Volvo C30

It's not always hip to be square-just ask Volvo. For years the Swedes have been trying to figure out how to shed their signature rectangular look in favor of one with sharper, sexier, younger lines. Well, the C30 is definitely thinking outside the box. In fact, it's the sleekest, most aggressive-looking Volvo yet. The sports-car character of this hot hatchback is underscored by a slanted snout, wide front air scoops, low-mounted driving lights, a smart-looking roof spoiler, bumper-mounted twin tailpipes, and a neat two-tone finish.

Yet it is still undeniably Volvo. This proto shares a platform with the 540 sedan, and even though it's shorter and a bit wider than the four-door, this coupe seats four rather comfortably. It packs a turbocharged 2.4 liter inline-5 engine-good for 260 horsepower and 268 lb.-ft. of torque-and a 6-speed manual transmission. Plus, of course, there are the signature safety features, including side and front airbags, whiplash protection, and an audible alert when you get too close to another car or object in the roadway, The trunk is a bit tight (leave the big bags at home unless you want to fold down the rear seats), but it's a small price to pay for this more shapely Swedish sled.

Aston Martin Rapide

Seriously sporty luxury sedans are popping up all over the automotive landscape these days. This new breed of four-door saloon delivers a never-before-seen combination of opulence and performance. At the start of this year's North American International Auto Show in Detroit, most considered the Mercedes-Benz CLS tops in the class, followed perhaps by the BMW M5. But that pecking order will change when this sleek DB9-derived machine hits the ground running.

The Rapide (pronounced RAH-peed) is Aston Martin's first four-door in more than 30 years. Built on the company's light and extremely stiff VH platform-just like the new v-s Vantage and, of course, the DB9 coupes-the elongated body has the same proportions, sinuous lines, and silhouette as its two-door siblings. And because 'ıt shares the DB9's fully independent suspension, the Rapide should feel just as well-balanced on the road-a responsive but not harsh ride that hugs the asphalt even in the tightest corners. According to sources, the concept's 480-horsepower, 6-liter V-12-mated to a ZF 6-speed Touchtronic gearbox-will make it into the final design.

That should propel this beauty from O to 60 mph in just 4.6 seconds, topping out at about 186 mph. True to form, the English coach builder went all out with the interior. It's an exquisite mix of wood, polished aluminum, and plush leather. You'll also find a navigation system in the dash, a DVD entertainment setup with rear-facing LCD screens mounted in the front-seat headrests, and Bluetooth hands-free cell-phone integration. Judging by the hysteria it generated among the public and pros on the show circuit, this dream car will surely top every enthusiast's must have list. It's simply a matter of superior genetics.

$100 Gifts for Moms

Each of these stellar Mother's Day picks will set you back about $100-and make her feel like a million bucks

"MR. & MRS, JONES" JUICERS

This whimsical set by British designer Polly George-the larger for lemons, the other for limes-is practical, too.

$98, MoMA Design Store, NYC.

"MINGLE" BOWLS

Pair two crystal dishes designed by Lena Bergström for Orrefors to create a modern, asymmetric centerpiece.

$40 (7.5" diameter); $60 (10.4")

IPOD SHUFFLE

Fill up the 1 GB version for her-and use Apple's free laser engraving service to earn extra brownie points.

$99

BLOSSOM GLASSES

Made in the Netherlands, these water sippers with etched flower patterns are sure to brighten her day.

$98, Clio, NYC.

"MEDITERRANEO" BOWL

The stainless steel fruit holder by Emma Silvestris is striking-with or without anything in it.

$99, MOS My Own Space, La Jolla, CA.

MIRRORED COMPACT

Eliza Grey's design has a crystal-adorned heart on its enamel lid. It opens to reveal a double-sided mirror.

$95, Takashimaya, NYC.

"MOTHER'S DAY" HATBOX

Spoil her with luxury confectionery:

This assortment includes handmade chocolate-complete with gold flakes.

$100, Jin Patisserie, Venice, CA.

"NEMO" FISH VASE

Pet care isn't her bag? Put so me water lilies in this handblown, fish-shaped vessel instead.

$98, Chiasso

"NY3759" WATCH

Unless she's a BASE jumper, skip the G-Shock and get this understated but sophisticated stainless steel looker.

$95, select DKNY stores

PICTURE FRAME

Add pics to this Barneys New York sterling silver, crocodile-patterned display (l 1/2" x 2 1/8") before you give it.

$98, select Barneys New York stores.

How do I know I am fertile?

WHEN SHOULD YOU BECOME CONCERNED ABOUT FERTILITY?

A normally fertile couple who use no birth-control measures and have intercourse whenever the spirit moves them start a pregnancyin about ten months on the average. However, the laws of probability have a good deal to say about exactly when conception will occur. Ten months is average, but two years is common and three years far from rare. Unless advancing age makes the situation unusually urgent, you should not worry about failure to get pregnant for some time.

The home measures described ab.ove are worthwhile if you are anxious to have a youngster, but the situation is neither so grave as to cause concem nor so pressing as to call for medical examinations and care until three years of unhampered marital relations have failed to initiate pregnancy. After three years of unsuccessful attempts to conceive, thorough medical examination of both partners is worthwhile. About half of the couples who have been infertile this long prove to have difficulties which can be corrected. The other half occasionally have children later, but have a suffidently remote chance of doing so to begin thinking about other ways of building a family, such as by adaption.

A great many couples use birth-control measures for a few years, then find that pregnancy does not occur promptly when they decide that the time is ripe. If this happens to you, do not let guilt feelings or recrimination add their burdens to the problem of infertility itself. None of the birthcontrol methods discussed above cause infertility once you stop using them. Fertility may decrease with the passage of time or with progression of otherwise undetectable disorders, so that it is wise to start having your family as soan as you find it convenient. Family-spacing measures do not themselves cause this problem, however, and you should not blame yourself for it. In most cases, people who experience difficulty having a child when they stop using birth-control measures would have had just as much trouble if they had tried to reproduce right at the start of their marriage, with no one whatever at fault.

Practical Ways of Cooking Fish

PRACTICAL WAYS OF COOKING FISH

If you want to know how much fun there actually is in a trip to the woods—if you want to know how much genuine enjoyment you can derive from a week's fishing —you must make up your mind to master the art of outdoor cookery. To be the mere desultory sportsman, the dilettante who goes out to rough it with a retinue of cooks and other servants at his heels, or to depend upon the hospitality of inns and fishing clubs for the material comforts of civilization, is to miss more than half the pleasure of an outing. Even when you know that there is a more or less complaisant cook waiting to serve the day's catch in the most approved fashion, you do not sit down to the eating of the fish you have caught with anything like the same keenness of appetite that you display when you have prepared your own repast in accordance with the primitive culinary methods that all true woodsmen know.

To fully realize just what this means it is only necessary to try the experiment and compare the results of the two methods. Even though it may be prepared by a thoroughly good cook, and by the best of recipes, your freshly caught fish will bear but slight resemblance in flavor to the one that you have cooked with your own hands, and with practically none of the facilities that are so requisite to the successful operation of a modern kitchen. In fact, it is because foods taste so much better when cooked by the simplest methods, that all lovers of nice eating still swear by the "plank," or the hot stones that form the foundation upon which that wonderful piece of culinary architecture, the clam bake, is constructed.

The idea of "planking" fish, like that of cooking upon hot stones, and most other methods of out-door cookery, may be traced back to the days of the American Indian, for, in almost every instance, it was in much such a way that the native redskin prepared his simple fare. As Clem Johnson, the planked-shad chef of Marshall Hall, on the Potomac, used to say, "Being short of dishes, Mr. Indian hit upon the idea of pinning his fish to a board, so that he could set it up before the fire to roast, and when the white man came along and saw the trick, it didn't take him long to get to practicing it himself." And, as the venerable Clem might have added, the only improvement that the white man has been able to devise is the invention of the savory sauces with which he now bastes the fish during the process of cooking.

HOW TO PLANK FISH

From a gustatory point of view, planking is the ideal method of preparing rather large fish, not shad alone, but many of the more sizeable fish that may be caught in American waters. Thus, blue fish, weak-fish (squeteague), fresh mackerel, sheepshead, etc., may all be planked delectably, and are far more tasty when cooked in this manner than they ever can be when stuffed and roasted, or baked in a modern oven.

Accordingly, after the fish have been cleaned, and split through the center, as though for broiling, it is nailed securely to a thick cypress, birch, or oak plank, which is set on edge before a rousing wood fire. You must be careful at first, not to let the fish stand too near the fire, for that will tend to make the flesh dry and tasteless. Instead, let the first heat be gradual; then, little by little, at regular intervals, move the plank nearer the fire, and, every few minutes, baste it with some appropriate sauce.

