Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Automobile Patent

II. The Long Vigil

II The Long Vigil IN 1879 Selden had no reason to doubt the primacy of his scheme to harness a light internal combustion engine to a road vehicle. Indeed, had he made a thorough study of patent publications disclosing earlier attempts to use a gas engine for that purpose, he would have been encouraged in his belief that he was atrail-blazer. The record of such undertakings revealed a long train of abortive effort. The inventors who by formal registry of their claims antedated the Selden application failed to understand the necessity for a compact power plant, even in instances where some of them recognized the advantage of using liquid hydrocarbon fuel. For example, in 1877 a French civil engineer, Henri Menn, patented a huge road locomotive driven on petroleum. Menn boasted that the vehicle could "traverse the deserts which border Algeria or the Steppes of Russia," but his specifications belied this trumpeted hope. Powered by a fifty-horsepower engine, the Menn locomotive weighed about eighteen tons. It was never built.1 Yet such dismal failures served a larger end. They were signposts pointing to the possibility of creative accomplishment in mechanical road transportation. If nothing more, they revealed that workers in the art could draw upon a technology furnishing the separate elements of an advanced automotive vehicle. By 1840 the steam-powered road wagon had evolved various constructions which were improved over the next half-century and permanently adopted in the art. Some of these elements were known in the late eighteenth century. In a section of a British patent granted to James Watt in 1784, the inventor indicated change gears and clutches for controlling speeds of "wheel car27 1 Monopoly on Wheels riages" driven by steam. Another British patent, issued to Richard Trevithick and Andrew Vivian in 1802 for a steam wagon, showed a clutch, rear wheel drive, and a power shaft running faster than the propelling wheels. The French patent secured by Onesiphore Pecqueur in 1828 for a steam vehicle disclosed many of the basic features of the automobile. It described an engine mounted above springs in the front of the body, differential gearing, chain drive to the rear axle, a clutch, change gears for varying the speed, and a fixed front axle with steering arms. These constructions were incorporated in most of the motor vehicles built before the middle of the nineteenth century.2 In 1878, if not earlier, Selden was familiar with these essential elements. That such components were available to contemporary inventors is demonstrated by the Rosenwald patent granted by the French government in 1877. The Rosenwald road carriage, specifying an Otto and Langen motor, included every basic feature of an automobile except a compression gas engine. Anxious to secure a comprehensive patent, the inventor claimed "the exclusive exploitation of any system of locomotion by gas." 3 Had Rosenwald built this vehicle, its engine probably would have made the carriage unfit for road travel. While the Rosenwald patent revealed that most of the fundamental elements of a self-propelled vehicle lay at hand, it also showed that their mere designation was not enough. The prime requisite wastheir arrangement in a harmonious and operable combination . Two factors were necessary to achieve this aim. One was a power plant more suitable than existing internal combustion motors; another was an inventive mind capable of welding these elements into a unified combination. The state of the art after the middle of the nineteenth century invited attempts to construct effective machines. Unknown to Selden, European inventors before 1875 had built primitive horseless carriages which lighted the way toward the emergence of the modern automobile. Although Selden had dismissed the Lenoir non-compression gas motor as an unsatisfactory power plant for a vehicle, Lenoir had in 1860 constructed a road wagon driven by his engine. The motor of this two-passenger vehicle was enclosed in a box over the rear wheels. The engine housing occupied about half the length of the carriage, but Lenoir claimed that it did not interfere with the pas28 ii The Long Vigil senger capacity. The gaseous fuel was stored in a reservoir. Power was transmitted to the rear wheels by a sprocket chain. A steering column was fixed on the driver's platform, and the vehicle was equipped with a brake. The Lenoir carriage illuminated the possibilities of the gas engine for a novel purpose. "Let us drop for a moment the stationary...