Automobile factory

“ The largest rooms of wholly automatic machinery were equipped, so that a large amount of crude steel wires, rods, etc., practically go into a factory at one end and come out at the other, fully machined and ready to go into the assembly of a machine. Cylinder boring, all with one operation, takes the place of operations that required many hours. Progressive types44 of assembly of the finished components of the cars make factories look like the “last words in manufacturing.” ”

“ Makers who could point to an annual production of, say 400 cars, took counsel among themselves, and some 50 increased their factory efficiency and financial responsibility that they can now point to an output of as many cars in one day as they made early in their manufacturing experience in one season. ”

“ It is singular how reticent owners of automobiles are concerning the shortcomings and eccentricities of their machines; they seem leagued together to deceive one another and the public. The literal truth can be found only in letters of complaint written to the manufacturers. The man who one moment says his machine is a paragon of perfection, sits down the next and writes the factory a letter which would be debarred the mails if left unsealed. ”

“ One does not expect perfection in a machine, but there is not an automobile made, according to the reports of users, which does not develop many crudities and imperfections in construction which could be avoided by care and conscientious work in the factory, —crudities and imperfections which customers and users have complained of time and time again, but without avail. ”

“ We met the man who made the first automobile in America, and saw his factory—the 352Haynes Automobile Company, of which he was president and principal stockholder, and which was employing, at the time we were there, nearly three thousand men and turning out over two thousand cars a year, nearly a car apiece for every man and woman in the place. I saw no children employed.
The history of this man, as sketched to me beforehand by Franklin and Speed, was most interesting. ”

“ The Michigan Car Company is running a regular class-room in its factory, so that we will have fifty men, properly trained, if we need them.
"Of course, we shall have signs up in the garage that automobile accessories and hardware can be bought from the hardware store, and in the hardware store there will be signs saying that gasoline and repairs of all kinds are to be had in our garage, at such an address. ”

“ The volume of business is so large, and the interests concerned so wide, that the manufacturers have their own organization, called the Motor and Accessory Manufacturers. It includes one hundred and eighty makers, whose capitalization is three hundred millions, and whose investment is more than half a billion dollars.
There still remain to be discussed two phases of the automobile which have tremendous significance for the future of the industry—its commercial adaptability and its relation with the farmer and the farm. ”

“ In that way they are able to admit that the war has been a great48 blessing to the motor truck feature of the industry. “All a part of the great scheme of economics that makes for the approach of the complete automobilization of the country,” is the way one manufacturer puts it.
The automobile industry is set—it is fourth in importance in the United States. It will handle itself, so to speak. The makers know they must give value for every car and truck they build, and the people have become ready to continue in the industry every maker who plays the industry as it should be—not as a “game.” ”

“ Moreover, the automobile illustrates more completely than any other industry the technical qualities that so largely explain our industrial progress. Above all, American manufacturing has developed three characteristics. These are quantity production, standardization, and the use of labor-saving machinery. It is because Ford and other manufacturers adapted these principles to making the automobile that the American motor industry has reached such gigantic proportions. ”

“ And this is scarcely gratitude—by the farmer to the horse—but it is economic pressure.
At every turn in the road of the automobile’s advance, we see its economic value. We see in cities that the big department store is able to cut down its delivery expense from $990 to $350 a day by using a fleet of motor trucks instead of horse drawn wagons; that coal, ice, groceries, feed—practically all commodities in cities—can be delivered by motor trucks at a large saving of cost. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is a fundamental principle in the science of investment.
When the saturation point is reached manufacturing automobiles will settle into an industry153 to supply a daily necessity. There will be keener competition, the price of cars will be lowered, and the profit on each will be correspondingly less. The industry will be similar to those of making hats, plows and shoes. It will carry a substantial profit, but not a spectacular one as now and for many years to come. ”

“ This is one reason why the American car could invade England and her dominions beyond the seas, why Ford has factories in the British Isles and Canada, and why our yearly exports of automobiles have increased in the last five years over $100,000,000 in value. ”

“ Ten years ago, the parts were all turned out in the ordinary forge and machine-shops; to-day there are six hundred manufacturers of parts and accessories, and their investment, including plants, is more than a billion dollars. They employ a quarter of a million people.
No one was more surprised at the growth of the automobile business than the parts-makers themselves. A leading Detroit manufacturer summed it up to me as follows:
"Ten years ago I was in the machine-shop business, making gas engines. Along came the demand for automobile parts. ”

“ Many of our major industries, such as steel, glass, rubber, and textiles, rely on the auto industry to buy a significant percentage of their output. It is estimated that at least one in five jobs in the United States depends, directly or indirectly, on the automobile industry. ”

