Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age - Hardcover

Goldstone, Lawrence

 
9780553394184: Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553394185 ISBN 13: 9780553394184
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From the acclaimed author of Birdmen comes a revelatory new history of the birth of the automobile, an illuminating and entertaining true tale of invention, competition, and the visionaries, hustlers, and swindlers who came together to transform the world.

In 1900, the Automobile Club of America sponsored the nation’s first car show in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The event was a spectacular success, attracting seventy exhibitors and nearly fifty thousand visitors. Among the spectators was  an obscure would-be automaker named Henry Ford, who walked the floor speaking with designers and engineers, trying to gauge public enthusiasm for what was then a revolutionary invention. His conclusion: the automobile was going to be a fixture in American society, both in the city and on the farm—and would make some people very rich. None, he decided, more than he.

Drive! is the most complete account to date of the wild early days of the auto age. Lawrence Goldstone tells the fascinating story of how the internal combustion engine, a “theory looking for an application,” evolved into an innovation that would change history. Debunking many long-held myths along the way, Drive! shows that the creation of the automobile was not the work of one man, but very much a global effort. Long before anyone had heard of Henry Ford, men with names like Benz, Peugeot, Renault, and Daimler were building and marketing  the world’s first cars.

Goldstone breathes life into an extraordinary cast of characters: the inventors and engineers who crafted engines small enough to use on a “horseless carriage”; the financiers who risked everything for their visions; the first racers—daredevils who pushed rickety, untested vehicles to their limits; and such visionary lawyers as George Selden, who fought for and won the first patent for the gasoline-powered automobile. Lurking around every corner is Henry Ford, a brilliant innovator and an even better marketer, a tireless promoter of his products—and of himself.

With a narrative as propulsive as its subject, Drive! plunges us headlong into a time unlike any in history, when near-manic innovation, competition, and consumerist zeal coalesced to change the way the world moved.

Praise for Drive!

“[A] marvelously told story . . . The author provides a terrific backdrop to the ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ era in which his story takes place. On display are lucky scoundrels and unlucky geniuses, hustlers, hacks, and daredevils galore. . . . Goldstone has written a book that beautifully captures the intertwined fates of these two ingenious pioneers.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A wonderful, story-filled saga of the early days of the auto age . . . Readers will be swept up in his vivid re-creation of a bygone era. . . . ‘Horse Is Doomed,’ read one headline in 1895. This highly readable popular history tells why.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred reviews)

“A splendid dissection of the Selden/Ford patent face-off and its place in automotive historiography, this work will be enjoyed by business, legal, transportation, social, and intellectual historians; general readers; and all libraries.”—Library Journal (starred review)
 
“This book contains the great names in automotive history—the Dodge brothers, Barney Oldfield, all the French (they seemed, until Ford, to lead the Americans in development of the vehicle)—and it is fascinating. . . . An engaging new take on the history of technological innovation.”—Booklist

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lawrence Goldstone is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies. One of his novels won a New American Writing Award; another was a New York Times notable mystery. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, the Toronto Star, Salon, and Slate, among others. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Nancy.

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Chapter 1

Power in a Tube

The latter half of the seventeenth century was a remarkable time, when science was called “natural philosophy” and one so engaged roamed freely over the intellectual landscape. Men such as Newton, Leibniz, Robert Hooke, Descartes, and Robert Boyle were all renowned for discoveries or innovations in a variety of disciplines. Christiaan Huygens was another of that century’s masters. An advisor to France’s Louis XIV for fifteen years, Huygens is best known for his work in astronomy, optics, and timekeeping—­he discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, and invented what came to be called the grandfather clock. But like most of his contemporaries, he was drawn to the more conceptual problems of the day, working in the mind as much as in practical spheres, theorizing on such diverse topics as the force of gravity and probability in games of chance.

One possibility that fascinated him was the use of controlled explosions as a power source. Since the only substance available to generate such a reaction was gunpowder, that became his default fuel, and cannons, some of which were huge and could propel a projectile weighing more than a quarter ton, provided the shape of the housing. And, since the objective was to generate energy and not to kill one’s neighbor, the canister would need to be closed at both ends. Finally, for maximum efficiency, whatever was employed inside the canister to be driven by the explosion would need to conform to its shape, a tool we now call a piston.

Huygens built such a device in 1673, but he made an odd discovery. After ignition, rather than being driven outward by the force of the explosion, his primitive piston was drawn back. Oxygen had yet to be identified as an element, so Huygens was unaware that the explosion had burned off the gas, creating a partial vacuum and therefore an atmospheric imbalance that the piston was sucked in to equalize. Motors that ran on this principle would be known as “atmospheric engines.” Only later would experimenters discover that in order to fully harness the force of the explosion, it would be necessary to compress the fuel in the cylinder before ignition.

