times. This vehicle, like the bicycle, is not essentially a modern
invention; the reason any one can manufacture it is that practically all
the basic ideas antedate 1840. Indeed, the automobile is really older than
the railroad. In the twenties and thirties, steam stage coaches made
regular trips between certain cities in England and occasionally a much
resounding power-driven carriage would come careering through New York and
Philadelphia, scaring all the horses and precipitating the intervention of
the authorities. The hardy spirits who devised these engines, all of whose
names are recorded in the encyclopedias, deservedly rank as the "fathers"
of the automobile. The responsibility as the actual "inventor" can probably
be no more definitely placed. However, had it not been for two
developments, neither of them immediately related to the motor car, we
should never have had this efficient method of transportation. The real
"fathers" of the automobile are Gottlieb Daimler, the German who made the
first successful gasoline engine, and Charles Goodyear, the American who
discovered the secret of vulcanized rubber. Without this engine to form the
motive power and the pneumatic tire to give it four air cushions to run on,
the automobile would never have progressed beyond the steam carriage stage.
It is true that Charles Baldwin Selden, of Rochester, has been pictured as
the "inventor of the modern automobile" because, as long ago as 1879, he
applied for a patent on the idea of using a gasoline engine as motive
power, securing this basic patent in 1895, but this, it must be admitted,
forms a flimsy basis for such a pretentious claim.

The French apparently led all nations in the manufacture of motor vehicles,
and in the early nineties their products began to make occasional
appearances on American roads. The type of American who owned this imported
machine was the same that owned steam yachts and a box at the opera. Hardly
any new development has aroused greater hostility. It not only frightened
horses, and so disturbed the popular traffic of the time, but its speed,
its glamour, its arrogance, and the haughty behavior of its proprietor, had
apparently transformed it into a new badge of social cleavage. It thus
immediately took its place as a new gewgaw of the rich; that it had any
other purpose to serve had occurred to few people. Yet the French and
English machines created an entirely different reaction in the mind of an
imagi