The Great Events by Famous Historians

Meanwhile, it has started a speculative mania that almost rivals the tulip excitement in Holland. In London alone hundreds of fortunes have been made by daring plungers in a crude article which only a few years ago was regarded as being absolutely outside the pale of the gambling marketplace.

Closely allied with the rubber end of the trade is the growing demand for sea-island cotton, which is used in the tires. A few years ago we used only fifty thousand yards a year; now we absorb ten million yards, worth seven and one-half millions of dollars.

Now take machinery, and you find that the automobile business has created a whole new phase of this time-tried industry. In many motor-cars there are three thousand parts. In view of the extraordinary demand for cars, the machinery to produce them must be both swift and accurate. The old standard tools and engine lathes were inadequate to perform the service. The automobile-makers had to have new machinery, and have it in a hurry.

This demand came at a heaven-sent moment for the tool-manufacturers. They were staggering under the depression of 1907, and many were tottering toward failure. Here came, almost out of the blue sky, a condition that at once taxed their brains, their resource, and their energy, and at the same time rescued them from bankruptcy.

You have only to go to any of the great factories in Detroit, in Cleveland, in Indianapolis, in Buffalo, in Flint, or elsewhere to see the result of this hurry call for tools and machinery. You find automatics cutting the finest gears by the score, while one man operates a whole battery; you see drills doing from fifteen to twenty operations on a piston or a flywheel; you see an almost human machine making seventeen holes at one time without observation or care.

Through these machines run rivers of oil. From them streams a steady line of parts. The whole scope of the tool business is broadened. In the old days—which means, in the automobile business, about ten years ago—an order for ten turret-lathes was considered large; now the motor-makers order seventy-five at a time by telegraph, and do not regard it as more than part of the day's work.

The whole effect of this revolution in machinery is that time is saved, labor is economized, and it is possible to achieve quantity production. This, in turn, enables the large manufacturer to turn out a good car at a moderate price.

So with steel, where likewise wonders have been wrought. Ten years ago the great mass of the steel output in this country was in structural metal and rails. We had to import our fine alloy and carbon steels from Germany and France. But the automobile-makers had to have the lightest and toughest metal, and they did not want to import it. The result was that our mills began to produce the finer quality to meet all motor needs, and it is now one of the biggest items in the business.

In half a dozen other allied industries you find the same expansion as you saw in rubber, steel, and machinery. For instance, the automobile-makers buy twenty million dollars' worth of leather a year. So great is the demand that a composition substitute was created, which is used on sixty per cent. of the tops. A new industry in colored leather for upholstery has been evolved.

Wood, too, has had the same kind of experience. Whole forest areas in the South have been denuded for hickory for spokes. A few years ago, aluminum was used on ash-trays and exposition souvenirs. Now hundreds of thousands of pounds are employed each year for sheathing and casings on motor-cars.

No essential of the automobile, however, is of more importance than gasoline. Here is the life-blood of the car. It is estimated that there are to-day three hundred thousand cars in the United States that travel fifteen miles a day. There are fifteen miles of travel in each gallon of gasoline. This makes the daily consumption three hundred thousand gallons. At an average price of fourteen cents a gallon, here is an expenditure of forty-two thousand dollars for gasoline each day, or more than fifteen million dollars a year. To this must be added the excess used in cars that work longer and harder, and in the host of taxicabs that are in business almost all the time, which will probably swell the annual expenditure for gasoline well beyond twenty millions.

As in the case of rubber, there is beginning to be some apprehension about the future supply of high-power gasoline, so great is the demand. Many students of this fuel problem believe that before many years there will be substitutes in the shape of alcohol and kerosene. The efficiency of alcohol has been proved in commercial trucks in New York, but its present price is prohibitive for a general automobile fuel. If denatured alcohol can be produced cheaply and on a large scale, it will help to solve the problem.