While Huygens had produced a theoretical prototype, his construction had obvious flaws, the most significant of which was that there was no means to keep the contraption running, since the cylinder had to be reloaded after each discharge. Gunpowder, a solid, was not at all suited to any device that was meant to run continuously. So primitive was Huygens’s apparatus that no one thought to improve in-­cylinder explosive devices for almost two centuries. The encased piston, however, was almost immediately utilized to provide power generated from other sources. In 1690, Denis Papin, a French mathematician who had once been Huygens’s assistant, created a partial vacuum in a cylinder by condensing steam, a spur that eventually inspired one of history’s most significant technological advances.

As iron came increasingly to replace wood, the great engineering challenge of the period was the development of an effective means to pump water out of mines and thus allow miners to access ore much deeper underground. In 1712, the year Papin died, Thomas Newcomen, an English iron merchant and lay preacher, built on both Papin’s work and the experiments of another Englishman, Thomas Savery, and fabricated the first practical steam engine. He placed a boiler beneath a cylinder, forcing steam into the chamber, and then used water from a tank above to cool the cylinder and condense the steam. The resulting partial vacuum allowed atmospheric pressure to draw the piston downward. A valve between the boiler and the cylinder would open to allow the steam to enter, and then close when the cylinder was full; another valve from the water tank would open when the cylinder was full, and then close after the piston had been sucked downward. A rocking beam—­a sort of seesaw—­attached at a pivot point above the cylinder and had a chain fastened on one side that ran a pump, which would suck water from a mine as the piston descended on the opposite side.

Newcomen’s engine could run continuously and reliably and was thus a boon to mine owners. But it was also highly inefficient. The cylinder had to be hot when the steam entered, then cold to create the vacuum, then hot again to continue the cycle. Such rapid and extreme changes of temperature engendered substantial heat energy loss and also put a strain on the iron cylinder wall. For all its shortcomings, however, Newcomen’s engine remained the state of the art for three-­quarters of a century, until James Watt developed a vastly improved design, one that has remained more or less unchanged ever since.

Watt’s engine was direct drive, that is, the piston was driven by the steam entering the cylinder and not sucked into a partial vacuum, as with atmospheric engines. He avoided energy loss by allowing his cylinder to remain hot. Waste steam was driven into a separate vessel by the downstroke of the piston, where it was condensed and then returned to the water tank to begin the water-­steam-­water cycle once more. A far more sophisticated system of valves controlled the movement of water and steam among the various components. Watt’s ingenuity did not end with the engine’s internals; he perfected methods for converting the piston’s reciprocal (up-­and-­down) motion to rotary motion using gears, and also a linkage system to gain power from piston strokes in both directions, not just one, as with the chain.

Watt’s engine and transfer system were far more powerful and efficient than Newcomen’s, using only half as much coal to produce twice the output. Since no ignition was necessary—­steam was created externally in a boiler and then piped into the cylinder—­steam engines avoided the problem that had doomed Huygens’s explosive prototype. With the supply of the two fuels for steam engines, water and coal, essentially inexhaustible, there seemed little incentive to experiment with gunpowder or any other combustible alternative.

With his partner and fellow Lunar Society member Matthew Boulton, Watt marketed his device in 1776, thus beginning an industrial revolution on one side of the Atlantic at the dawn of a political revolution on the other. The steam engine was soon employed in virtually every commercial process that demanded a consistent and reliable power source. Perhaps no other mechanical device in history caused such a rapid and profound change in the human experience. In many ways, the modern urban industrialized world could be thought to have sprung from the mind of James Watt.

Although Watt’s engine, like Newcomen’s, had been designed for stationary use, it was inevitable that the notion of applying steam power to locomotion would soon follow. Within decades, both steam locomotives and steamships would transport millions of tons of goods and millions of travelers greater distances and in less time than had previously been thought possible.

Applying steam power to personalized conveyances was another obvious extension of the technology, but it would require any such device to be engineered a good deal smaller and substantially lighter than had by then been achieved. The first man to successfully build a steam-­powered carriage was a French engineer, Nicolas Cugnot, who in 1769, predating Watt, fashioned a heavy three-­wheeled cart with a large boiler hanging over the front, driving the single front wheel, leaving the entire platform free to haul munitions or artillery. Cugnot’s cart was quite cleverly constructed, with two cylinders operating alternately, utilizing a ratchet that created rotary power and...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553394185
ISBN 13 
9780553394184
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
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