Roy D. ChapinAutomobile Biographies Roy D. Chapin Roy D. Chapin was a chairman of the Hudson Motor Car Company. In the early days of 1901 when the foreshortened Oldsmobile was still an object of wonder and envy, a young college lad slipped away from Ann Arbor in mid-semester and took the train for Detroit. Once there he [...]  |
The First Crisis: A Bad YearA boom always reaches its greatest velocity just before it crashes, and in the opening months of 1920 the automobile industry was moving at a high velocity indeed. Ford planned to make 1,000,000 Model T’s. Durant scheduled a 550,000-car output, including 200,000 Buicks, 120,000 Chevrolets, and 100,000 Oaklands. The Oakland schedule required a $3,000,000 construction [...] |
The difficulties of General MotorsWhile Ford was having trouble with his stockholders, Storrow and Nash at General Motors were having a much worse time with theirs. You will remember that Durant had bought control of the Chevrolet (in November, 1911). The car was named for its designer, Louis Chevrolet, until then best known as a driver of racing cars. [...] |
The HudsonAnother 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 [...] |
The OverlandThe 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, [...] |
The Selden patentIn 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 [...] |
The Automobile ProgressesIn the last two years of the nineteenth century and the first year of the twentieth century, there was a great increase in the number of automobiles manufactured, and a tremendous awakening of public interest in the automobile. James Rood Doolittle says that more than three hundred companies making automobiles and automobile parts were organized [...] |
