The Turning Wheel - The story of General Motors through twenty-five years 1908-1933 E-Book

Arthur Pound

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Savine
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

“ …GENERAL MOTORS in 1933 reached its twenty-fifth milestone. Since the founding of General Motors Company of New Jersey in 1908, the growth of the organization has contributed a unique chapter to American industrial history. From beginnings so small that its birth escaped notice in financial centers, General Motors has worked its way steadily forward to a place where its leadership in many of the most exacting branches of production and distribution is taken for granted and where it meets the public of many lands with a wide variety of merchandise and services. Scientific research, close attention to dealer and consumer needs, and constructive public policies are among the factors accounting for General Motors' present strength. My acquaintance with General Motors began at its birth in 1908, and as a somewhat impartial observer of social trends I have watched its progress with keen interest ever since”Arthur Pound - 1934

Leseprobe

THE TURNING WHEEL

The story of General Motors through twenty-five years 1908-1933

by Arthur Pound

New digital edition of:

THE TURNING WHEEL

by Arthur Pound

© 1934 - Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Edizioni Savine

All Rights Reserved

Strada provinciale 1 del Tronto

64010 – Ancarano (TE) – Italy

email: [email protected]

web: www.edizionisavine.com

ISBN 978-88-96365-39-7

Source text and images taken from the Public Domain

NOTES

CONTENTS

THE TURNING WHEEL

Colophon

Publisher's Note

Foreword

Chapter I - AMERICA ON WHEELS

Chapter II - THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-PROPELLED VEHICLES

Chapter III - THE FORMATIVE PERIOD: 1879-1899

Chapter IV - OLDSMOBILE: FIRST "QUANTITY" CAR

Chapter V - BUICK: THE FOUNDATION STONE OF GENERAL MOTORS

Chapter VI - OAKLAND AND PONTIAC: OLD AND NEW

Chapter VII - CADILLAC: THE TRIUMPH OF PRECISION

Chapter VIII - THE BIRTH OF GENERAL MOTORS

Chapter IX - THE BANKERS TAKE THE WHEEL

Chapter X - CHEVROLET: THE CINDERELLA OF MOTOR-CAR HISTORY

Chapter XI - THE CORPORATION ESTABLISHED

Chapter XII - THE WAR YEARS

Chapter XIII - THE EXPANDING CORPORATION

Chapter XIV - THE NEW ERA UNDER PRESIDENT DU PONT

Chapter XV - ROUNDING OUT GENERAL MOTORS

Chapter XVI - LATER HISTORIES OF PASSENGER CAR DIVISIONS

Chapter XVII - GENERAL MOTORS OF CANADA, LIMITED

Chapter XVIII - GENERAL MOTORS ACROSS THE SEAS

Chapter XIX - RESEARCH: THE MARCH OF THE OPEN MIND

Chapter XX - BODY BY FISHER: THE MOTOR CAR AS A STYLE VEHICLE

Chapter XXI - FRIGIDAIRE AND ELECTRIC REFRIGERATION

Chapter XXII - COMMERCIAL VEHICLES

Chapter XXIII - GENERAL MOTORS IN AVIATION

Chapter XXIV - THE POINT OF VIEW OF GENERAL MOTORS

Chapter XXV - THE STOCKHOLDER INTEREST

Chapter XXVI - MARKETING THE MOTOR CAR

Chapter XXVII - FINANCING AND INSURING THE BUYER

Chapter XXVIII - COOPERATIVE PLANS

Chapter XXIX - PUBLIC RELATIONS

CONCLUSION

Notes

Publisher's Note

It is probable that no invention of such far-reaching importance was ever diffused with such rapidity or so quickly exerted influences that ramified through the national culture, transforming even habits of thought and language." This quotation from the report of the Hoover Research Committee on Social Trends refers to the motor vehicle.

The commonplaceness of motor cars in our daily lives makes us unaware of their significance. It is almost impossible to realize a present-day world without automobiles, and yet motor cars are little more than a generation old.

This book, then, not only helps to make us conscious of the marvelously rapid development of a new art, a new convenience, a new means of transportation, but also, in giving the history of one of our important industries, it provides a view of the vast social consequences of invention and enterprise. And yet General Motors is but twenty-five years old.

Innumerable histories of nations, rulers, wars, and peoples have been published of much less significance than this story of a great industry. Our leading business groups will find here many instances and examples of enterprising public service. Here is a broad yet carefully written history of an industrial enterprise which directly or indirectly affects intimately the lives of our people.

In this book will be found illuminating accounts of inventors, financial geniuses, scientists, business statesmen. Their accomplishments have altered our lives and will affect those of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. While making motor cars, they have also been making history.

Foreword

GENERAL MOTORS in 1933 reached its twenty-fifth milestone. Since the founding of General Motors Company of New Jersey in 1908, the growth of the organization has contributed a unique chapter to American industrial history. From beginnings so small that its birth escaped notice in financial centers, General Motors has worked its way steadily forward to a place where its leadership in many of the most exacting branches of production and distribution is taken for granted and where it meets the public of many lands with a wide variety of merchandise and services. Scientific research, close attention to dealer and consumer needs, and constructive public policies are among the factors accounting for General Motors' present strength.