While the ingredients of these sauces are largely a matter of personal choice, and must depend, to some degree, upon the nature of the fish that is to be planked, a mixture of melted butter, bacon fat, Worcestershire, lemon juice, mustard, pepper, and salt, can scarcely fail to give satisfaction to the majority of palates.

BAKING BY USE OF HOT STONES

Hard and soft clams, crabs, lobsters, etc., are always tasty when baked on the hot stones, and, in this case, nearly everything else that goes to constitute the repast may be cooked in the same "bake." To prepare this distinctively primitive "oven," it is first necessary to arrange a foundation of large stones. Upon this bed of rock, build your wood fire, and keep it burning until the stones have become thoroughly heated. At this point, clean the stones well with a long-handled brush; then, cover them with wet rock weed to the depth of about twelve inches, Place the clams, or other shell fish, on the weed, with the potatoes, corn, chicken, and other ingredients of the "bake," being careful to wrap each variety of food except shell fish in pieces of wet cheesecloth.

Cover all with more weed; arrange a thick square of carpeting, or sailcloth over the "bake," secure the corners with heavy stone, and wait as patiently as you can for the results. It will not take more than an hour and a half to two hours. While the clambake is an ideal method of preparing large quantities of food, in the case of a comparatively small camping party it would be impractical to resort to it. At such times, clams, lobsters, etc., should be boiled in a huge pot that has been suspended over the fire, while the fish, when small, should be fried, or, when large enough, encased in a mold of wet clay and cooked in the hot embers. This, in fact,
is about the only way in which trout, pickerel, and the daintiest of fresh-water fish should be cooked.

If you are too weary to take much trouble about culinary affairs, the easiest way to solve the problem of cooking is to roll the previously cleaned and dressed fish in a mold of clay, which is then buried in the glowing coals in the very center of the fire; but, if your love of nice flavors is sufficiently strong to tempt you to pay more attention to details of cooking, there is a way in which your fish may be made to seem far more palatable. If this is your purpose, clean and dress the fish as usual; then stuff it with a mixture of fresh mint, wild celery, and salt pork, that have already been well minced and fried lightly together. When this has been done, wrap some thinly cut slices of pork around the fish; cover the pork with a layer of poplar leaves, and encase in a mold of clay. Bake as directed.

A QUICK. METHOD OF COOKING

If the demands of hunger forbid you waiting so long for dinner—it takes from an hour and a half to three hours to cook a fish in a mold—very nearly the same results may be obtained far more easily. To meet this difficulty, take a sheet of oldfashioned brown paper and spread it thickly with butter, or, if butter is not any too plentiful, a mixture of butter and pork fat may be used. Wrap the fish in this; around the outside tie a goodly quantity of sprigs of sweet-fern, and cover this again with three or four sheets of the brown paper. Bury this brown-paper bundle in the ashes of the fire, taking care to see that all the live coals, or embers, are removed, and cook for about thirty minutes.

Many amateur cooks—and some who are not strictly amateurs—seem to have the idea that fish, to be properly fried, must first be covered with a coating of egg and crumbs, or egg and meal. This, however, is a most erroneous theory. Trout, for example, can be spoiled more easily by this sort of treatment than in any other way. To fry trout, the only facilities that are necessary are a good fire, a frying pan, and plenty of fat salt pork. When the pan has become heated, several slices of the pork should be fried in it until practically all the grease has been extracted, after which the meat scraps are removed, and the fish are dropped directly into the hot fat. It is only necessary to turn them once or twice, and, when done, the only seasoning they require is a sprinkling of salt. Most fresh water fish may be cooked in this fashion, although some of the less dainty varieties will stand the egg-andmeal, or egg-and-breadcrumb treatment.

The majority of salt water fish should be coated with the beaten egg and crumbs, or with dry meal, before being fried. When it is tautog (blackfish) that are to be cooked, they should invariably be skinned, as it is extremely difficult to scale them, and before they are fried they should be scored across each side, about an inch apart. Fry some slices of fat salt pork as before; and when it is crisp, remove the scraps, roll the fish in corn meal, and fry them in the sparkling hot fat until they have browned deliciously.

If there is a gridiron in camp—and there certainly ought to be when there are so many fish that may be broiled so nicely— it will be found quite as useful as the frying- pan. Fish, to be broiled on the gridiron, should first be salted, and, if it has been caught in fresh waters, it may well be left in a salted water bath for an hour or more before it is cooked. When ready to cook it, score it evenly to prevent it from bursting open when it swells under the action of the heat; then place it upon the greased gridiron and brown carefully. Just before serving, baste the fish lightly with butter and season to taste with pepper and salt.

PREPARING SMALL FISH

Should the fish be too small for ordinary broiling, and yet it should be necessary to utilize the gridiron in cooking them, this difficulty may be overcome and a pleasing note of variety given to the menu by combining them with potatoes. To do this, boil and mash the potatoes as usual, and season to taste with butter, salt and pepper. When thoroughly mixed into a paste, envelop each of the little fish in a coating of the potato, and broil for several minutes, or until the potato has browned.

If, as sometimes happens, even such commonplace culinary utensils as the frying pan and the gridiron are out of reach, there is little reason why the ingenious fisherman should go hungry if he has plied the hook and line at all successfully, for—should the fish be in evidence— it is possible to prepare a very dainty repast practically without the use of anything like a pot or a pan. To meet this emergency, first start your fire, and, while it is getting under way, select some of the small fish on your string, and clean and scale them thoroughly. If you have a broiling fork, or wire, you may string the fish upon it, or, in the absence of such a utensil, a stout greenwood twig will answer the same purpose, but, in either instance, be sure that you do not neglect to place a thin strip of salt pork, or bacon, between the fish, that the melting fat may baste each of them constantly as it drips into the fire. As fish prepared in this way need to be cooked very slowly, the twig should not be suspended too near the fire at first. Later, when more than half cooked, they may be brought closer to the heat, that they may brown more attractively. While most sportsmen prefer to broil, or fry, their fish, or, at the most, to bake them in the embers, it is so much easier to boil the larger varieties that it is rather surprising that they are not cooked in that fashion more frequently.

To boil fish properly, it is necessary that the cook should have a clean piece of cloth at hand, and, after cleaning the fish, and salting it with discretion, it should be wrapped closely in this towel, or cloth, the end of which should be tied, or pinned securely. Before putting the fish into the pot, you must be certain that the water is actually boiling, and be sure to add a handful of salt. Cover the pot closely, and keep it simmering, but do not let it boil. This is particularly important in the case of freshly caught salt-water fish, which are very apt to become hard if the water in which they are cooked is permitted to boil. In estimating the time required to boil fish, it is pretty safe to allow ten minutes to each pound, although especially large, or thick, pieces may take a few minutes longer. When done, serve with the simplest kind of a white sauce. This may be made by mixing a lump of butter and a tablespoonful of flour with the necessary quantity of warm water. Let this, simmer slowly for a few minutes; then add a little minced parsley—if you can get it—or, if more convenient, a hard boiled egg that has been cut into small pieces. Season to taste and pour over the fish.

CHOWDER EASILY MADE

To the man who is "roughing it," no dish can be more appetizing and filling than a good chowder, and, fortunately for the fisherman who is near the ocean, a good chowder may be made with either clams or fish, If clams are within the reach of the digger, this, of course, obviates all difficulties.

To make any chowder—either fish or clam—begin by frying diced salt pork in the bottom of the pot. When the pork has become crisp, remove the scraps, and, in the fat remaining, fry some sliced onions until they are nicely browned. At this point, add some diced potatoes, with the clam juice—if a clam chowder is to be made—or some water, if the chowder is to be of fish. Boil the mixture slowly until the potatoes are practically done; then add the fish or clams, and continue cooking about ten minutes longer. Prom time to time, while the chowder is cooking, the scum that rises to the top should be carefully removed, and if the mixture threatens to become too dry, a little more hot water should be added. At the last moment a quart of milk may be introduced, if milk is obtainable, or, if you have such an article among your supplies, a can of tomatoes will add an agreeable flavor to a chowder made from clams. Just before serving, add the pilot-bread, or hard-tack, crackers, and season to taste with salt and pepper. The result cannot fail to prove amply satisfying to the hungriest member of your party.

ChryslerDodge consolidation gave the automobile industry a Big Four

An observer of 1928 would have grounds for claiming that the ChryslerDodge consolidation gave the automobile industry a Big Four rather than a Big Three, because there was in existence another automotive combination which looked big, which had been in operation since 1921 with apparent success, and which had a variety of models on the market, including a lowpriced competitor of Ford and Chevrolet. This was Durant Motors, formed less than a month after Durant had been ousted from the presidency of General Motors. The company was first chartered in New York in midJanuary, 1921, with a capital of $7,000,000 subscribed by Durant and a group of 67 friends, and was then reorganized, in April as a Delaware corporation.

