H. L. Barber

“ With the genial, warming rays of co-operation turned on the industry, problems of vast quantity production at remarkably low cost,129 easy and rapid assembling, inexpensive maintenance, and the vexatious problems of freight movements to bring in raw material and take out the finished product for distribution, became no longer work, but fascinating play. Thus does co-operation make an elysium of the workshop, turn the darkness of gloom into the light of day, and give grounds for the belief that if the millennium ever comes, co-operation will be the vehicle it will be transported in. ”

“ And if anybody had an idea that the profits from producing petroleum might be limited by the use of gas and electric light, it was because the automobile’s enormous consumption of gasoline and the use of oil by ships could not be foreseen.
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The field for investment is kept constantly fallow, and ready for the seed that is to fructify into great profits, by the human brain which is ever active—ever thinking. If its product is not an elemental, it is a supplementary idea, as the rubber tire, the demountable rim and the self-starter for automobiles. ”

“ Eighty-eight years before in Philadelphia, Oliver Evans’ steam propelled wagon, bearing in triumph a flatboat surmounted by an engine, moved along Market Street with no horses in front, and was a sight that was too much for the Philadelphian.
The world “do move,” but very slowly, and this 88-year span of time is practically the measure of the period consumed by automobile development to the point where a motor carriage would really run, and keep on running. ”

“ Almost every valuable lesson might be learned from nature if we knew and fully understood her laws, and co-operation is one of the most potent of these laws. But it took man a long time to learn even the rudiments of this law of co-operation—that it supplied a force of a hundred horsepower where one horsepower was used before; that its moral influence was tremendous, and that it was to business what the steam radiator, internal combustion, or the electric storage battery was to the horseless carriage—a means of propulsion, a driving force, an agency of high power to produce progression. ”

“ A satisfied customer, the best advertisement, finds expression in the loyal recommendation an owner gives his own make of car; enthusiasm of maker, of salesman, of owner—it runs along the line, and if advertising is the gasoline which makes the car go, enthusiasm is the oil which keeps the bearings of the industry lubricated.
The year 1898 saw the first real attempts of manufacturers in the United States, either of gasoline, electric or steam cars, to make them in any quantity. ”

“ As the great teacher of frugality and thrift, Franklin laid the cornerstone, 150 years ago, on which the superstructure of the American automobile industry has been erected. For, assuredly, had the seed planted by him failed to germinate and ripen in the American consciousness, we could as well have been today a nation of spendthrifts as a people self-denying, thrifty and frugal. ”

“ Power of the People—the force that revolves the world, revolved the wheels of millions of automobiles, and will go on turning the wheels of millions more.
The people of the United States supplied the fertile field in which the American automobile grew and blossomed. ”

“ From 1898, the time of the sale of the Winton car, dates substantially the development of the automobile industry in this country.
Beginning with this date, the first real enthusiasm was put into the sale of cars.
Enthusiasm had not existed before. Confidence, which is the mother of enthusiasm, had hesitated and halted. But now confidence believed the automobile was a reality—all doubts had been resolved—and confidence bade enthusiasm run, not creep, crawl or walk; and we see how enthusiasm obeyed. ”

“ And in the early days of the automobile’s struggles for recognition as a promising investment, no banker or other moneyed man could be brought to believe that it held out any reasonable hopes of great gain. No one could foresee, not even the inventors of the automobile, that in less than two decades the business done through its comparative perfection would rank fourth in order of the industries of the United States. ”

“ But since the beginning of this century, when the automobile industry began growing, many of our people have, among many other things, built the great automobile industry into what it is, and made money. Not only this, but they will build it still greater, and make still more money.
Before we get through with this little analysis we will see that the automobile industry has not been more than half built thus far, and that the really big profits in it are yet to come, because so far much of the profits have been used in building the industry. ”

“ But that the electric car is a perfectly balanced piece of mechanism and the one type of the automobile with the least fits and starts, is conceded, and this superiority will doubtless enable the electric type to make up in the future in the motor truck field what it has lost to the gasoline type in the passenger field.
If the passenger automobile has not reached the length of its use and consumption, and it unquestionably has not, what shall be said of the freight automobile, the industry in which is yet in embryo? ”

“ The opportunities of today and tomorrow are as great as they were yesterday. It is a question whether they are not greater, for if the quotation ascribed to Emerson is true, that the world will beat a path to the door, though it be in a forest, of him who makes a mouse trap better than his neighbor, the future possibilities of enterprise are favored by increased population and the element of the cumulative nature of the wants of man. As inventions and articles of use increase in number, new needs which demand supplementary products are created. ”

“ There can be no question that the automobile industry had, in the era in which fate decreed it should make its debut, favorable conditions. Not only did this era happen to be the era of a better understanding of the science and value of advertising, but also the era in which a better understanding has been gained of the principle and value of co-operation. ”