The older companies of General Motors, now known as divisions, go back to the early days of the automotive industry, and some of them far beyond. Their taproots reach down to carriage- and wagon-building, to firearms, stationary and marine gasoline engines, milling machinery, roller bearings, bicycle gears, lathes, and even to door-bells. Their branch roots stretch back to the beginnings of scientific experiment, since the self-propelled vehicle is the child of physics and chemistry. Chapters n and in trace that long evolution. As one follows the rise of General Motors against the broad background of latter-day industry and science, he comprehends that the flowering of large-scale production in our day is the inevitable result of generations of inventiveness, organizing ability, and the willingness of capital and labor to pull together toward common objectives. Among those objectives are the lifting of the standards of living, the satisfaction of old wants with less labor, and the creation of new wants on a higher level of comfort, convenience, and culture. Modern industry has conquered the old-time dearth of goods, and more and more it searches for a balance wheel through whose steadying influence its products can remain available to all industrious men and women at all times. To steady economic life is perhaps as real an industrial need today as mass production was fifteen years ago, as real a need as the automobile was forty years ago, when men traveled at the pace of the horse over wretched roads.

My acquaintance with General Motors began at its birth in 1908, and as a somewhat impartial observer of social trends I have watched its progress with keen interest ever since. After observing General Motors employees as workmen and citizens, I began, more than thirteen years ago, to write in Flint, Michigan, my Iron Man papers, noting some of the social effects of modern industrialism. The Corporation seemed then to foreshadow many of the developments on the social side which have since come to pass. I welcomed the opportunity to complete a full-length study with access to records, believing that the story of a great corporation's growth through twenty-five years would be of more than passing value, since corporations are the most efficient of modern groupings and probably also the most meaningful from the standpoint of basic social relations: work and wages, production and distribution, consumption and investment. If it appears that approval is voiced here more freely than the reverse, that is because the record is clean and clear.

As I review the history of General Motors in my mind, I think of the many thousands of men and women who made its present competence come to pass by their labors in factories, laboratories and offices, and in the field; of workers in all branches of production; of craftsmen and designers striving to combine beauty with serviceability; of scientists patiently attacking problems in chemistry, electricity, metallurgy, and engineering; of foremen, superintendents, and inspectors; of dealers and salesmen in every land searching for the sales by which the Corporation lives and by means of which it pays wages and dividends. This book is the history of a joint effort which succeeded because, when a long, strong pull was needed, team-play triumphed over the frictions which tend to dissipate human efforts and destroy institutions.

Those who recognize in General Motors a force of the first magnitude in America's economic life will find here several references to the Corporation's policies which have contributed to its present standing. Some of these policies apply to interdivisional operations, others to employees, dealers, suppliers, and the public. Beyond the equities involved in strictly commercial contacts, any large corporation which touches the lives of millions of persons here and abroad can scarcely escape being rated and appraised by public opinion. General Motors has been a leader in providing full and detailed accounting to stockholders and in giving the general public accurate news of what it is doing and why it is doing it.

The history of General Motors records scientific and commercial achievements of a high order, but this is true of many corporations. What makes this corporation most interesting is the fact that its expansion was rapid and yet it was marked by relatively few of the discords usually connected with swift industrial growth.

The author acknowledges gratefully the assistance of persons too numerous to mention who have contributed information to this work, including many formerly active in Corporation affairs but now retired, and others whose business relationship with General Motors in its early days qualifies them to testify on the events of that period.

Special thanks are due to Dr. Dixon Ryan Fox, Professor of American History at Columbia University, for his interest and encouragement, to Dr. John S. Worley, Professor of Transportation at the University of Michigan, and to Dr. M. M. Quaife, secretary-editor, the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, for their aid in research.

ARTHUR POUND

Chapter I - AMERICA ON WHEELS

In a single picture are caught and recorded centuries of history. In the distance, ready to vanish over the hill, is an Indian family departing with its poor goods and beaten gods. A tiny pony strains between two poles, across which is a laden platform. The poles drag on the earth. In the foreground is the settler's covered wagon, drawn by strong horses and ready to roll westward as long as its tall, iron-shod wheels hang together.

The wagon holds more wheels and the produce of wheels: a spinning wheel and the cloths which wheels have fabricated; a plowshare which some wheel has helped to smooth and point. There is a rifle fashioned on a lathe to which the principle of the wheel has been adapted. A continent is being surrendered to those who come on wheels. The conqueror sets his wheels in motion and moves on with calm assurance to occupy the empire which wheels have enabled him and his kind to possess [1].

