y built track, it has taken less than ten
years to perfect an automobile that will run the same distance in less
time on a common road.

Since this business is so invested with human interest, let us go back
for a moment to its beginnings. Here you find all the properties,
accessories, and environment to fit the launching of a great drama.

Toward the close of the precarious nineties, a few men wrestled with
the big vision of a horseless age. Down in Ohio and Indiana were Winton
and Haynes; Duryea was in Pennsylvania; over in Michigan were Olds,
Ford, Maxwell, with the brilliant Brush, dreaming mechanical dreams; in
New York Walker kept to the faith of the motor-car.

At that time some of the giants of to-day were outside the motor fold.
Benjamin Briscoe was making radiators and fenders; W.C. Durant was
manufacturing buggies; Walter Flanders was selling machinery on the
road; Hugh Chalmers was making a great cash-register factory hum with
system; Fred W. Haines was struggling with the problem of developing a
successful gasoline engine.

Scarcely anybody dreamed that man was on the threshold of a new era in
human progress that would revolutionize traffic and set a new mark for
American enterprise and achievement. And yet it was little more than
ten years ago.

Those early years were years of experimentation, packed with mistakes
and changes. Few of the cars would run long or fast. It was inevitable
that the automobile should take its place in jest and joke. Hence the
comic era. With the development of the mechanism came the speed mania,
which hardly added to the machine's popularity.

You must remember in this connection that the automobile was a new
thing with absolutely no precedent. The makers groped in the dark, and
every step cost something. New steels had to be welded; new machinery
made; a whole new engineering system had to be created. The model of
to-day was in the junk heap to-morrow. But just as curious instinct led
the hand of man to the silver heart of the Comstock Lode, so did
circumstance, destiny, and invention combine to point the way to the
commercially successful car.

Out of the wreck, the chaos, and the failure of the struggling days
came a cheap and serviceable car that did not require a daily renewal
of its parts. It proved to be the pathfinder to motor popularity, for
with its appearance, early in this decade, the automobile began to find
itself.

Now began the "shoe-string" period, the