Durant's announced intention was to manufacture a four-cylinder car to be sold below $1,000. His first associates were F. W. Hohensee, who had been production manager for Chevrolet, and H. T. Strut, who had been Chevrolet's chief engineer. An emphasis on the low-priced car seemed clearly indicated, although, in view of the poor condition in which DuPont and Sloan found the Chevrolet company, there might have been some misgivings about the likelihood of the same personnel doing any better elsewhere.

Operations were supposed to begin in Durant's home town of Flint, but, while manufacturing facilities were being developed there, Durant was making other arrangements to get into production. In March, 1921, he bought the Goodyear plant in Long Island City for two million dollars and prepared to bring out the Durant Four in the fall. Two months later, he acquired what had been the Sheridan Motor Car Division of General Motors, located in Muncie, Indiana, and the Sheridan car became the Durant Six. In addition, a new plant was projected for Oakland, California.

These moves were just preliminaries. Durant still held to the multi-model philosophy which had led to the founding of General Motors, and apparently had not intended the car that bore his name to be the entry in the low-priced field. This role was assigned to an automobile named the Star, which Durant introduced early in 1922. It was to sell for about $350, and the first full year's production was to be 200,000, as against 80,000 Durants. In practice, Durant never succeeded in making Stars for this price; they sold at the level of the Chevrolet rather than the Ford. They did, however, enjoy considerable popularity, some 1,500,000 being manufactured before Durant Motors went out of business.

Shortly after the announcement of the Star, Durant staged his coup of outbidding Chrysler and Studebaker for the Willys plant in Elizabeth and getting with it the designs that Chrysler's engineering trio had been working on, thereby adding another six-cylinder car, the Flint, to his line. He then reached into the luxury-car area by getting control of the Locomobile Company, just emerged from its unhappy involvement with Hare's Motors. Subsequently, Durant Motors offered two other models, the Princeton and the Eagle, but both were short-lived. There was also a truck manufacturer in the Durant structure, the Mason Truck, formerly Mason Motor Company, of Flint.

In addition, Durant managed to assemble a collection of parts-making subsidiaries. He selected the New Process Gear Company out of the wreckage of the Willys Corporation, buying it through the Warner Transmission Corporation of Muncie, Indiana, which he also controlled. Other supplier firms in Durant Motors were the American Plate Glass Company, whose acquisition meant that Fisher Body, Ford, and Durant together controlled a third of the country's plate glass production, the Adams Axle Company, and the Associated Bodies Corporation. Continental Motors supplied Durant with engines. Although it never was absorbed into the Durant organization, there was a point in the middle 20's when practically all of Continental's annual output of 300,000 engines was going to fill Durant orders.

Nor was this all. There was a Durant Motors of Canada, a Durant Motors Acceptance Corporation, which was not only to finance purchases but also to underwrite storage of cars during the winter by dealers so as to guarantee prompt spring delivery, and a bank, the Liberty Bank in New York. This last item, if unusual for an automobile company, was also ominous. Durant had begun with seven million dollars, and the breakneck expansion of Durant Motors in its first three years had certainly swallowed up all that plus whatever earnings the component companies had made. The incorporation of the bank was clearly an attempt to improve Durant Motors' cash position.

The basic trouble was that Durant had nothing to offer but a name, and while it was a name with some glamor in automobile circles, it was not one to arouse enthusiasm in the money markets. The man who had twice run General Motors into a financial crisis and had been jettisoned by the DuPonts was hardly a good risk. And even if a careful investor was willing to overlook the past record, a casual inspection of Durant Motors would show that it was predominantly an assortment of makeshift and castoffs.

By 1926, although the business boom was well on its way up, Durant's combination was beginning to come unstuck. In that year the properties in Flint were sold to General Motors, and in the following spring the Long Island City factory was disposed of to Ford. Durant's reaction was characteristic. Instead of reducing his operations to a scale commensurate with his resources, he announced grandiose plans for new mergers. There was to be a new combine called Consolidated Motors, which was to unite a group of unspecified independents around the Star "exactly as Buick in 1908 was used as the nucleus and keystone of General Motors. The companies in question were later rumored to be Hupp, Chandler, Peerless, Moon, Gardner, and Jordan.

But the automobile industry had changed too much in 20 years for Durant to be able to make history repeat itself. Nothing came of the proposed mergers; on the contrary, Durant Motors continued to shrink. The Locomobile Company stopped production early in 1929, and late in the summer it was announced that the Elizabeth plant was to be closed --this before the stock-market crash. (These closings left recently developed facilities in Lansing, Michigan, as the company's principal center of production.) Durant was also in trouble with stockholders who claimed that they had been induced to invest through misrepresentation, and he made a typically flamboyant effort to restore confidence by stating that for reasons of health he was turning the management of his affairs over to a group of executives who stood head and shoulders above any others in the automobile industry. This group turned out to be Frederick J. Haynes and several other Dodge executives who had been dislodged in the Chrysler-Dodge merger. They lasted a little over a year.

The crash of 1929 finished Durant Motors, although the final liquidation was delayed until 1933. Durant was not the man to concede defeat until he was knocked out. He tried to salvage his company by an arrangement with E. E. C. Mathis, a French automobile manufacturer, to make Mathis cars at Lansing, predicting with his usual incurable optimism that the day of the small car was at hand because of parking problems and cost of maintenance. It could be that he was right but merely premature. In any event, as the depression deepened, people were buying neither small nor large cars, and this time Durant was out. The fall of Durant Motors was his third strike.

That Durant had some of the qualities of greatness is beyond dispute. The Durant-Dort Carriage Company achieved its success because it made a better article more efficiently than its competitors. The Buick represented a contribution to the development of the automobile, and while Durant was not responsible for the contribution, he was the one with the foresight to realize the car's potentialities and the daring to gamble on it. His vision of a great automotive enterprise offering a car in each price range was perfectly sound. This was the concept that made both General Motors and the Chrysler Corporation, and to which Ford eventually had to come.

This much was constructive. But somewhere along the line "Billy" Durant became lost in a dream world of high-pressure promotion and paper values. He was not alone in this error during the 1920's, and it is much to Durant's credit that his fall was unaccompanied by the kind of scandal that attended the collapse of other paper empires of the period. He brought catastrophe to himself as well as his investors. At the age of 75, in fact, he had to file a petition in bankruptcy listing assets of $250 and liabilities of $914,000.

Yet he still was not finished. The year of his bankruptcy saw him open a supermarket in Asbury Park, New Jersey, which restored him briefly to the limelight because a newspaperman saw him helping to clean up the night before the opening and spread the story that the former master of General Motors was reduced to sweeping floors for a living. General Motors remembered its founder long enough to give him a place in the celebration of the production of the 25 millionth General Motors car in 1940. Subsequently his health failed and he was virtually a complete invalid when he died in 1947, the same year as Henry Ford. If Durant made big mistakes, he paid heavily for them. His epitaph can be given in the words of his onetime associate, Frederick L. Smith:

It would be a poorly posted analyst who failed to list W. C. Durant as the most picturesque, spectacular, and aggressive figure in the chronicles of American automobiledom. He certainly made some capital mistakes, a fact as to which we often violently disagreed, but the man who makes no mistakes rarely makes anything at all on a large scale.

Chrysler and Dodge, The Chrysler car was a success from the start

The arrival of Walter Chrysler as an independent automobile manufacturer has already been described. The Chrysler car was a success from the start, with the result that it was possible to organize the Chrysler Corin Delaware on June 6, 1925, to take over all the business and properties of the Maxwell Motor Corporation. The Maxwell car, which Chrysler had never liked, was then discontinued.

Chrysler thus realized his dream of having his own company and his own car, but he was too experienced an automobile man to stop there. As a onecar producer, he would be just another of the struggling group of independent automobile manufacturers. To attain major stature in the industry he had to expand his line and above all compete in the low-priced field. His first step in this direction was to bring out the De Soto early in 1928. The next step was to issue a direct challenge to Ford and Chevrolet, but for this purpose Chrysler required far more extensive facilities for production and distribution than the Chrysler Corporation at that point possessed. In particular, he needed to be able to cut his production costs by becoming independent of outside suppliers for such elementary items as forgings and castings. 33 The solution to his problem came when he was offered a chance to buy the Dodge Brothers Manufacturing Company.

For this part of the story it is necessary to go back to 1920, the year in which both John and Horace Dodge died. Ownership of the company passed to their widows, and management to Frederick J. Haynes, who had been vice president and general manager and was elected president early in 1921.

