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Content :
1 –
New thematic list :
Automobile Tycoons (1919)
2 – Announcement : “Chapter 13 – Automobile and Aviation” coming soon
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New thematic list : “
Automobile Tycoons (1919)
“
The
evolution
of economic development in America, like in the rest of the world, is
essentially linked to technological progress. If the Gilded Age was
characterized by the great expansion of railroads and by the
concentration of (basic) industries under the umbrella of a small
number of increasingly powerful trusts, the technologies that marked
the dawn of the 20th century were revolutions in the field of
transportation : the automobile and aviation.
The horseless carriage, as the forerunner of modern automobiles was
called, had its American beginnings in the 1860s, when Sylvester H.
Roper, an inventor and mechanic developed its firs steam carriage. But
while steam was clearly the right power source for railway locomotives,
it proved too heavy and cumbersome for the smaller horseless carriage.
Electric vehicles were next, but the eventual technological winner was
the gasoline engine, as used by Frank and Charles Duryea in 1893.
An expensive curiosity first, the horseless carriage started to get
wider acceptance, when the Olds Motor Works started to produce their
“Curved Dash” runabout, at $600 the cheapest model on the market, in
ever larger quantities, reaching 6500 in 1905. Ransom Eli Olds had
founded the company, which later became a cornerstone of General
Motors, but by that time (1908) he had left the company, which was
controlled by copper baron Samuel L. Smith and his sons Frederick and
Angus.
Among the pioneers in the field of automotive construction, Henry Ford
has achieved the biggest success. He tinkered around a horseless
carriage as early as 1893 and started his first automotive venture, the
Detroit Automobile Company in 1899, backed by a group of wealthy
Detroit financiers, including Detroit mayor William C. Maybury. The
company was succeeded by the Henry Ford Company, which after Ford’s
departure became Cadillac, another future cornerstone of General Motors.
Henry Ford went on to found the Ford Motor Company and became one of the
two outstanding automobile tycoon of the founding years, that is
roughly the period between 1896 and 1920. The other one was William
Crapo Durant, the grandson of millionaire lumber baron and Michigan
governor Henry Howland Crapo. As a young man, W. C. Durant associated
with Josiah Dallas Dort and became one of America’s leading
manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages, establishing his factories in
the family’s adopted hometown : Flint, Michigan.
In 1904 Durant was already a millionaire, when the directors of the
Flint Wagon Works approached him with the plea to save the Buick Motor
Company, an automobile manufacturer they had taken over as an attempt
to shift their production from carraiages to cars. Durant did such a
good job in reorganizing Buick and selling its cars, that he launched
himself on one of the most astounding careers in the American
automotive industry.
1908 was the decisive year, when both Henry Ford and William Crapo
Durant launched their great succeses. Ford’s was his popular Model T,
which in association with the assembly line became the first mass
produced car in the world and made him a huge fortune. Durant’s was the
founding of General Motors, an automotive giant which would eventually
even outdo Ford in size and profitability.
1919, the year we chose to list the automobile tycoons, is the year
when both Ford and Durant achieved new heights of their power in the
automotive industry. Henry Ford was then able to buy out his minority
shareholders for an aggregate $105’820’894.57, making his former
partners (including future US senator James Couzens and the Dodge
brothers) many times millionaires. William Crapo Durant was then
reigning over his enlarged General Motors Corporation, and by various
takeovers also making other people millionaires (notably the Fisher
brothers, Charles Kettering and Alfred Pritchard Sloan jr).
Ford would go on and become a billionaire, while Durant would stumble
over his own speculative nature and eventually die penniless. But in
1919, these two men led the club of automobile tycoons, a list which
(on a preliminary basis) contains 40 people, most of them in Michigan,
which became the girdle of America’s automotive industry.
The list is a prelude to the coming chapter about the American
automotive industry and will be completed in a future update, along
with the publication of this chapter
at
”A
Classification of American Wealth”
Browse the list of
Automobile Tycoons (1919)
or other wealth classification lists and read more about the wealthy
Americans and wealthy American families of the past at
Encyclopedia of American Wealth
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Coming soon
: Chapter 13 – Automobile and Aviation
The first
chapter of the long awaited Part 3 of “A Classification of American
Wealth” is just around the corner. Tagged “Automobile and Aviation”,
chapter 13 will lead us from the heydays of the Gilded Age into the
Twentieth Century.
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Web
site improvements
Enhanced server speed
Thanks to the connection of our provider via a 100 M/Bit glass fiber
cable, access to www.raken.com
will soon be much faster than before. This is another among various
measures to improve the browsing of our wealth classification list as
well as the general reading of our online content.
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