BALANCING ON ONE WHEEL

In the building of this automobile industry, personalities played a major part. There was the idea of a self-propelled road vehicle, crude as it is granted, but to pick up that idea and carry on took men of imagination, men with the courage of their convictions, resourceful, colorful, and last-ditch fighters.

—Chris Sinsabaugh, Who Me? Forty Years of Automobile History

By the age of forty-nine, Albert Champion employed three thousand five hundred workers in his AC Spark Plug Company in Flint, Michigan, and they all passed every workday under his photo portrait, which hung in a large frame over the portal leading into the factory. They called him The Chief. He looked every inch the chief in his tailored dark suit—fashionable, trim with an air of Gaulic insouciance, stylish Arrow collar points, cuffs showing just so with links of gold, a diamond pin winking in his necktie, hands resting in the pockets of pleated trousers. His attire perpetuated his reputation as a lady's man. He was of medium height with a commanding presence, accustomed to being stared at by women for his distinguished appearance, enhanced by a fringe of gray hair hugging the sides of his head, and by men for his athletic bearing. This stolid corporate image failed to portray the fame and heroics of his youthful trans-Atlantic energy celebrating that trait so essential to Frenchmen of his generation, la gloire! The man with a predestined name was born in Paris, hard by the Arc de Triomphe, on April 5, 1878, upon sawdust.

Paris had such high infant mortality that the law required parents to take newborns in person with two witnesses to city hall to register them. Champion's birth certificate, in flowing longhand penned with a quill nib, indicates that his parents, Alexandre Champion, a coachman, and Marie Blanche Carpentier Champion, a washerwoman, waited two weeks to bundle him up before they left their home at 11 Avenue MacMahon for city hall in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, a neighborhood known as Batignolles. Witnesses Henri Genet, a metalworker, and Eugène Belly, a laborer, attended to verify the identity of the couple's legitimate son: Albert Joseph Champion.

Albert, the couple's firstborn, could now be counted among the City of Light's two million residents. Avenue MacMahon, a tribute to the former soldier-statesman and president of France, Patrice de MacMahon, stretches as one of a dozen streets laid out like spokes of a wheel radiating from Place de l'Étoile, the hub encircling the Arc de Triomphe. Emperor Napoléon had erected the monument in the early nineteenth century to glorify the armies of the empire and to mark the western entry into Paris. Avenue MacMahon marked twelve o'clock on the circle, above Avenue des Champs-Élysées, perhaps the most famous boulevard in the world, which intersected at three o'clock. Other thoroughfares honored greats, such as Avenue Victor Hugo for France's grand man of letters. Champion may have been born to humble parents, but they put him in the center of la gloire!

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In the spring of 1889, on his eleventh birthday, Champion was strolling on a sunny afternoon at the end of the chic Avenue de la Grand Armée when he spotted a crowd watching a slim dark-haired young man riding a unicycle. The unique one-wheel contraption without anything whatsoever to steer was enough to make anyone stop whatever they were doing to look. It was the latest gadget, a simple piece of equipment, and the wheel held a neat standard-issue hard-rubber tire. The rider sat with his back in perfect posture, chin up, and appeared completely at ease, as though he were born on that wheel. Although the avenue was lined with tempting sidewalk cafés and boutiques offering fashionable clothes and jewelry, Champion could see that the cluster of elegantly dressed men and women had their eyes fixed on the acrobat. His legs rolled the machine's short crank arms forward a yard or two, then he abruptly pedaled backward exactly to where he had started—as though pulled by an invisible cord. The stunt incited applause and shouts of bravo ! The unicyclist spun around like a coin on a tabletop. People gasped. Then with a slight forward dip of his torso, he zoomed ahead and made four sharp square turns that took him back to where he had started. His movements looked silky smooth and magical. Spectators clapped and cheered. They tossed franc coins into a cloth cap on the sidewalk, the coins so plentiful that each new deposit clinked.

Champion stuck around until the performer in due course popped off his unicycle and landed on his feet, one hand holding the device by its leather saddle. The acrobat graciously smiled and bowed his head, nodding and thanking everyone before he bent down to pick up the cap and tips. Champion enthusiastically introduced himself to Alexandre Tellier.

Tellier looked at the eager youngster, curly blond hair parted down the middle of his head in the fashion of the day, gray eyes flashing with excitement, asking an outburst of questions. Champion had a build that a journalist described as resembling the Greco-Roman statues bequeathed to posterity for admiration in museums. Something about him impressed Tellier. He volunteered good-naturedly to mentor the lad. They were in the neighborhood of Porte Maillot, the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, the magnificent park on Paris's west end. Tellier and Champion found a grassy section to get started.

There Tellier instructed his protégé on the proper basics of mounting the unicycle and riding—head held straight on the neck, backbone upright as though it were an extension of the seatpost holding the saddle, lean forward slightly, arms out for balance, and legs pedaling. The trick was to keep the wheel rolling and to point with your chin to where you want to go. You can set a wheel rolling and it will continue on its own until it slows down. Tellier had him practice on the grass. Most everyone can learn the basics of riding a regular bicycle in less than an hour, but a unicycle can require at good day or two of concentrated trial and error. It takes that long to sense that your center of balance lies just below your navel.

Fortune smiled upon young Champion. He caught the eye of Henri Gauliard, a civil...