Haynes was a natural choice. A one-time mechanical engineering student at Cornell, he left college after three years because of financial troubles and took a job with the E. C. Stearns Company of Toronto, bicycle manufacturers. This company was later sold to the National Cycle and Automobile Company of Hamilton, of which John Dodge was general manager. Then there was a 10-year interlude while Haynes worked as factory manager for H. H. Franklin, an association undoubtedly originating in the fact that E. C. Stearns had made bicycles and steam automobiles in Syracuse also. In 1912, after turning down an offer from Ford, Haynes joined the Dodge organization.

Under Haynes, the Dodge company went along successfully if uneventfully until 1925, when the Dodge widows sold the company to Dillon, Read and Company of New York for a reported 100 to 125 million dollars in cash and about 50 million in securities. 35 Haynes's principal achievement was to put Dodge firmly in the motor truck business by joining forces with the Graham Brothers, Joseph C., Robert C., and Ray A. This was a family which had begun with a glass-manufacturing business in 1901, using machines invented by Joseph. Ray, the youngest of the brothers, was graduated from the University of Illinois in 1908, and, while he was managing the family's farm properties, became interested in designing a light-weight motor truck. 36 He first designed a rear axle which could be used with a Ford frame. Then the glass company was merged with the Owens Bottle of Toledo [so that the Grahams flater became major participants in Libbey Owens], and the rest of the brothers went with Ray to establish a factory in Evansville, Indiana, to build truck cabs and bodies.

In 1921, the Grahams made an arrangement with the Dodge company whereby they manufactured trucks in Detroit under the Graham name but used Dodge engines and transmissions and marketed the vehicles exclusively through Dodge dealers. To keep this association intact, Dodge bought a majority interest in the Graham Brothers Truck Company six months after its own sale to Dillon, Read. The Grahams then became officials of Dodge Brothers, Ray as general manager, Joseph as vice president in charge of manufacturing, and Robert as sales manager, with John R. Lee, formerly of Ford and Wills Sainte Claire, as his assistant. Haynes remained as president.

This arrangement dissolved six months later. Haynes became chairman of the board and was replaced as president by Edward G. Wilmer, a lawyer who had been an official of various industrial corporations and had recently distinguished himself by reorganizing the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company--also in behalf of Dillon, Read and Company. At the same time, the Graham brothers sold the rest of their truck company stock to Dodge and withdrew completely from the Dodge organization. The reasons for this upheaval are unexplained. It was announced at the time that Haynes had wanted to retire from active management earlier but had stayed on at the request of the Dodge family and later of the banking house, and this could well have been so.

The same explanation will not work for the Grahams. They may have had disagreements with the bankers, or they may simply not have wanted to stay with Dodge as subordinates. It would have been an unaccustomed role for them. At any rate, they returned to automobile manufacturing on their own a year later by buying the Paige-Detroit Motor Car Company and converting it into Graham-Paige.

Dillon, Read and Company's intention all along was undoubtedly to hold the Dodge firm only until it could find a suitable buyer. If the banking house entertained any ideas about running the company itself, they were dissipated in 1927 when Dodge, although still one of the top sellers, lost ground to its competitors and the company paid no dividend on its common stock. So, in the spring of 1928, Clarence Dillon approached Walter Chrysler on the subject of purchasing the Dodge concern. It was an interesting bargaining situation. Chrysler wanted to buy, and Dillon knew it; Dillon wanted to sell, and Chrysler knew it. So they haggled, each trying to appear indifferent but each in fact eager to make a deal. In the end, an agreement was reached whereby the Chrysler Corporation acquired Dodge Brothers for $170,000,000 in Chrysler stock and the assumption of various Dodge liabilities including $56,276,000 in debenture bonds.

This one transaction made the Chrysler Corporation the third of the automotive giants. Contemporary observers placed the market value of the securities of the two companies at $432,000,000, of which $174,000,000 was Dodge and $258,000,000 Chrysler, and their assets at $131,569,968 for Chrysler and $103,894,691 for Dodge. The consolidated organization would have 18 plants, including ample forge and foundry installations, a manufacturing capacity estimated at between 700,000 and 1,000,000 cars a year, and 12,000 dealers.

So Walter Chrysler had arrived. It was now possible for him to execute the plan he had already been formulating and put a car on the market in direct competition with Ford and Chevrolet. The Plymouth made its appearance in 1928, and if it did not exactly set the automotive world on fire, it still managed to get itself securely established.

Most of the credit for this achievement is due to Chrysler himself, but he never at any time claimed to have done it all single-handed. His experience at General Motors gave him all the training he needed in the desirability not only of choosing good subordinates but also of giving them a free hand to do their jobs. Consequently, while the Chrysler Corporation was not decentralized like General Motors under Sloan, neither was it the one-man operation that Ford had become. The three men who had helped to develop the Chrysler car were still very much on hand, Zeder as vice president in charge of engineering, Breer and Skelton as directors. So was treasurer Hutchinson, who had done the figuring in Detroit while Chrysler was dickering with Dillon in New York. And when the Dodge purchase was consummated, the management of what was now the Dodge Division of the Chrysler Corporation was put into the hands of Kauffman T. Keller, who would later be Walter Chrysler's successor.

Keller, who was 42 years old when he became head of the Dodge Division, was a machinist by training, having served an apprenticeship at the Westinghouse Machine Company after being graduated from high school in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. He eventually arrived at the Metal Products Company in Detroit as inspector of Chalmers and Hudson axles, served as general foreman of the Metzger Motor Company, and as chief inspector at the Tarrytown, New York, plant of United States Motors. He entered the General Motors organization in 1912 as general superintendent of Northway Motors and came under Chrysler's supervision as master mechanic of Buick in 1917. He later became manufacturing manager of Chevrolet and then vice president and general manager of General Motors' Canadian branches. He had wanted to leave with Chrysler, but the latter persuaded him to stay where he was--until the Chrysler Corporation was a going concern and Keller could be brought in as vice president in charge of manufacturing.

The End of Model T

While General Motors was moving rapidly ahead, the Ford Motor Company was standing still and thereby forfeiting the unique position it had attained in the automobile industry. For three years after the First World War, every other car produced in the United States was a Model T Ford; as late as 1923 the company's position in the low-priced market was still regarded as unassailable. Ford sales in that year were 1,700,000 as against 800,000 for General Motors, of which Chevrolet accounted for 465,000. Two years later, Ford's loss of ground was being noted and associated with the fact that his car had been virtually unchanged for 15 years; two years after that, Ford, as has been mentioned, dropped behind Chevrolet.

For this loss of his company's leadership, responsibility rests squarely and inescapably on the shoulders of Henry Ford. He refused to recognize that the happy-go-lucky managerial techniques which had been possible in the early days of the Ford Motor Company were not suitable for an industrial giant, so that, while General Motors was acquiring an integrated, smoothly working administrative mechanism, the Ford organization depended on the whims of one aging individual. Ford retained all his prejudice against the trained technician and made no serious effort to develop anything resembling a systematic research program. Above all, he stubbornly disregarded the warnings of his officials, including his son Edsel, that Tin Lizzie had had her day.

The contrast between the phenomenal growth of the Ford Motor Company before the First World War and its stagnation afterward has led to speculation that Henry Ford's unhappy ventures into pacifism and politics caused a sort of psychological change of life. There may be something in the idea, but in the conduct of his business the only visible difference is that, as Henry Ford became older--he was sixty in 1922--he became more set in his established thought patterns. He had always been a oneidea man; he had always preferred cut-and-try methods to orderly planning, either in design or administration; and the executives who found themselves out of their jobs because they represented a real or imaginary challenge to Henry Ford's authority were in lineal descent from Alexander Malcomson and James Couzens.

The cumulative effect of Henry Ford's methods was to throttle initiative in his company. In the days when the cheap car and the assembly line were being developed, Ford and his associates played their hunches, took chances, tried any new idea that looked promising. By the 1920's this condition had changed. There was no opportunity for experimentation when the same model was being produced year after year, and any executive who expressed an independent opinion on company policy was in effect handing in his resignation. Of the brilliant group that had made the Ford Motor Company one of the wonders of the world--Couzens, Wills, Sorensen, Knudsen, Flanders, Avery, Lee--only Sorensen remained in a position of authority, and Sorensen by his own admission was "Henry Ford's man," whose function was to take his chief's, ideas and put them into workable form.

This personnel situation was the Ford Motor Company's worst weakness. Henry Ford had fallen into the classic pattern of the despot, preferring servants to counsellors and even carrying on the traditional feud with the heir to the throne. Edsel Ford, officially the president of the company, was fully aware of the need for change and had his own ideas on what ought to be done, but he was never allowed a free hand to try them. On the contrary, his questioning of his father's judgment contributed to the tragic rift between the two which was terminated only by Edsel's death. Of the two men to whom Henry Ford did give his confidence, one was Charles E. Sorensen, who, as we have just seen, was content to put Ford's ideas on to the production line and did so very ably. The other was Harry Bennett. Of his activities, all that needs to be said at this point is that his Ford Service Department was a long way down hill from Dean Marquis's Sociological Department.

