In the 1910s, Ford put the Model T on a moving assembly line, Cadillac offered an electric starter in place of the hand crank, and Indianapolis ran its first 500-mile races. World War I then pressed taxis, trucks and racing drivers into service, while boosters promoted named trails and states began numbering highways. These stories follow the makes, the inventions, the people and the moments of the decade.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1910s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The Model T's black-only rule was never so neat
On the tile: Model T Paint1913-1919Myth busted
Popular belief holds that 1914 was the first year Ford painted every Model T black. The Model T Ford Club of America's encyclopedia, drawn from Ford's own records, finds a messier picture. A paint list issued in December 1913 still called for blue coats on bodies. In March 1917, Ford asked its branches to count their blue body paint, because it expected to paint all bodies black by April 15. And a factory letter of February 20, 1919 announced that closed bodies were now being painted black instead of green.
Race cars of 1911 normally carried two people, a driver and a riding mechanic. Ray Harroun, of Marmon's engineering department, helped design a streamlined racing version of the locally built Marmon with only one seat. When rival teams objected that it had no place for a mechanic, who watched for cars coming up behind, Harroun mounted a mirror above the cowl. The Speedway says it is believed to be the first rearview mirror ever used on a car. Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500, then announced his retirement from driving.
In April 1911, Harry C. Stutz began building a car for the first Indianapolis 500, which was only weeks away. On May 30 it finished 11th with no mechanical problems, and a slogan was born: "The Car That Made Good in a Day." By June, Stutz had leased a building in Indianapolis to begin production, and in 1912 he introduced the Bear Cat. The famed Bearcat had a powerful T-head four-cylinder engine, and in 1915 Stutz racing cars won at Elgin, Illinois, and Sheepshead Bay, New York.
John and Horace Dodge were born in Niles, Michigan, and made their name as precision machinists. Beginning in 1903, their shop supplied parts to Ford Motor Company, and John served as a Ford vice president until he resigned in 1913. The brothers then left Ford's supply business to build a car under their own name, and on November 14, 1914, Dodge Brothers introduced it. The four-cylinder touring car came with features that soon became standard, including a speedometer, an all-steel body and an electric ignition system.
Mack introduced its AC truck in 1916, with chain drive to the rear wheels and the radiator mounted behind the engine. During World War I, Mack delivered about 4,500 ACs to the U.S. government and more than 2,000 to Great Britain. The story goes that British engineers and soldiers said the trucks had the tenacity of a bulldog, high praise at a time when the bulldog was a symbol of Britain. Whatever the exact words, the AC is credited with giving Mack its bulldog identity, and the bulldog became the company's emblem.
In the early 1910s, the cars on Japan's roads were foreign makes such as Ford and GM. In 1911 Masujiro Hashimoto opened a small workshop in Tokyo's Hiroo district, the Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works. Three years later it completed the DAT, a small passenger car with a twin-cylinder 10 ps engine and a top speed of 32 km/h, about 20 mph. Its name combined the initials of three men who had invested in the firm: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama and Aketaro Takeuchi. The DAT was shown at the Taisho Exposition that same year.
Mitsubishi's first car came out of its Kobe shipyard. Production of the Model A began in 1917, and Mitsubishi counts it as the first series-produced passenger car in Japan. Its designers worked from sketches of a dismantled European car. The engine was cast iron, gas lamps served as headlamps, and the horn was blown by air. Experienced horse coachbuilders made the interior from hollowed-out, lacquered white cypress, trimmed with English worsted fabric. By 1921, just 22 cars, prototypes included, had been assembled.
Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin met through cycling, and in 1913 they founded Bamford & Martin Ltd, at first selling and servicing Singer cars. They had competed in hill climbs in a modified Singer, but both wanted to build a car of their own. The new name recalled success at the Aston Clinton hill climb, and the Aston Martin Heritage Trust says "Aston" is believed to have gone first so the name would appear at the top of alphabetical lists of carmakers. Their first car was built in 1915, but World War I interrupted the young company's progress.
Before there was an Alfa Romeo, there was A.L.F.A., short for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. It was registered in Milan on June 24, 1910, taking over the factory of the Italian branch of the French carmaker Darracq. Its chief engineer, Giuseppe Merosi, had already drawn up the company's first car, the 24 HP. In August 1915 the Neapolitan entrepreneur Nicola Romeo took control and turned the factory to military production, including shells. His name was later added to the company's.