“ They were entrants that never toed the scratch. Their failure to make a start was due to lack of capital or inefficient organizers. A very large proportion of automobile companies that actually started in business have survived and are successful. ”

“ The remarkable thing about the automobile industry is that, in comparison with its present magnitude, there has been but little original capital invested in it. Today the industry represents a large investment, to be sure, but the bulk of it is made up of profits on the original small investment. Companies started with small original capitals, made money, and used some of it to enlarge plants and increase outputs, until today we have the gigantic institutions that some of these companies are. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can therefore hope that in time we shall cease completely to import factories and heavy machinery and will instead engineer and fabricate them. We are even now in the process of gradually manufacturing automobile, heavy truck and diesel engines. ”

“ It is equaled only by the internal combustion gas engine, which is a factor in making it practical and efficient.
Gasoline-propelled vehicles have become one of man’s greatest aids in business efficiency, but nevertheless it is very important that we consider the facts, that the adoption of the automobile by man for business, commerce and pleasure is on a very large scale, and that the production by manufacturers is so great that very little thought is given to proper care, which is an ever-present factor in economical operation and a fair return for the investment. ”

“ But for the manufacturers’ quick recognition that the future of the automobile did not rest with the rich, that to be a great money-making industry, they must make automobiles for the mass and not for the class, the business would probably today be no further advanced than it was fifteen years ago. ”

“ Co-operation contributed to the general adoption by the motor industry of the automatic machining of parts. What that meant in economic production was the saving of millions in cost of construction, which in turn got the automobile down to the level of the common people’s price. ”

“ The automobile industry rose almost overnight. Orders poured into the offices of companies already organized; new companies were formed by dozens, capitalized at millions of dollars. Fly-by-night concerns sprang up like mushrooms, flooded the country with stock-selling schemes, established factories where parts of motor cars, bought elsewhere, were assembled. Fortunes were made and lost and made again. Almost every day saw new cars on the market. ”

“ A visit to any one of the great automobile factories reveals an inspiring picture of cheerful labor. As you wind through the wildernesses of lathes, hearing a swirling industry singing its iron song of swelling progress, you find enthusiasm blending with organized ability in a marvelous attack on work. Plants with a daily capacity of forty cars turn out sixty. You can behold a complete machine produced every three minutes; you can see the evolution from steel billet to finished car in six days. ”

“ Co-operation between the manufacturers produced standardization, and standardization enabled quantity production, and the low price which quantity consumption warranted has caused automobiles to be bought by millions, and the purchase of the automobile in millions, instead of thousands, has made the hundreds of millions of dividends which this wonderful mine of profits has yielded. ”

“ Homes were mortgaged and all the financial trails were traversed in the effort to maintain an impossible extravagant life. The banker began to detest33 the automobile. It seemed to him that it was undermining the life of the nation. Something had to be done to correct, also, the tone of the domestic automobile maker’s life. He developed a desire for watered stock. Over capitalization of his plant was suspected by the banking interests, and on every hand the motor car industry was decried. Waste and inflation stalked arm in arm through many plants. ”

“ This combination of knowledge by the men engaged in it has made the automobile industry a record breaker in point of the time consumed in its development. It has made it stand out as unparalleled by any other industry in this country in the speed with which it progressed from final experimentation to an established recognized enterprise, involving mammoth investment of capital and huge profits. ”

“ In a situation that is nothing if not competitive, they have coöperated, almost from the beginning, and almost universally for the betterment of the machine itself. This plant or that, devising and perfecting a new kink for the improvement of the internal combustion or gasolene-engine, has thrown it into the common pot for the benefit of its competitors. I have known an automobile manufacturer to spend months on the perfection of a cylinder-block and then to drive it in mad haste over the Indianapolis Speedway, hour after hour, at more than a hundred miles an hour. ”

“ It was expected that the industry would climb into the billion dollar fold—men said that the fourth industry in the country had the financial stage set for starring the “Big Billion,” and they never permit themselves to see a possibility of a recession unless steel becomes too great to be kept within bounds—in short material price is the only problem the venturesome automobile maker will put down for earnest discussion. ”

“ For automobile enterprises that took the wrong road and got mired in the mud of mechanical and management difficulties and financial complications were, most of them, lifted out of the slough by men who knew the right road and were better drivers. Had the automobile developed mechanically to near-perfection a score of years before it did, not only would the people as a mass not have been ready for it, but it is doubtful if business at that period had developed to the point of efficiency where it could recognize the possibilities latent in the motor car as a money-making machine. ”

“ If at our present rate of production we employed the same number of men per car that we did when we began in 1903—and those men were only for assembly—we should to-day require a force of more than two hundred thousand. We have less than fifty thousand men on automobile production at our highest point of around four thousand cars a day! ”