The pressure of events finally compelled Henry Ford to admit that he was wrong. Dropping the price of the cheapest Model T to $290, extending more liberal credit terms, even dressing Lizzie up with accessories and an occasional deviation from the standard black finish--all failed to halt declining sales in a boom period. None of these expedients could alter the fact that by paying not too much more the customer could get a superior car in the Chevrolet, the Overland, the Essex, or William C. Durant's Star, or that for the cost of a Model T he could get a used car with equipment and styling such as no Ford possessed.

So a landmark in automotive history was reached on May 26, 1927, when the last of some 15,000,000 Model T's rolled off the assembly line at River Rouge and the great plant closed down except for the manufacture of replacement parts. Yet no one regarded this move as a confession of failure. Such was the reputation of Henry Ford in popular imagination, that it was simply taken for granted that he was suspending operations in order to produce another technological miracle.

The Model A which Ford introduced early in 1928 was not quite that. It was built along conventional lines, styled like its competitors, with a four-cylinder engine and a sliding gear transmission in place of the Model T's planetary gears, 30 Still, if it was not a miracle, it was good enough to arrest the decline of the Ford Motor Company, although not to restore the company to its former position. Ford sales exceeded Chevrolet's in 1928 but dropped back again once the novelty of the Model A wore off. The net effect of the Ford recovery was to insure a firm second place among automobile manufacturers for the Ford Motor Company.

The demise of the Tin Lizzie can also be taken as the point at which the annual model came to dominate automobile manufacturing. The tradition of year-to-year change was of long standing in the industry. Automobile shows had been held annually since 1900, and most producers liked to be able to display some novel feature of technique or styling--not a difficult thing to do in the experimental years of the horseless carriage. Model changes, however, had been overshadowed by the apparently endless line of Model T's, all built to the same pattern. But now the Model T was gone, and both its successors and its competitors had to face a market condition in which the new car had to offer something ostensibly superior to its still serviceable predecessor. Since the annual model was primarily a selling feature, it was inevitable that styling should normally be given more emphasis than technological changes, since major technical improvements cannot be guaranteed to arrive on a 12-month schedule.

At any rate, the Model A demonstrated that Henry Ford was still very much in business. The man who could quit completely for six months and then work out the Model A in 90 days still had much of his old resiliency and mechanical talent.

Nevertheless, the basic weaknesses which had brought on the Ford crisis were still there. If Henry Ford could not yet be counted out, the fact remained that he was getting no younger and no less set in his ways. The autocratic management of the Ford Motor Company continued, along with the absence of any adequate research and engineering organization. Despite the temporary success of the Model A, Ford was now following automotive development rather than leading it. Under these conditions he could certainly not expect to overhaul General, Motors; it was even questionable whether he could face the new challenge being offered by Walter Chrysler.

The Triumph of General Motors

When Alfred P. Sloan became president of General Motors in 1923, he took charge of a concern whose future was still far from assured. Its survival was reasonably certain and its financial and organizational soundness could be taken for granted after the end of the second Durant régime, but the figure that the corporation would cut in the automotive world was as yet to be determined. There were enough weaknesses in the structure to create the possibility that General Motors might shrink rather than expand.

In its automobile line Buick and Cadillac had always been consistent money-earners, and their position in the market was too solidly established to be affected even by the departure of men like Chrysler and Leland. Oldsmobile was steady if unspectacular, but Chevrolet had proved a disappointment after its promising start, and Oakland was a weak competitor among the high-priced cars. Durant's latest acquisitions, the Scripps-Booth and the Sheridan, were quietly dropped after his departure.

There was, moreover, some question of morale in the General Motors organization. There was disorder and confusion left behind by Durant's haphazard administrative methods, and some uncertainty over the change of management, since only a few people knew exactly what had happened. Among dealers there was disgruntlement because General Motors' long delay in reducing prices when the panic of 1920 struck had hurt their sales badly.

Sloan approached these problems in systematic, orderly fashion. He rejected the whole idea of playing hunches; he was not the type to have hunches anyway. He believed that managerial technique demanded "a constant search for the facts, the true actualities, and their intelligent, unprejudiced analysis. Thus, and in no other way, policies and their administration are determined." The reorganization of General Motors on the decentralized plan which Sloan had initiated was carried through to completion, so that increasing size did not bring unwieldiness. Needless to say, Sloan put an increased emphasis on technological research, with the great advantage of having Charles F. Kettering to take charge of the research program--even though "Boss Ket" has to be classed as a hunch-player. Dealer discontent was taken care of by sheer hard work. Sloan himself and other top executives made personal visits to every General Motors dealer to find out by direct contact what ideas and grievances they had.

This methodical procedure can be taken as a conspicuous example of the engineering approach to management. If so, it was the engineering approach at its best. As the visits to the dealers indicated, Sloan was perfectly aware that the successful administration of General Motors required something more than organization charts and tables of statistics. The most accurate information in the world would be worthless without competent leadership to make use of it, and Sloan had already made it abundantly clear that he regarded the leadership of an enterprise the size of General Motors as a group rather than an individual function. Consequently, his selection of the lieutenants who were to run General Motors with him should be ranked as his greatest achievement.

First on the list of lieutenants unquestionably comes William S. Knudsen. In 1922, shortly after he left the Ford Motor Company, Knudsen was introduced to Sloan by Charles S. Mott, former head of the Weston-Mott Axle Company and now a vice president of General Motors. Sloan at first gave Knudsen a roving commission to improve production, but soon put him in charge of the Chevrolet Division, where Knudsen's talents were urgently needed. Chevrolet, as has been pointed out, had been going down hill, and a firm of consulting engineers employed by Pierre S. duPont to survey the General Motors properties had recommended that the Chevrolet operation be liquidated, on the ground that General Motors could not compete in the low-priced car market. To Sloan this verdict was completely unacceptable. He refused to agree that there was any part of the automotive field in which General Motors could not compete, and he persuaded DuPont to disregard the recommendation. Sloan then of course had to make good, and this was the task that he delegated to Knudsen.

What Knudsen did with this challenge is automotive history. By 1924, Chevrolet sales, although still well behind Ford's in total volume, were showing the most rapid rate of increase in the automobile industry; two years later Chevrolet was approaching the goal with which Knudsen had brought down the house at a convention of Chevrolet dealers: "Vun for vun"; in 1927, Chevrolet moved into first place and held it with only occasional lapses for the next 20 years. Knudsen admittedly was materially assisted by Henry Ford's blunder in hanging on to the Model T and by the nine-month suspension of Ford production when Ford finally realized his mistake. On the other hand, Knudsen did not make the error of trying to compete directly with Ford. He was aware, as Henry Ford was not, that the American people had become sufficiently automobile conscious to be willing to pay a little more for style and comfort. So the Chevrolet was priced from one to two hundred dollars above the comparable Model T, and for that the buyer got a car with distinctly more graceful lines and such features as a self-starter, a three-speed transmission, and a spare tire.

The other lame duck, the Oakland, underwent more drastic if less highly publicized treatment. The initial step was Sloan's decision that General Motors should have a low-priced six-cylinder car to compete with popular newcomers like the Essex, and that this car might as well be produced by the Oakland Division, which was not doing very much anyway. The preliminary work was done by Sloan's M.I.T. classmate, Henry M. Crane, who was brought into General Motors as technical adviser to the president. 20 Crane's design, however, was going to be too expensive for Sloan's purpose and was turned over to the Oldsmobile Division.

Meanwhile, Oakland's affairs were put into the hands of Alfred R. Glancy, a mechanical engineer who, as a student at Lehigh University in 1903, had written a thesis on the automobile, arriving at the conclusion that it was a rich man's toy and had no commercial future. After his graduation, Glancy spent several years in an assortment of mining and construction jobs, plus a session as a salesman of mining and quarrying machinery along the New York State Barge Canal. He then joined a chemical company which was acquired by DuPont during the war, and it was this association which brought him at long last to General Motors and the automobile industry. The circumstances of his arrival might well have led Glancy to wonder if perhaps his original judgment had been correct after all. In 1920, he was made general manager of Durant's ill-advised Samson tractor venture and also of the Sheridan Motor Company, his principal responsibility with each being to liquidate the enterprise as painlessly as possible. He did well enough for Sloan to pick him out in 1924 as the man to reconstruct the Oakland Division.

Glancy assembled a new engineering staff, headed by Benjamin Anibal, who had formerly been chief engineer at Cadillac under Henry M. Leland, and went to work on the six-cylinder car. They redesigned Crane's engine, put it into an enlarged version of the Chevrolet chassis, and came up with a car that they called the Pontiac after the city in which it was to be built, just as the Oakland was named for the county in which Pontiac is located. The new car went on the market in 1926, so successfully that presently the Oakland was withdrawn and the manufacturing facilities given over completely to the production of Pontiacs.