The story goes that Byron Carter was cranking a stalled car when the crank kicked back and broke his jaw, and that his death spurred Cadillac to get rid of the hand crank. The starter was real: Charles Kettering demonstrated his electric starter on a Cadillac engine in Detroit on February 27, 1911, Cadillac ordered 12,000 systems, and its 1912 cars had it. But Carter died on April 6, 1908, two years before the accident supposedly happened in Kettering's biography, and his death certificate lists pneumonia.
Ford's moving assembly line did not start with whole cars. Around April 1, 1913, at the Highland Park plant, flywheel magnetos for the Model T went onto a moving line. Before, one worker had needed some 20 minutes to finish one. Along the waist-high line, each worker added a few parts and slid the flywheel to the next person, and a finished one came off every 13 minutes, then every five. Engines and transmissions followed, then complete chassis, and by early 1914 a Model T took 93 minutes instead of 12 1/2 hours.
Edward N. Hines was a charter member of Michigan's Wayne County Road Commission. In 1911 he came up with the idea of painting a line down the center of a road to separate traffic. The story goes that it came to him while watching a leaky milk wagon leave a white trail down a road. His painted center lines were first used that year on River Road in Trenton. Michigan's transportation department notes that the center line has been called the most important single traffic safety device in the history of auto transportation.
In the 1910s, many long routes were named trails promoted by boosters. Wisconsin's highway engineer, Arthur R. Hirst, said in January 1918 that the typical trail promoter seemed to think "plenty of wind and a few barrels of paint" were all it took. A 1917 state law had created a trunk highway system with uniform signs, and Wisconsin became the first state to replace trail signs with numbers. Routes were numbered from 10 upward, so every number had two digits, and counties put up the signs at an agreed zero hour on May 24, 1918.
5An actress patented a motor-driven windshield cleaner
On the tile: Electric Wiper1917
Charlotte Bridgwood, a stage actress who performed as Lotta Lawrence, filed a patent on October 16, 1917 for an electric windshield cleaner. A small motor rode on a carriage along the windshield frame, reversing automatically at the end of its travel, while wiping elements cleaned both sides of the glass. The driver started and stopped it with push buttons on the instrument board. The patent was granted on August 6, 1918. Her daughter, the film star Florence Lawrence, became president of her mother's company, Bridgwood Manufacturing.
6Brakes worked by fluid, from a man named Loughead
On the tile: Fluid Brakes1917
Malcolm Loughead of Santa Barbara, California, filed a patent on January 22, 1917 for a braking apparatus that applied force to the wheel brakes "through the medium of a fluid" instead of the usual train of links and levers. It was granted that December. Malcolm and his brother Allan were also building airplanes, but Malcolm later found success in Detroit with his hydraulic brakes for cars. Tired of hearing his name mispronounced "Log-head," he changed the spelling to Lockheed and named his firm the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company.
The first Indianapolis 500, on May 30, 1911, began in a new way. Speedway founder Carl Fisher drove his Stoddard-Dayton passenger car ahead of the 40-car field for one unscored lap, then released the racers to the starter at about 40 mph. As the pace car pulled onto the pit apron, starter Fred Wagner waved the green flag. The Speedway says it is believed to have been the first mass rolling start for any automobile race in the world, and quite possibly the first use of a pace car at a major event.
Railroad tycoon Sam Hill and engineer Sam Lancaster toured the scenic highways of Europe and came home with a vision for Oregon's Columbia River Gorge. Lancaster charted the Columbia River Highway past as many of the gorge's waterfalls, canyons and cliffs as he could, with grades of 5 percent. At Mitchell Point, a tunnel with several windows was modeled on the Axenstrasse tunnel in Switzerland. The highway was dedicated on June 7, 1916, and Oregon's transportation department says it was considered the first scenic highway in the United States.
In late 1912 the U.S. Army asked the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, for a truck to replace the four-mule teams that hauled loads of a ton and a half. Less than a year later the Quad was ready. Four-wheel drive, four-wheel brakes and four-wheel steering had all been tried before, but the Quad made them work well together, with top speed governed to 14 mph. In June 1914 the Army owned just 62 trucks of all kinds. During World War I, Quads were built by the thousands.
