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While the widening automobile market and the small capital required to carry on an automobile business were bringing large numbers of new companies into the motorcar field, the Ford Motor Company was getting a great deal more than its share in the expanded market and establishing itself as the unquestioned leader in volume of sales. [...]
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The automobile is often discussed as if it were the origin of personal transportation. Yet, backward as the horse-and-buggy era may have been, it unquestionably did possess the buggy and the horse. And before the appearance of the first automobile, there was a flourishing industry dedicated to the manufacture of buggies, carriages, wagons, and other [...]
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Another example of how to get along in the automobile business with hardly any working capital was furnished by Roy Chapin and Howard Coffin, makers of the Hudson car. Chapin had started out as photographer and odd-jobs man for Olds, one of the odd jobs being to file by hand gears which did not fit [...]
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The best example of hand-to-mouth auto-making was given by John North Willys, who took charge of the Overland when the Overland Company had no working capital and was $80,000 in debt. The Overland company was organized in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1902. At that time Willys ran a bicycle, phonograph, and sporting-goods store in Elmira, [...]
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Very few American corporations have ever made as much money as $1,000,000 a year, as has already been pointed out. In 1929, there were about 1,300 such corporations out of some 450,000 incorporated concerns. In 1932, there were only about 250 $1,000,000-earners. In what is commonly called a normal period, about 1,000 corporations – one [...]
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While the Selden suit was still being argued, the auto industry was developing a movement not toward monopoly but toward merger. The chief figures in this movement were Durant and Briscoe. It is not likely that either of them had any ambition to monopolize the automobile business, or even to stabilize it in the sense [...]
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The automobile was born competitively and operated competitively; a large part of the industry has died competitively. No other industry of comparable importance, and particularly no other industry in which a few large corporations have produced the bulk of the output, has remained as individualistic, as independent, as true to the tenets of Adam Smith [...]
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In the discussion of Hiram Maxim’s early experiments, it has been said that Maxim was unacquainted with the work of his predecessors in the field. One important item of early auto history of which Maxim was ignorant was the fact that in 1879 Rochester, New York, patent lawyer named George Baldwin Selden had applied for [...]
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In the 1900-08 period, the automobile outgrew its horseless-carriage era, established the superiority of the gasoline engine over electricity and steam, and swung from the very light buggy-type automobile, with a one-cylinder or two-cylinder engine, to the four-cylinder and six-cylinder touring car, which sometimes approached the proportions of a land-going battleship. There was still no [...]
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The Oldsmobile, the Cadillac, the Buick, and the Ford were typical Michigan automobiles in that each was, at one time or another, at or close to the top in sales volume. But the Middle West was not without its luxury cars, designed for the wealthy purchaser and supported not by sales volume but by profit [...]
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