Another figure to move up rapidly under Sloan was Charles E. Wilson. A graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1909, Wilson made his first acquaintance with the automobile industry by working on automotive electrical equipment for Westinghouse. 22 In 1919, he joined the Remy-Electric subsidiary of General Motors and seven years later became president and general manager of the merged Delco-Remy organization. He was made a vice president of General Motors in 1928.

Sloan's taste in lieutenants, it can be seen, ran understandably to engineers: Crane, Mooney, Wilson, Glancy. It was not an exclusive preference; Knudsen was primarily a production man with some formal technical training, while Harlow H. Curtice, who reached the top echelon as president of A. C. Spark Plug in 1927, had started with the company as a bookkeeper. In any event, the test of results provided a convincing endorsement of Sloan's selections.

While the weak spots were being bolstered, the General Motors giant was continuing to grow. In 1925, it bought the Yellow Cab Manufacturing Company of Chicago for $16,000,000 and merged it with the General Motors Truck Division under the title of Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company, with the founder of the Yellow organization, John B. Hertz, as president. 23 Hertz had founded his company in 1910 after a varied career as a sportswriter, fight manager, and automobile salesman. 24 He became a taxicab operator because he found himself with nine unsalable Thomas Flyers on his hands, so started an automobile livery service with them. When he found that too few calls were coming in, he sent the cars cruising in the streets of Chicago, painted yellow to attract attention. Then, as the business grew, he decided to manufacture his own cabs, and later developed a motor bus business as well.

General Motors also began at this time to acquire foreign subsidiaries, as other American manufacturers were doing in order to bypass the accumulation of restrictions on international trade which sprang up after the First World War. An attempt to buy the British firm of Austin Motors, Ltd., in 1925 got as far as approval by the Austin directors but was blocked by the shareholders. 25 Two months later, a similar deal with Vauxhall Motors, Ltd., was carried to completion. Germany's Adam Opel Company was added in 1929. This step by no means completed the structure of General Motors, but the corporation was clearly in first place among automobile manufacturers--it had been since 1925, in fact 26 --and, since 1929 marks another watershed for the automobile industry, as for so much else, the further development of General Motors can be postponed for subsequent discussion.

The Automotive Giants in the early 1920's

With the return of prosperity in the early 1920's, the American automobile industry came into its own as the nation's largest manufacturing enterprise. Production of motor vehicles climbed from 2,227,349 in 1920 to a phenomenal high of 5,337,687 in 1929, a figure not surpassed for another 20 years. By 1929, there was one automobile on the highway for every six people in the United States, and Herbert Hoover's campaign slogan of "two cars in every garage" was by no means as ridiculous as it was made out to be by subsequent critics.

Much of the economic expansion of the period, in fact, was a direct consequence of the rise of the motor vehicle. The production and the operation of automobiles absorbed 20% of the country's annual steel output, 90% of its gasoline, 80% of its rubber, and 75% of its plate glass. Moreover, as millions of Americans became automobile owners, they demanded better roads. The Federal Highways Act of 1921 and the dedication of the Zero milestone in Washington a year later, a ceremony at which Roy D. Chapin was appropriately one of the principal speakers, signaled the launching of a vast program of road building by both Federal and state authorities. The automobile also brought with it a substantial new area of service occupations: dealers and repair shops, filling stations and tourist camps.

Expansion, of course, had its problems. For both the manufacturer and the dealer, the most serious was the fast-growing number of serviceable used cars. The trade journals of the decade contain a variety of proposals for taking second-hand cars out of circulation; quite clearly, none of them worked. Associated with the used-car difficulty was the unbelievable fact that after just a quarter of a century, automobile ownership in the United States had become so widespread that for the time being new cars would be bought predominantly for replacement rather than by purchasers who had not previously owned an automobile. This situation gradually achieved a reluctant recognition within the industry. As early as the end of 1925 there were warnings of the danger of overproduction and of excessive liberality in retail financing. The continued upsurge of business made this note of caution appear needless at the time, although at the peak of the boom in 1928 Alfred P. Sloan was advising that the automobile industry was thinking too much of volume production and not enough of net profits, while James D. Mooney, president of the General Motors Export Corporation, was suggesting that the executive who thought in terms of production for its own sake was now outmoded. These, however, were minority opinions, noteworthy because it was the engineer-executives who were looking critically at the demand side of the picture while practically everyone else was hypnotized by the bull market ( Mooney was a graduate of Case who had worked for Westinghouse and B. F. Goodrich before entering General Motors via the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company).

On the technological side, there were few major changes in the cars themselves. Essentially the automobile of the 1920's was the same as its predecessor of the previous decade, with refinements in the form of more efficient and more powerful engines, better lighting systems, and more graceful body styling. The most conspicuous innovation of commercial significance was Roy D. Chapin's offering of both Hudson and Essex closed cars in 1922 at prices only $100, above the comparable touring car.

The boldness of the move may be seen in the following table:

COMPARATIVE PRICES OF OPEN AND CLOSED CARS

Make Lowest Touring Car Price Lowest Closed Car Price Differential
Ford $ 393 $ 595 $202
Chevrolet 525 850 325
Dodge 880 1,195 315
Buick 885 1,395 510
Essex 1,095 1,195 100
Hudson 1,575 1,695 100

The Essex coach body, the cheaper of the two, was at first a somewhat ungainly wooden box with a metal framework, since cost considerations ruled out either manual cabinet work on the wood or an all-steel body-the latter because stamping presses large enough to make steel body forms had yet to be introduced, along with facilities for making sheet steel cheaply and in quantity. Nevertheless, Chapin was right in assuming that the American public would regard a closed car as being worth some deficiencies in style. The experiment was so successful that the rest of the industry had to conform. In a short time, the touring car with its awkward top and its flapping side curtains virtually disappeared from the American scene, until a swing of the technological circle brought it back in vastly improved form as the convertible.

There were several important technological developments in what can be classified as essential adjuncts to the automobile. Quick-drying and durable lacquer finishes became available in 1923 through the joint efforts of Charles F. Kettering and the DuPont Company; Kettering and Dr. Thomas H. Midgley contributed ethyl gasoline a year earlier, the result of 10 years of research. Kettering was convinced that the cause of motor knock was in the fuel, and in due course he and Midgley came up with tetraethyl lead as the most effective antiknock agent. Ethyl gasoline was first marketed through the Standard Oil Company ( Indiana), but in 1924 General Motors and the Standard Oil Company ( New Jersey) joined forces to organize the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. The rubber industry was also pressing to keep pace with the needs of its principal customer. Cord tires came into general use at the end of the First World War, and low-pressure balloon tires first appeared in 1922. Automobile manufacturing was also responsible for a revolutionary change in glass making when the Ford Motor Company built its own plant and worked out a technique for continuous-process production of plate glass. Safety glass, moreover, was developed largely in response to automotive needs.

Thus, there was enough technological activity in and about the automobile industry to keep its leaders aware of this part of their field. When the agreement for cross-licensing patents came up for renewal in 1925, there was a vigorous demand for modification, led by Roy D. Chapin, Alfred P. Sloan, and Alvan Macauley. Chapin was especially disgruntled with the cross-licensing system because he had just been through a long and unsuccessful fight to get class B rating for a patent on a balanced crankshaft designed by Stephen I. Fekete, the Austrian-born chief engineer of the Hudson Motor Car Company. The fact that the Fekete patent was the only one for which B classification was sought during the 10-year life of the original cross-licensing agreement is striking testimony to the absence of any basic change in the automobile itself.

While Chapin was discontented, he was unwilling to go as far as Sloan, who wanted to limit cross-licensing to minor construction details. Macauley's company had not been a party to the original agreement, but he was willing to work with Chapin to revise the system. In the end, crosslicensing was continued for class A patents held as of January 1, 1925, later extended to January 1, 1930, at which time the number of patents included was 1,687. This modified agreement was renewed at intervals until December 31, 1956, when it finally lapsed.

The gradual decline of the cross-licensing arrangement was directly related to the advance of concentration in the industry. As the larger comparties developed their own research programs, they came increasingly to feel that they should be reimbursed for what they were spending in this way before they gave their competitors access to their discoveries. On their side, the smaller concerns were at some disadvantage because patents taken out by parts manufacturers, even if they were subsidiaries of the big automobile companies, were excluded from the agreement. Nevertheless, the tradition of cross-licensing had become so ingrained in the automobile industry that, in 1953, Alfred Reeves was able to boast that there had not been a patent suit between members of the Automobile Manufacturers Association in 37 years.

