. Other types of self-moving vehicle preceded the gas car, and other men may have invented gas cars before Winton. But he was the first man who not only made a practical gaso-line car but sold it, and sold it not for experimental purposes but for actual use. Wherefore Winton takes his place in his-tory beside his fellowtownsman, Charles F. Brush. This famous sale was accomplished on March 24, 1898. The automobile output for the United States during that pioneer year is recorded as amounting to four cars. The buyer was Robert Allison, an audacious mining engineer of Fort Carbon, Pennsylvania, who had heard of "horseless carriages" and started shopping around for one. He looked at the Haynes and Duryea models, and then bought Winton's It was a "one-lunger" and very elegant in appearance, fashioned after the pattern of an equine runabout and lacking little but the shafts and whip-socket. The motor was under the car. He paid $1,000 cash for his beauty, took a few driving lessons and proudly drove off in a cloud of dust. That car is now in the Smithsonian Institution. The maker, thus financed for further operations, determined to go into quantity production. He had organized the Winton Horseless Carriage Company and then the Winton Motor Company. He planned an expansion campaign in which publicity was to play a large part. And publicity, in those days of county fairs and fast horses, meant public exhibitions. - 686 - THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 687 In fact, Winton had already embarked on a spectacular advertising campaign, of which his initial customer was the first fruit. New York was the heart of the potential market and the center of intelligence. He would show the world what his automobile could do by driving from Cleveland to New York. He started, unheralded, in a little two-cylinder car. All went well until he neared Painesville, when he met two men driving a team of horses hitched to a box wagon. The startled horses tore loose from the wagon and bolted over a rail fence into a pasture. The men had disappeared. Finally the overturned wagon began to heave, and they were discovered under it, unhurt, but very indignant at the "con-sarned contraption" that had caused the trouble. The inventor and his assistant drove on through terrible roads, covered alternately with dust and mud and often losing their way. Horses continued to make trouble for them, though less than they made for the horses. At the summit of the Peekskill Mountains, Mr. Winton has related, they en-countered a young man and woman sitting in a buggy parked beside the highway, with the brakes set and the reins wrapped around the whip. The horse, as the automobile roared around the curve, gave a sudden leap and the wheels collapsed, dropping the body of the buggy with its occupants to the ground. "Please drive on !" they said. Winton reached New York, making an average speed of fifteen miles an hour while under way, or forty-seven and one-half hours total elapsed tipe. In spite of repeated suggestions that he "get a horse," this was better than a horse could do. He proved that it was possible to start out with a mechanical vehicle for a point several hundred miles distant and reach his objective in a specified time. His experience enabled him to build a small, sturdy car that would stand up under the demands of existing roads. He sold many replicas of the one-cylinder model that Allison had bought. He built racing autos and raced them himself. In 1902 he set a world speed record at Daytona Beach, with his "Bullet No. 1." The next year he went to Ireland with "Bullet No. 2" for the Gordon Bennett Cup race. He is said to have lost that race 688 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS through the mistaken zeal of a pious Irish friend who put some blest candles in his gasoline tank, evidently thinking to improve combustion, and thereby choked his gas line with paraffin. Winton, like many of his pioneer competitors, was a bicycle man. He had come to America a penniless young Scots-man, with no resources but mechanical talent. Arriving in Cleveland in 1885, he was employed in the Phoenix Iron Works, becoming. superintendent. Then dawned the cyclic era of the gay 'nineties, and Winton, organizing the Winton Bicycle Company, was soon producing twenty-five to fifty "ladies' and gents' bikes" a week. It was a profitable and promising industry, but Winton was not satisfied. There was something more stirring in the air. Many eager young mechanics were experimenting with something which, if successful, would surpass 'cycles as cycles surpassed legs. Early in the decade Winton began working on the problem. In 1893 he had a car that would run. After that it was merely a question of perfecting it. Around the fringes of Cleveland, too, there was much inventive activity. The writer of this narrative recalls the thrill with which he looked upon a strange buggy, nearly all cog wheels and springs, chugging about the streets of Youngstown in 1895, driven by Dr. C. C. Booth. The car was designed by the doctor himself and built for him by the Fredonia