“ The Automobile Board of Trade followed, and today the trade association is the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce. Fostering trade, reforming abuses and promoting harmony, were steadily the aims of all the organizations, and how well they have done it is attested by the fact that no association of producers has better demonstrated and more completely justified the valuable principle of true co-operation.
Standardization in the automobile business has never discouraged individuality of the manufacturers in the essentials of form or speed. ”

“ This truth, that the greatest profits lie in products that can be given general distribution, with a consequent large sale, which is one I have maintained in my book, “Making Money Make Money,” in my magazine, “Investing for Profit,” and in all my teachings on the science of investing, finds a splendid exemplification in the automobile industry’s success as a phenomenally profitable form of investment, and the circumstances of this success are but cumulative evidence of the soundness of my doctrine. ”

“ The automobile industry illustrates graphically that when an enterprise develops to the point where it is well grounded and has reached a period of age and steady earning capacity, it is not new investors who may come in and gather the richest plums, but the old ones, those who helped to give it its start, who stood by it when the future was obscure, and the ultimate outcome not certain. ”

“ It made the handwriting on the wall for popular price so large, that every man who subsequently invested a dollar in automobile making read, pondered and agreed. It placed popular price and standardization of mechanism in the same category—linked them so that the words of the Detroit automobile manufacturing wizard became axioms. The Detroit genius had proved that the depth and capacity of the automobile market was exactly in ratio to the possible price reduction. Amazing but true, the big men said, was the field that the lower priced car opened to the thoughtful maker of cars. ”

“ But the biggest factor in the lead which the United States has taken in the production of automobiles, both for export and consumption within her own borders, is the universal method of standardizing in manufacture, adopted by the automobile producers of the nation.
The manufacturers of this country shine in the field of cost production, in the economies of purchase of raw materials, in the method of manufacture, and in marketing their product. ”

“ The success of Ford’s idea of quantity sales demonstrates a great fact in the affairs of life. It is that fields of human endeavor are not exhausted or worked out until the human race has ceased to exist. Take any line of enterprise you will, and it has as many facets as a prism.17 An idea only is needed, which, if the right one, illustrates the enterprise as lights thrown on the prism cause it to sparkle in many colored rays. ”

“ The man who conceives the idea of a sport car supplies a want that others have neglected. There may be many automobile tractors on the market, but the human brain conceives one with some feature lacking in others, such, for instance, as making a Ford automobile interchangeable into a farm tractor, and it has an immediate and large success. ”

“ Then again a man may have two or three pleasure cars, but in his business he may have use for two or three hundred commercial cars.
The business world is just beginning to realize the value of the commercial car. Not only does it cost less by the ton or trip to haul in a motor car than with horses, but more can be accomplished in the same time. The teamster may require six hours to make a trip that the motor car driver can make in less than an hour. Business men, great and small, will soon learn this, and the commercial car industry will grow accordingly. ”

“ And it has paid—every automobile maker, and every salesman will admit this as a matter of course. They will admit it because they know it to be so—a knowledge derived in their own experience.
The psychology of advertising shows that there are two principal things involved in making advertising profitably productive. One is that it informs, the other that it persuades. If the mind is informed of what an automobile is, what it does, and all the advantages and benefits it confers, it has a basis to work on, and from this working basis it will evolve conclusions. ”

“ Figures showing the total amount of money that has been taken in profits out of the automobile industry have never been compiled. It is a business that has developed so rapidly and feverishly that the water churned up by the commotion it has made has not yet settled. But there is a record of enough individual instances of gigantic profits to prove that the largest individual appetite for dividends should have been satisfied by the ratio of earnings already made in automobile manufacture. ”

“ The farmer’s wife and daughters can now go to town more frequently, and multiply the number of their visits to friends. The automobile is the emancipator of the farm woman, bringing the scope of her activities out of the narrow circle of routine drudgery and monotony into the larger circle of inspiring activities. ”

“ Road races, speed and endurance contests, employment of racing drivers with records, automobile shows, outdoor displays—all have been forms of advertising employed in the industry, and all have played their part and exerted their influence to one common end—that of putting the industry in the United States on the highest pinnacle it has attained anywhere in the world in seventeen years. ”

“ But here again it was fortunate for humanity, reckoning the automobile as one of the greatest boons vouchsafed the human race, that the mechanical perfection of the automobile was reached at a date coincident with more enlightened thought, a liberalism of view and a clearer vision of the possibilities of the future by our men of business. ”

“ No people in the world have learned, as have Americans, to spend money to make money. No people in the world take the chances Americans do, and no people win as the Americans do. In this is found one of many causes for the commercial success of the automobile in America.
The American is good to himself as is the man of no other nationality. ”