The Great Events by Famous Historians

You have only to go to Detroit to see this pulsating drama of production in action. Here beats the heart of the motor world; here a mighty army is evolving a vast industrial epic.

Its banners are the smoke that trails from a hundred soaring stacks; its music is the clang of a thousand forges and the rattle of a maze of machinery.

You feel this quickening life the moment you enter the city, for the tang of its uplift is in the air. There is an automobile for every fifty people in Detroit. The children on the streets know the name, make, and model of nearly all the cars produced. You can stand in front of the Hotel Pontchartrain, in the public square, and see the whole automobile world chug by.

Formerly our cities were motor-mad; now, as in the case of Detroit, they are motor-made. Ten years ago the proudest boast of the Michigan metropolis was that she produced more pills, paint, stoves, and freight-cars than any other American city. The volume of the largest of these industries did not exceed eighteen million dollars a year. To-day she leads the world in automobile production. Her twenty-five factories turn out, in a year, more than ninety thousand cars, or more than sixty per cent, of the total output of the United States. These cars alone would stretch from New York to Boston.

But these figures do not convey any adequate idea of what the motor-car has done for Detroit. You must go to the spot to feel the galvanic and compelling force that the industry projects. The city is like a mining-camp in the days of a fabulous strike. Instead of new mines, there are new factories every day, and the record of this industrial high tide is being made in brick, stone, and mortar. Energy, resource, and ingenuity are being pushed to the last limit to take advantage of the golden opportunity that the overwhelming demand for the automobile has created. It is a thrilling and distinctively American spectacle, and it makes one feel proud and glad to be part of the people who are achieving it.

Some of the new plants have risen almost overnight, and on every hand there are miracles of rapid construction. The business is overshadowing all other activities. A leading merchant of Detroit asked a contractor the other day if he could do some work for him. On receiving a negative reply, he asked the reason, whereupon the man said: "These automobile people keep me so busy that I can't do anything else. I have a year's work ahead now."

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. Formerly it took five months.

While the development of the automobile business is in itself a wonder story, no less amazing is its effect on all the allied industries. On rubber alone it has wrought a revolution.

Ten years ago practically all the rubber that we imported went into boots, shoes, hose, belting, and kindred products, The introduction of rubber tires on horse-drawn vehicles only drew slightly on the supply. To-day more than eighty per cent. of the crude article that reaches our shores goes into automobile tires; and the biggest problem in the whole automobile situation is not a question of steel and output, but a fear that we may not be able to get enough rubber to shoe the expanding host of cars. You have only to look at the change in price to get a hint of the growth of this feature of the business. In 1900 crude rubber sold at sixty-five cents a pound; now it brings about two dollars and fifty cents.

The facts about rubber have a peculiar human interest. When you sit back comfortably in your smooth-running car, you may not realize that the rubber in the tire that stands between you and the jolting of the road was carried on the back of a native for a thousand miles out of the Amazon jungle; that for every twenty pounds of the crude juice brought in from the wilds, one human life has been sacrificed. No crop is garnered with so great a hazard; none takes so merciless a toll.

The natives who gather rubber in the wilds of Brazil, in the Congo, in Ceylon, and elsewhere must combat disease, insects, war, flood, and a hundred hardships. The harvest is slow and costly. Only the planting of vast new areas in Ceylon has prevented what many believe would have been a famine in rubber, and this would have been a serious check to the development of the whole automobile business, for as yet no man has found a substitute for it. In such a substitute, or in a puncture-proof tire, lies one of the unplucked fortunes of the future.