Manufacturing Company. One of the Leppo brothers of Belleville, in Richland County, is said to have shown a car in Chicago that year. The first car in Ohio, according to the Horseless Age, predecessor of the publication Automotive Industries, was a steam automobile built in Painesville in 1870. It may be added that, according to an article published in Automotive Industries in 1932, an automobile has been found in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania, which may be the oldest four-wheeled gasoline car in the world. Its builder, James F. Hill, tells of being ordered off the streets with it in 1885. However that may be, there is no question that the race in the early 'nineties was close. In 1893 Elwood Haynes, THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 691 Charles E. and Frank Duryea and Ransom E. Olds of Lans-ing, Michigan built their first cars. The Duryea cars were first to attract general attention, particularly by a race on Thanksgiving Day, 1895, sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald. The Duryea brothers are often credited with primacy in manufacture because of a dozen sample cars they produced in 1896, and which they demonstrated but apparently did not sell. Haynes is usually credited with priority of invention, though not of commercial production. Olds is often spoken of, with considerable justice, as the "founder" of the American motor industry, because he was the first to grasp the principle of mass production. There is glory enough for all. Other Clevelanders, too, were in the field. Frank Stearns built his first automobile in 1896. Paul Gaeth was getting ready to manufacture his car on West Twenty-fifth Street. Walter C. Baker was building an electric car on Jesse Street and Rollin H. White was developing a steam car at the factory of the White Sewing Machine Company on Champlain Street. Here is, perhaps, as good a place as any for a brief glance backward. No one who has followed Oleveland's industrial story thus far will expect to find that the motor industry was born full-fiedged at the end of the nineteenth century, or that America has sole claim to its motherhood. We may pass over, as unproved, the statements of certain occultists who maintain that the ancient Atlanteans had automobiles, rec-ords of which they "have read in the astral light." Doubt may be expressed likewise regarding the story in the ancient Abyssinian scriptures which tells of an airplane in which Solomon, after a visit from the son of the Queen of Sheba, sent him back home. The first self-moving vehicle getting into historical records appears to have been built by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot in France in 1769. It was a three-wheeled gun carriage propelled by a pot-bellied little steam engine. Thus the automotive steamer has pioneer honors. That car wrecked itself against a brick wall. At the beginning of the last century there were primitive 692 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS steam highway vehicles built by William Symington and Richard Trevithick in England and Oliver Evans in America. It was as natural to put Watt's steam engine on the highway as to put it on rails. Thus many steam coaches were built, especially in England. These were the first busses, some of them carrying- as many as fifty passengers and running on regular schedules. In 1831 Parliament ordered them off the road because they ruined the highways, frightened horses and threatened their extinction and required far more power than when they ran on rails. A steam car was put on the road in Springfield, Massachusetts, by Thomas Blanchard in 1825. Similar vehicles were built for highway use in 1840 by J. K. Fisher in New York. Another American, Richard Dudgeon, soon afterward is said to have built a steam carriage that ran forty miles an hour, thereby winning a bet. It was quite natural that the first efforts to produce prime-moving vehicles should turn to steam. There was no other motive power available. For fuel they used coal, wood or charcoal, none of which was wholly satisfactory. French engineers made the most nolable progress in this type of car. Louis Serpollet in France made the greatest improvement when he invented a boiler which turned water instantaneously to steam, and brought his fire under control by using petroleum fuel. Thus he produced, in 1889, a steam engine light enough to be carried by, and propel, a phaeton. Toward the end of the century there were many efforts in America to adapt this principle to steam cars. Among the inventors undertaking. it were James A. House and Henry A. House, Connecticut sewing machine manufacturers, Ransom E. Olds, and Henry Ford. Also a little later, as we shall see, and with far better success, another family of sewing machine manufacturers in Cleveland. The early motor industry in America, even for some years after two other kinds of automotive power became available, was all steam. Meanwhile a revolutionary innovation had appeared in Germany. This was the internal combustion or gas engine, operating by the pressure of explosive gases in a closed