The principal beneficiaries of the automobile industry's expansion were the big companies. Mass production and mass marketing gave a tremendous advantage to large-scale operation. This feature of automobile manufacturing had, as we have seen, been emerging for some time, but without a definite indication of how many giants the industry would support or which firms would make the grade. To be sure, Ford and General Motors appeared to be secure once they had weathered their respective crises in 1920, but beyond these two it was anybody's guess. Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Willys-Overland, Maxwell--all were prospective candidates for the top rank.

The boom period of the 1920's saw the pattern of bigness crystallize. Ford and General Motors remained well in the lead but changed places, so that General Motors became the nation's and the world's largest manufacturer of motor vehicles. Meanwhile, Walter Chrysler was putting together another behemoth, and these three completely outstripped and overshadowed the rest of the field.

The really proper way of showing the Earth is on a globe

The result has been the development of an endless variety of projections, each of which tries to show on a plane surface that portion of the globe which it aims to represent, with a minimum of distortion for one particular purpose, or with a compromise which has some errors everywhere, but a minimum all told. Projections can be made which show all areas proportional to their size, but the shapes look very queer indeed. On the other hand Mercator's well-known projection has reasonable shapes, but because the longitudes are drawn parallel to one another, instead of converging at the poles, Greenland comes out looking as large as the whole of North America, and all the other polar regions are similarly enlarged.

The really proper way of showing the Earth is on a globe, the only source of sound geographical ideas. Whenever a globe and a map disagree, the award for accuracy must go to the globe every time. Unfortunately, like all things, globes suffer from tradition. Their purpose is to show the form and arrangement of the Earth, to serve as an index to maps of the continents, which in turn serve as indexes to maps of countries. The amount of information put on a globe should be limited to what can be read and followed easily, else they defeat their own purposes. All else should be eliminated.

Above all there is no place on a terrestrial globe for astronomical features. The signs of the zodiac, often put on the stands, are meaningless. The ecliptic is hopelessly out of place. It is no more in the north of India, where custom has it, than in Mexico, and the same might be said of the figure-8-shaped "analemma" which represents the "Equation of Time." If the barren wastes of the Pacific Ocean offend the aesthetic souls of the globe makers, they might just as well put in the lost continents of Atlantis or Mu. Vague as these districts are, they have a great deal more meaning than has the lost continent of Analemma plumped down in the middle of the Pacific. One of these days some poor sea-struck lad will run away to find it, and no one but the globe makers will be to blame.

A plane map may have many shapes and the form that it takes depends usually upon the subject matter chosen, and the area to be covered; upon them depends the projection to be used. Topographic maps, which show elevations, are usually of such small areas that the type of projection is not important, except where a number of them have to be arranged so that they can be mounted on a single sheet. Even that would not be difficult were it not for the general requirement that outlines must be rectangular.

A map is a representation of a portion of a sphere on a plane surface. A so-called grid is usually laid out first. It may be set by "projection," hence its name, or it may be laid out according to any preconceived idea of the map maker that this particular projection will illustrate his point better than any other.

Sometimes the projection is so complicated from the requirement that even the outlines of the continents cannot be shown on it. One of these was produced a few years ago by the Royal Geographical Society. It was called a "Reverse Azimuth" Map, and its purpose was to enable anyone with a directional radio to turn his aerial until it pointed to the Rugby broadcasting station in England. The distortion was so terrific that nothing on the map looked like anything. It might just as well have been a portrait of the other side of the Moon, as a map of the Earth. However it was not hard to use. Knowledge of the latitude and longitude of one's own radio was required; from these we could determine the direction to which the aerial should be pointed. I worked it out but, having a certain distrust of this villainous appearing map, I took the trouble to write my finding to the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, who informed me by return mail that the bearing was correct!

Certain projections have marked advantages. An old favorite commonly used on astrolabes was the stereographic in which all circles on the sphere appear as circles on the projection. It was made by taking a point on the surface of the opposite hemisphere as the point of projection.

The gnomonic projection has the advantage that all great circles (that is circles which bisect the sphere, like the equator or meridians) are shown as straight lines. These maps give directly the shortest distances between two ports, and that is the line which steamers follow, unless forced out by intervening land or danger from icebergs. It is just because the great circle is the shortest route between any two ports on a sphere, that steamers run the hazards they do, from northern weather and icebergs. Washington and Pekin are on almost the same latitude, but the shortest path between them lies not along the fortieth parallel as it would look from Mercator's projection but along the great circle which the Lindberghs took when they flew via the Arctic in search of the Orient. In the Southern Hemisphere ships must start out by heading to the south, and in the Northern Hemisphere they must head to the north if they wish the shortest routes. All this is shown clearly on the gnomonic projection. The constant compass direction is circuitous, and would tend all the time to form a spiral going around one of the poles unless the course be due north or south or east or west.

Mercator's projection has its fame, because it was one of the earliest devices used, and it still has merit for navigation. The course between two near-by points can be taken off readily with a parallel ruler, so most harbor maps are made with Mercator's projection. It can also show the whole world unbroken into hemispheres, and parts of the world can be repeated at each end. With this arrangement, journeys across both the Atlantic and Pacific can be planned on the same map. Of course there is rank favoritism at the poles, but a trained eye can put the arctic zones back to the small area where they belong, and the "conventional signs," which the snark hunters so scorned, might have been of some use even to them, for like most men who set out with a blank, their griefs came later:

This was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due east,
That the ship would not travel due west!

A few of the "merely conventional signs" are not out of place for snark hunters or for anyone else.

Among the Arabs too there were remarkable travelers

Among the Arabs too there were remarkable travelers. Their first visits to Cathay worked wonders on the fruitful imagination of Bagdad, and the result was Sinbad the Sailor, many of whose best stories were repeated in the European travel books of the same day. The required pilgrimage to Mecca gave Arabs a taste for wandering, and they possessed the carefree hearts with which all nomads must be born.

The greatest of them all, Ibn Batuta, was completely without a sense of responsibility. His wanderings surpassed even Marco Polo's in extent. Whenever a Rajah of India grew tired of bestowing favors, Ibn went to China. Whenever the Emperor of China scorned him, he went back again. His real home was in Tangiers, but he managed to make a home for himself, complete with wives, wherever he went. When the Black Death finally drove him back to northern Africa, he merely made Tangiers a base for further explorations. Then he was off again, across the Sahara this time, where he reported that houses were really built of rock salt and roofed with camel skin as Herodotus had told. Thence south to Timbuctoo and across the Niger (which he mistook for the Nile) and finally into the Sudan. When he returned he dictated his travels by royal command; but that was one of the Arab documents which the Europeans never took the trouble to translate until the nineteenth century; and the light which might have been thrown on the dark continent by 1400, remained unguessed.

Long before Columbus, the theory of the spherical Earth was generally accepted among scientific people. Roger Bacon had brought the notion back to life. All the great philosophers had fought for it. Even Sir John Mandeville, who was the Baron Münchausen of the fourteenth century, had added his argument.

Mandeville's argument was a characteristically weird tale. He said that he had often heard in his youth how a man had set forth to search the world; how he had gone so far by land and sea that at length he had come to an island where he heard his own language used, wherefor he had great marvel. "But I say that he had gone so long that now he was come again unto his own marshes, and if he had passed farther he would have found his own land. But he turned again from thence, and went back as he had come."

In other words the poor traveler had voyaged east from England until he came to Ireland, and been so amazed that he turned and went west again--surely the most terrific penalty that belief in a flat Earth ever had to pay. But Mandeville was a romancer, and by the middle of the fourteenth century most travelers believed in a spherical world. Ptolemy's works were translated early in the fifteenth, and in 1492, the year that Columbus set forth, Martin Behaim of Nuremburg produced a terrestrial globe.

To Christopher Columbus belongs the credit of daring. He risked his life, all he possessed and all he could borrow to prove his point, where the philosophers of his day had been content with their theories. But his voyages were the result of the knowledge which they had accumulated. With Ptolemy he believed that there was less water than land on the globe, and therefore he telescoped together the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and set forth to cross a small body of water in a few days. Undoubtedly the tales of hardships to be endured in Siberia had scared him off that continent. But the stories of the wonders of Cathay enticed him on. It was no accident, but a genuine sequence of cause and effect, that he took with him a copy of the travels of Marco Polo. But it was an accident, resulting from too scant knowledge, that he took with him also a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella introducing him to Kubla Khan, though that gentleman had been dead for over two hundred years!

After the efforts of Columbus, exploration received a new impetus; and the longed-for trade in spices added a commercial incentive. The names of the explorers are so well known that we need but mention them here; there was Vasco de Gamma, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope; John Cabot, who rediscovered Newfoundland; Balboa, who first saw the Pacific "from a peak in Darien"; Cortez, who conquered Mexico; Magellan, who rounded South America and whose boat crossed the Pacific; and Drake, who sailed around the world, passing on his way up the coast of California where he missed the sight of San Francisco Bay because the Golden Gate was buried in fog.