William "Billy" Durant created General Motors in 1908. By 1910 GM needed money to stay afloat, and Durant had to let bankers take control for the five-year term of a loan that began on September 26, 1910. He was not finished. He teamed up with Buick's former racing star Louis Chevrolet, and in 1911 they founded a company named for the driver. Chevrolets sold well, and Durant kept buying GM stock. At a GM board meeting in 1916 he announced that Chevrolet held controlling interest, and he was elected GM's president again.
Louis Chevrolet, born in Switzerland in 1878, raced for Buick until a severe crash in the 1910 Vanderbilt Cup led William Durant to take him off the track. Durant needed a new car to sell, and the company that bore Chevrolet's name was founded in 1911. But Durant wanted volume and profits, while Chevrolet wanted speed. Chevrolet later recalled the break: during a talk about a low-priced model he lit a cigarette, Durant offered him a cigar and called him stubborn, and he walked out. By 1916 he was building Frontenac race cars for Indianapolis.
Florence Lawrence, known as "The Biograph Girl," was one of the first movie stars, and she liked to tinker with her own car. In 1914 she told The Green Book Magazine, "I have invented an 'auto-signaling arm,' which, when placed on the back of the fender, can be raised or lowered by electrical push buttons." She was not the first to think of turn signals, since a British man had patented signal hands in 1909, and she never patented her own. Still, she is credited with early turn and brake signals.
Erwin Baker of Indianapolis made a living from record runs, and his motto was simple: no record, no pay. In May 1914 he rode an Indian motorcycle from San Diego to New York in about 11 and a half days, beating the old record by nearly nine days. That summer, newspapers began calling him "Cannon Ball," after a famous express train. In May 1915 he drove a Stutz Bearcat from coast to coast, reaching New York in 11 days, seven hours and 15 minutes. In 1916 he beat his own transcontinental mark by four days, this time in a Cadillac.
Barney Oldfield started out racing bicycles and became a barnstorming race driver. His flair for showmanship kept him in almost constant trouble with the AAA, which sanctioned major American auto races, but he still chased records. In 1910, in the 200-horsepower Blitzen Benz, he broke the existing marks for the mile, two miles and the flying kilometer, reaching 131.724 mph. In 1914 he won the grueling Cactus Derby, a desert race of roughly 700 miles from Los Angeles to Phoenix, and finished fifth at Indianapolis in a Stutz.
Henry Leland had helped found Cadillac and sold it to General Motors in 1909. In 1917 he left GM after a dispute with William Durant over war production, and with his son Wilfred he started a new company. He named it for Abraham Lincoln, the first president he had ever voted for, in 1864. Lincoln's first job was not cars. Backed by a government contract, it built Liberty V12 aircraft engines, some 6,500 of them by the end of World War I. The first Lincoln automobile did not appear until 1920.
7Emily Post's cross-country drive that a banker doubted
On the tile: Emily Post1915
In April 1915, years before her famous book on etiquette, Emily Post set out to motor from New York to San Francisco, with her son driving and no chauffeur, servants or mechanic. A New York banker insisted they would never make it and predicted they would be "on a Pullman inside of ten days." They kept going. But in Arizona, with the car badly crippled, they put it on a freight car to Los Angeles and took the train to the Grand Canyon. She told the whole story in By Motor to the Golden Gate.
On July 7, 1919, the Army's first transcontinental motor convoy left Washington, D.C., for San Francisco: 81 motor vehicles that would cover 3,251 miles in 62 days. Along as an observer for the War Department was a bored young officer, Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bridges cracked, vehicles got stuck in mud and equipment broke. Eisenhower later wrote, "The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways," and as president he pushed the highway plan that sped construction of the Interstate System.
9Henry Ford would not chip in for Carl Fisher's highway
On the tile: Carl Fisher1912-1913
Carl Fisher, builder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, wanted a coast-to-coast highway finished by May 1, 1915. At a dinner with auto industry friends in Indianapolis in September 1912, he put the cost at about $10 million and urged them to build it "before we're too old to enjoy it." Within a month they pledged $1 million. Henry Ford refused, even after Fisher pleaded with him over a pigpen at the State Fair in Detroit, because Ford believed government should build roads. The federal highway agency's history concludes that Ford had been right.