cham- THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 693 ber upon a piston-head. The motive principle was not essen-tially different from that of steam driving a piston, but the fuel itself was now introduced into the cylinder and burned there by a sudden and violent explosion instead of burning slowly under a water-boiler. Such combustion required electric ignition, timed to the piston's motion. There was also available a volatile petroleum product, known abroad as petrol or benzine and in America as gasoline, which, mixed with a suitable volume of air, burned with a flash like gun-powder. Such a motor promised greater effectiveness than any existing form of "heat engine." In 1876 Nicholas August Otto and Eugen Langen, building on the work of many predecessors, succeeded in producing a practical engine of this type. It was what Americans call a "four-cycle" engine, though the English term, "four-stroke" engine, is more descriptive. In such a motor the piston works in a cycle of four strokes, first compressing the explosive mixture, second being driven back by the explosion, third pushing out the spent gases, and fourth sucking in the new charge for the next explosion. Their motor, improved in its ignition and carburetion, was soon utilized by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, fellow-Germans, for road vehicles. Daimler's high-speed motor, patented in 1884, is credited with revolutionizing the whole movement and ushering in the gas motor era. In 1888 he mounted his motor on a bicycle, producing the first motorcycle. Benz, working independently, put his engine in a tricycle. The new transportation era was dawning. It required only one more wheel and a few more gadgets, which remained for America to contribute. Even in this embryonic stage of development, American inventors had played an important part. They had improved the storage battery until it became a dependable means of ignition and also capable of mechanical work, including ve-hicular propulsion ; and they had provided an ample supply of good motor fuel. These were two essential requisites. Oil and electricity, both developed so largely in Cleveland, had prepared the way for automobiles, in which also the city was destined to play a conspicuous part. 694 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS There were now available the knowledge and facilities for producing three types of self-propelling vehicles : the steam motor car, the internal combustion car and the electric car operating on a storage battery. And now a curious shift occurred in the general quest for light and flexible locomotion. British experimenters, who were more accustomed to steam engines than any other nation, took over the French contributions made by Serpollet, improving on them, and began manufacturing steam automobiles. The French, about 1890, forsaking their own automotive child, adopted the German gas engine, and in the last decade of the century used all their skill in mechanics and design to make it their own ; to such good purpose that, although they were soon surpassed in America, they gave their own terminology to the automobile itself and to its principal parts. Americans, at that time, still under the spell of electricity in its youth, though experimenting with gasoline cars, were interested mainly in electric cars. These were heavier and more expensive than either of the other types, but had the advantage of being easily driven, having few moving parts and being free from noise, smell and vibration. They appealed to the wealthy, and for a while no others thought of owning an automobile. Thus the gas motor pioneers, who proved to be the real creators of the motor age and eventually put the world behind a steering wheel, had an up-hill fight, struggling against popular prejudice as well as mechanical difficulties. Another curious thing that happened during this form-ative period was the patent granted in 1895 to George B. Selden of Rochester, New York. Knowledge of the general principles of gas motors was by this time common property. It was no secret, either, that gas motors could be mounted on wheeled vehicles to make them go. Several American in-ventors, as we have seen, were already building primitive gas-powered cars experimentally, and using various principles and devices necessary for the purpose. But none of them seems to have obtained patents fully .covering their work. Selden, a patent lawyer, had long known in a general way THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 695 what was being done, and was keenly interested in the problem. Not a mechanic himself, he built no car, but he figured out how such a car should be built, had plans drawn, and filed an application for a general patent on a gas-propelled vehicle. By the wording of his patent he acquired virtually monopolistic rights over the new industry. This coup was destined to create a vast amount of trouble for automobile designers and manufacturers. Now to resume our Cleveland story. Down at Warren were J. W. Packard and W. D. Packard, who had been dreaming of automobiles, and even