It is one of the paradoxes of history that America, where modern civilization runs on wheels, was a wheel-less country before the white man came to its shores. Other peoples, no more primitive than the American Indian, had discovered and applied the wheel in the dawn of civilization; indeed, it is likely that without the wheel Western civilization would never have emerged from its birth throes. The two-wheeled chariots of Nineveh broke down the barriers of space and the boundaries of empires built on self-contained river valleys. The mergings of peoples, exchange of ideas, tools, and goods over wide distances — in short, the early education of the race in commerce, mechanics, language, and thought — were destined henceforth to proceed through and by, and to a large extent directly on, wheels.

Yet prehistoric America somehow missed this potent application of the wheel to earth. Their grave lack was early noted by scholars. The learned Dr. Robert Hooke, in the 1726 edition of his Philosophic Experiments and Observations, says that ignorance of the wheel in aboriginal America indicates that its inhabitants could not have come hither from Europe, Africa, or Asia, since the wheel "is an invention of so great use, that it seems impossible to be lost by mankind, after it be once known."

Ancient Egyptian Wheel

The American Indians possessed marked capacities in many directions. They were excellent workers in stone, as well as hardy hunters and bold warriors. They traversed wide areas in both war and chase; they were essentially moral and lived a primitive religion of exalted concepts and close harmonies. In their intertribal relations they were capable of acute political sagacity; The Great Peace Pact of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, which endured at least three centuries, is one of the most subtle adjustments of conflicting national political interests ever devised, more intricate and better balanced than the League of Nations. Yet the Indian gave way before the whites because the newcomers had better tools, especially better weapons and vehicles.

At one time or another the American aborigines had used the other five primary machines: the lever, wedge, screw, pulley, and the inclined plane. With these the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala and the Incas of Peru built massive edifices. But there is no evidence that the Red Man ever had command of the wheel. In the meantime, through the centuries of recorded time and before, the Asiatics, Europeans, and Egyptians had not only evolved wheeled carts and chariots, but also they had made so many efficient combinations of the wheel with the other five primary machines that they had evolved the compass to guide them to America, domestic tools of many sorts, the well-ground sword blade, and the musket which spat fire. The conquerors had inherited a superior technology as well as superior form of carriage on land and sea. Hence the aborigines gave way. One reason—and perhaps the root reason—for the failure of the aboriginal inhabitants effectively to occupy and defend North America may well have been their failure to master the wheel.

But merely to put two wheels on the ground, with an axle-tree between them, is not enough to satisfy an artful folk with pressing problems to solve—problems of sustenance and distribution, problems of state and war. The fabled wheel of Ceres, the goddess of Agriculture, might be turned into a country cart, the scythed chariot might do for war, but not for long could either satisfy the eternal demand of a questing people for more speed, more thrills, more wealth. The ancients applied more power to wheels by harnessing eight and twelve horses to their chariots and as many oxen to their wagons, increasing their teams of draft animals up to the full limit of the wit and muscle of men in controlling them. Within the limits prescribed by flesh and blood these ambitious men of ancient days did what they could to increase their power in transport. They built gorgeous equipages of state, rode furiously in their hunts, developed strains of horseflesh suitable to various purposes—chargers for war, draft horses for tillage, light palfreys for milady to ride, high-stepping carriage horses. They developed wheeled vehicles in great variety, from the simple cart to impressive and beautiful coaches of royalty. But ever and always each generation was restricted in its burning desire to conquer space and time by the fact that the horse represented at once the strongest and most flexible power plant he could apply to the wheels of his vehicles. Other animals might outdraw the horse, but no other animal could combine pulling power with as prompt acceleration. The unique conformation of the horse's leg from hoof to hip-joint gives him a leverage out of all proportion to his weight, and for centuries he was the best motive force man had at his disposal for transportation purposes.

The Horse Age lasted from the dawn of history to recent times. In those slow-moving centuries enormous advances were made in other directions, but land transport remained keyed to draft animals. Man charted the solar system, discovered the mass of the earth by laying out a geographical degree on the plains of Greece, applied the arch, tenon, and pillar in architecture, constructed huge cathedrals of surpassing beauty, worked out the basic laws of physics and mathematics, began experiments in chemistry, developed marine transportation from the oar to the sail, applied the compass to the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the earth, built large and cunningly contrived vessels for the mastery of wind and water, and harnessed water power to turn looms. Laboriously he brought water transport by means of canals to assist in his problems of land carriage. In all the practical arts the advance of knowledge had been tremendous, but from the dawn of history down to modern times mankind had available in quantity for land transport no better motive power than the horse.

Yet the challenge toward improvement persisted. Dimly the more progressive peoples have understood the truth laid down in the report of a Select Committee of the British House of Commons on Highways in 1808, that "next to the general influence of the seasons upon which the regular supply of our wants and a great proportion of our comfort so much depend, there is perhaps no circumstance more interesting to men in a civilized state than the perfection of the means of interior communication."

A philosophical investigator of transportation has said, "with the exception of land and ruins there are few things of any material value to man which do not derive that value, in part at least, from transport from their original position." One might go further and say that life, shorn of the prospect of ever improving transportation, would be dull, flat, and unprofitable. Truly civilization has run on wheels from the stone discs of the primitive cart to the rubber tires of the automobile.