A French legend says a fleet of Paris taxis saved the city in September 1914. The taxis were real. On the night of September 6, Renault cabs gathered at the Place des Invalides and carried reinforcements toward the Battle of the Marne, several thousand men in all, though estimates vary. But most of the troops who rode in them were held in reserve, and historians rate the episode as a boost to morale rather than a decisive blow. Back in Paris, their meters were read and the military was sent a bill.
On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford and vice president James Couzens announced that Ford Motor Company would double its workers' wages to five dollars a day. Within days, thousands of job seekers massed at the company's gate, and in icy January weather the crowds were turned away with fire hoses. The pay came with conditions. It was really profit sharing: a man who made $2.30 a day kept that wage and got a $2.70 bonus only if he met company requirements, and a Sociological Department monitored workers' habits outside the plant.
John and Horace Dodge owned a tenth of Ford Motor Company's stock, and they wanted more of its huge cash surplus paid out to shareholders. When special dividends stopped, they sued, on November 2, 1916. On February 7, 1919, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld an order for an extra dividend of about $19 million. "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders," the court wrote. Yet it refused to block Henry Ford's plans to expand, including a smelting plant on the River Rouge.
On July 1, 1913, the day the Lincoln Highway Association was founded, its "Trail-Blazer" tour left Indianapolis with 17 cars and 2 trucks to choose the best roads west. Newspaper and telegraph company representatives came along to send out dispatches. The trip to San Francisco took 34 days of mud in Iowa, sand in Nevada and Utah, boiling radiators and cracked axles, with cheers in every town that hoped to be on the route. The route announced that September was 3,389 miles long, and less than half of it was improved.
5Army trucks drove to the coast through a hard winter
On the tile: Army Trucks1917-1918
In World War I the railroads could not keep up, yet new Army trucks at first went to eastern ports on railroad cars. Beginning in December 1917, to free those cars, the Quartermaster General ordered the trucks driven to the coast instead. The first convoy left Toledo early that month, at the start of one of the most severe winters in recent U.S. history. On January 3, 1918, 29 of its 30 vehicles rolled into Baltimore, helped by Pennsylvania crews who kept the road open through a blizzard. The Army sent 30,000 trucks this way.
Spencer Penrose of Colorado Springs saw the tourist potential of Pikes Peak, and in 1915 he finished turning its narrow carriage road into the Pikes Peak Highway. The next year he founded a race on it. The first Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb was held on August 10, 11 and 12, 1916, and it ended in an upset: Rea Lentz won in a homemade car, the Romano Special, with a time of 20 minutes, 55.6 seconds. Halted only during the two world wars, the event calls itself the second-oldest motorsports race in America.
"Back Home Again in Indiana" is now sung before the Indianapolis 500 every year, and the Speedway traces the song's place in the race to 1919. That year, the first 500 after World War I, a trackside brass band played it as Hoosier Howdy Wilcox was on his way to victory. The song did not become a fixture until 1946, when James Melton became the first to sing it before the race. Jim Nabors later performed it 36 times.
8A worker's wife wrote to Henry Ford about the line
On the tile: Letter to Ford1914
On January 23, 1914, less than three weeks after the five-dollar day was announced, the wife of a final assembler wrote to Henry Ford. Her husband, she said, could not leave the line when nature called, was cursed at by a foreman to hurry, and kept working while sick. She called the chain system "a slave driver." She did not scorn the wage, calling it "a blessing-- a bigger one than you know but oh they earn it." Her letter survives in the collections of The Henry Ford.
When Ford built its moving assembly line at Highland Park, it did not keep it secret. Horace Lucien Arnold, a correspondent for The Engineering Magazine, began a series of articles on the factory. After Arnold's untimely death, Fay Leone Faurote completed and compiled them into the 1915 book Ford Methods and the Ford Shops, full of photographs and diagrams. The Henry Ford calls the access Ford gave its authors the book's most remarkable feature, a sign of Henry Ford's confidence that rivals could not catch up quickly.