drawing plans, but had gone no further because of the business depression of the nineties. In 1899 J. W. Packard came up to Cleveland and bought a car from Winton. Incidentally he expressed himself rather freely on the subject of how an automobile should be made. Finally Winton lost his temper, and retorted : "If you know so damned much about an automobile, why don't you build one yourself." "I will !" replied Packard. He built a one-cylinder car and began selling it, adding three cylinders at the insistence of Henry B. Joy of Detroit, who was financing his Ohio Automobile Company. "Aren't we having enough trouble with one cylinder?" he protested. In 1902 the capital stock was raised to half a million and the factory was moved to Detroit, the name being changed to the Packard Motor Car Company. The year after, the firm built 200 cars and drove one of them from San Francisco to New York in fifty-three days, a feat that made Winton take notice. Little more need be said about that concern. One of its most enduring claims to fame is its production of the Liberty Motor used on American airplanes during the war. Another thing. John North Willys, running a sporting goods store in Elmira, New York, and selling bicycles, saw his first automobile on a trip to Cleveland in 1900. He was standing on the sidewalk with the sales manager for the bicycles he sold. A Winton came chugging along through the traffic, easily passing the buggies and bicycles. Willys ran to the curb and beckoned to the driver, asking him to stop. "I can't do it !" shouted the driver. "Mebbe I couldn't get 'er started again." 696 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Willys refused to worry about that problem. "That machine," he declared, "has all the bicycles in the country beaten a mile." "Nonsense !" sneered his friend. "Those things haven't got a chance with horses and bicycles. They're not practical !" Willys went back to Elmira in a fever of enthusiasm, obtained an automobile agency and began to sell cars. In 1906 he became interested in the Overland, then made in Indianapolis, and contracted for its entire output for 1907. That meant forty-seven cars. In the fall he ordered 500 more. Then came the panic. Willys rushed to Indianapolis, saved the company and became the third largest automobile manufacturer in America. And one more thing. The Detroit Automobile Company was organized in 1899, with a group of incorporators whose names mean little today until you come to the last one of them—Henry Ford. This bicycle man had been puttering' with a motor car for some time, and needed money. Frank R. Alderman had been financing him. Ford had spent nearly $90,000 in experiments, and wanted more. The money was refused and he was allowed to resign. The company changed its name to Cadillac Motor Car Company, and William E. Metzger, a salesman who had been selling bicycles and Winton cars, was made sales manager. He got a Cadillac car finished and took it to New York, exhibiting it at the first American automobile show, held in a horse stable in January, 1901. Metzger is said to have sold 2,286 Cadillacs at the show, taking a ten dollar deposit on each, and with that money production started. Ford, loose on the world, began working on another model for a new organization, the Ford Automobile Company. It broke up within a year because Ford and his stockholders could not agree. He wanted to build a low-priced car. His backers wanted a high-priced car. Ford temporarily dropped out of sight, as far as the automobile industry was concerned. He was employed as chief engineer of the Detroit Edison Company, and worked on his hobby at odd hours. His THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 697 employer offered him the superintendency of the plant if he would stop fooling with gas engines. "I do not object to ex-periments with electricity," he said "Electricity is the coming thing. But gasoline—no !" Ford resigned his $1,000 a year job and had more time for tinkering. The year 1900 was a fruitful one in Cleveland's infant motor industry. The Baker Motor Vehicle Company, organized by Walter C. Baker, brought out its first automobile, an electric buggy so small and light that, with its motor and batteries, it weighed only 550 pounds. It had ten cells under the seat, and the back of the car was available for parcels. The motor, of three-fourths horsepower, was likewise under the seat, with a chain drive to the axle. There were two speeds, forward and back, and the advertised speed was twenty miles an hour—which was true, on good roads. Later the company produced larger and finer electrics and also steam and gasoline cars. Likewise in the same year appeared the Peerless Manufacturing Company with its Motorette, largely a reproduction of the De Dion car, whose business Peerless took over, but with its own body. It was a two-passenger vehicle, with a folding seat forward, a sort of dashboard rumble, for two extra passengers. It steered by a lever or tiller, used wire wheels did had the customary leather fenders of the period. From it descended a brood of excellent ears. The Stearns, too, was put on the market in that year, an odd little contraption with a one-cylinder, two-cycle motor carried on a spring frame. The car itself had a wooden frame supported by steel plates. The motor was soon changed to a four-cycle horizontal type, still with a single-cylinder. But two cylinders were now coming in. In 1901 the first steam car appeared, made by the White Sewing Machine Company. Its boiler had a new flash generator, a helical coil of seamless tubing with the water entering at the top and being converted to steam before it reached the bottom, doing away with the need of a volume of steam and a fixed water level. About this time there was associated with Winton in 698 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Cleveland, for a short time, one of the geniuses of the motor industry, whose story in itself is a tragic romance. This was Leo Melanowski, now a mere "ghost name," a pioneer of the pioneers, who won fortunes and lost them, whose brilliancy went into ideas and inventions that profited other men. He had worked with famous automobile men in France. Coming to America, he was attracted to Cleveland and Detroit, serving several of our American pioneers. He became acquainted with Henry Ford, brought him to Cleveland and recommended him to Winton as mechanic in his shop. Winton was unimpressed with Ford's training and skill, and refused to hire him. A little later Melanowski was vainly trying to interest Cleveland capital in the production of inexpensive motor cars. He originated the integral cylinder block for multi-cylinder motors. An engine he built for Winton is said to have been the first vertical gas motor in America. He devised axles for motor trucks and numerous other devices and improvements that went into the building of the industry. In Detroit he was of service to many automobile companies. He had five shares of Ford stock. After many ups and downs, Melanowski disappeared for years. About the end of the last business boom he turned up, aged and broken, at Cleveland's Warrensville Farm, and was admitted as a pauper. His Ford stock, which would have been worth more than a million and a half, was gone and forgotten. On his first night at the farm someone stole his last possession—his clothes. He then appealed to the Little Sisters of the Poor on East Twenty-second Street, who took him in and provided him a home. There he lived until his death in 1932. His last years were spent in the only occupation that still interested him, making metal crucifixes, for which purpose he was allowed the freedom of the Allyne-Ryan Foundry. As the new century began Ransom E. Olds taught the industry a lesson. He had set up at Detroit the Olds Motor Works, financed by retired Michigan lumber and mining men. In 1900 they put out a fine, "complicated" car selling for $1,250, and lost money. Then Olds built a small, light runabout with one cylinder, to sell for only $650. THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 699 "My whole idea in building it," he has explained, "was to have the whole operation so simple that anyone could run it, and the construction such that it could be repaired at any local shop. We rushed out a few of them as fast as possible, and they tested out so well that I decided to put them on the market immediately." He sold 400 cars the first year, which was doing pretty well. A business slump had begun, and he boldly challenged the slump with a production program of 4,000 cars for 1902, which was obviously crazy. He made good on that program, and then sold 10,000 cars in 1903, more than all the other manufacturers combined. His theory that the public would respond to a moderate-priced car, easily operated, was verified. Ford, dropping in occasionally at the Olds plant, was much impressed. Thus began mass production and the democratization of the motor car. Olds had the jump on the industry. But in spite of his remarkable success, he did not have a free hand. His associates, impressed with some of the new models, wanted to get into "the good car field" the next year. Olds, weary of argument, gave up and sold out. "I had enough money for myself," he said afterward, "and I did not want to hamper others in expressing their ideas." They expressed those ideas in a magnificent new model, and lost nearly all Olds had made for them. Olds, after a vacation, was persuaded by another group to go into a new venture, and gave his initials to make the name "Reo." Meanwhile Ford stepped forward again. He had been experimenting with gasoline motors and racing with cars of his own design, off and on, for nearly ten years, and in 1902 had won the speed championship from Winton. On June 16, 1903, the year of Olds' big success, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in Michigan. This was less than a year after Theodore Roosevelt had ridden in an automobile in Hartford, Connecticut, with a horse-drawn vehicle following closely behind to use in case of mishap, and had been complimented by the newspapers on "his usual display of courage." There were about 1,000 automobiles in New York State.