These men and the others of their kind made the new geography. No one could argue now as to whether the world was a sphere or a flat disc. The argumentative stage had passed.

There was still some doubt however as to the actual shape of the world. The author of one novel makes a publisher reply to a young writer on philosophy:

"Of course you were wrong in saying there is no world. The world must exist to have the shape of a pear; and that the world is shaped like a pear, and not like an apple as the fools of Oxford say, I have satisfactorily proved in my book. Now if there were no world, what would become of my system?"

With these new explorations, ideas had to fit in with the known geography. It was no longer possible to treat continents as the giant Procrustes had treated visitors to his bed, cutting them off if they were too long to fit, and stretching them out if they were too short. The great problem now was to make the map fit the continents, and serious complications had arisen, complications which had been forgotten since the days of Ptolemy. The problem was to show spherical surfaces on a plane map.

All flat maps have some distortion. If the map be of a limited area, a few miles square, the distortion is so small that it may be neglected safely, but when the map shows large areas, a continent or a hemisphere, the distortion must be dealt with.

About 1260, two Venetian merchants, brothers, traveling east of Constantinople

Meanwhile in the Far East there had been a tremendous conquest of which Europe for a time knew nothing. Sweeping over Asia the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan had captured everything before them, boasting that their horses could run without stumbling where cities had stood. The Mongols were barbarous, but they had the ability to absorb culture swiftly. By their third generation the conquerors were building China up to a cultural height never seen before. For the first time in history the whole of Asia, with the exception of a few Persian and Arabian territories, submitted to a single king. As a result the trade routes were open.

About 1260, two Venetian merchants, brothers, traveling east of Constantinople chanced to fall in with a group of envoys who had been to Persia on a mission from the great Kubla Khan. They were easily persuaded to join in the adventure, for they had heard rumors of Cathay and were eager to see the wonders. Kubla Khan received them well. He listened to their doctrine of Christianity and thought that he saw in it a new method for subduing his people. Therefore he sent back the two merchants, begging them to ask the Pope for two hundred men of letters to help in their mission. So the two brothers returned to Venice; but the only person whom they could persuade to join their expedition was the young son of one of them. His name was Marco Polo.

Many years afterward in a prison in Genoa, Marco Polo met a literary hack of the more respectable variety, a man who was used to abridging and recasting the Arthurian romances which were then so much in vogue, and this man persuaded Marco Polo to dictate his adventures. The imprisonment was only a year long, but it profited the world with a tale which was not duplicated for six hundred years; and the sights which young Marco Polo had seen as he crossed the desert were as vivid to the man of fifty as they had been to the boy of seventeen. It was not alone his knowledge of geography and his flair for languages which gave him more knowledge than any other European of his time; but it was his intimate acquaintance with the innermost workings of the Chinese Empire. Had he not been taken into favor by Kubla Khan? Had he not gone on expeditions to distant provinces and come back successful? Had not he--young Marco Polo--been sole governor of the great city of Yang Chow?

It was a wonderful tale, a tale that never ceases to be wonderful and remains modest to the end. Fortunately for the world Marco Polo had the spirit of an anthropologist. For the wisdom and valor of Marco Polo, you must hunt in the Chinese annals; his own story tells only of the Chinese, their methods of trading, their money, their customs. His account was too true to be believed. The priest who ministered to Marco Polo when he was over seventy and in his last illness asked him to confess his exaggerations. And Marco Polo, dying, said, "I have not told the half of what I have seen."

Slowly the maps began to indicate his travels, and other men began to follow where he had gone. The travelogues of these wanderers are far more exciting than any modern adventure story. They have all been gathered and edited by Sir Henry Yule under the title of Cathay and the Way Thither. No doubt the editor's humor and sympathy add much to their charm, but in themselves they might be described as was another far more fanciful tale, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but these are stranger than both."

Even before Marco Polo started there had been a general feeling among the prelates of Europe that the Tartars were anxious to be converted to Christianity--a conviction which arose from nothing but desire and tried belatedly to find roots for itself in the fabulous story of Prester John. Nevertheless from time to time we find records of some lone prelate rounding the Indian coast, stopping at Sumatra (where one man at least really thought he had found Paradise) and reaching Cathay. Or a group will set out to cross the desert, and one or two arrive, worn out by their travels, but steadily pursuing their mission, and sending letters back to the Pope for help. They must have been extraordinary men to set out as they did, and such valor is not without its effect in any land. The fact is, that having started on a completely false assumption, they then proceeded to make it true. A surprising number of Mongols were converted to the Christian faith.

On one occasion, about 1328, the last of the Christian missionaries in Cathay died. Then the Khan himself undertook to send an embassy to the Pope, "Lord of the Christians where the Sun goes down," requesting that there be frequent messengers of exchange and Friars sent to the desolate Christian flock. The return embassy was received with great kindness and courtesy. The Khan lavished his wealth upon them, so that the impecunious Europeans were driven to hard mental arithmetic before they could write home how much their host must have spent in their behalf.

It is good to record that there is not one of the genuine travelers of this period who does not tell the same tale of the Chinese. They are full of praise for the Chinese arts (surpassed by none--no not one nation--throughout the world), and for the amazing civilization, where traveling was safe even for a foreigner, because criminals were fingerprinted, the rogue's gallery sketched, and no unjust man ever escaped.

No wonder adventurers wanted to go to China! By the middle of the fourteenth century one man had made a sort of tourist guidebook to Cathay, listing the towns and the methods of selling goods, and telling just how the customs man should be tipped, what sort of a beard a traveler should wear, and recommending the kinds of guides (and the kinds of women) who would make the most suitable traveling companions.

Still in Europe, the rumors were uncertain. One or two of these men mention Marco Polo as the greatest of them all, but most had never heard of him. It was a long time before his fame spread, and two hundred years had passed before his tales were really believed. In the meantime the Mongol Empire had fallen, the trade routes were closed, and the few missionaries sent out from Avignon disappeared forever into darkness. The only possible way to China was through the west.

Medieval Europe entertained more thirst for knowledge than is usually credited to them

Medieval Europe entertained more thirst for knowledge than is usually credited to them, but they lacked the scientific background with which knowledge is correlated. Sagas were sung of the exploits, and a few returning Gaels spread the news through Ireland and Scotland that there was land beyond the ocean--that they were not the farthest west of peoples after all. But any results which might have come from the Norse expeditions were halted by one of the curious accidents which from time to time have helped to change the whole course of history.

In 1047, Adam of Bremen, one of the genuine geographers of his time, took the trouble to visit Denmark in order that he might inquire from the king of that country about the strange rumors drifting over Europe. The king told him almost exactly what Leif Ericson had said, and expatiated upon the beauties of Wineland, adding that the description was not fabulous, but a trustworthy account. For some reason, when Adam came to write down the report he located the new country beyond the Arctic, "all those regions which are beyond are filled with insupportable ice and boundless gloom." No wonder medieval Europe was unimpressed!

The mistake was the more unfortunate because already Europe was suffering from overpopulation. Younger sons, crowded from their ancestral estates, needed room in which to show their valor. The Northerners, under the same conditions had sailed west; but the southern Europeans turned their eyes in a different direction, and with Bibles as guidebooks and banners fluttering over their heads began to march eastward on a Holy War. They accomplished little, but for the first time in centuries, the scholars were given a chance to lay their hands on Arabic books.

Maps were in great demand during the crusades. Faulty, drawn with too much logic and too little knowledge, the maps of the crusaders were less dependable than any since Babylonian times. No doubt it looked fine when you started out from home to show a map drawn like a circle, with the river Hellespont bisecting the whole, and a radius at right angles for the Mediterranean. All you had to do was travel southward, past the big castle in the illustration, and then take a boat along the Mediterranean, sailing due east until you reached the Holy Land, which was (quite properly) in the center of the world. There were no islands, no reefs to get in your way.

Only when you had started, things were somehow quite different. The islands were plentiful and, if you followed along the coast, you found that it was far from straight. There were mountains. Entirely new maps had to be designed, and these were as complicated as the others were simple. By the third crusade the compass points were marked all over the maps, each sending out radial lines. Directions between any two places could be found by moving a parallel ruler from the line joining them to the nearest central compass point. They were frightfully complicated but a big improvement.

The change was coming. William of Wykeham, the founder of Winchester College and of New College Oxford, directed the Fellows and Scholars of the latter to occupy themselves during the long winter evenings with "singing or reciting poetry, or with the chronicles of the different kingdoms, or with the wonders of the world." The Renaissance was in the air.

The Universities furnished the nucleus from which the Renaissance grew. They were not monasteries, but were founded because the monastic environment was unsuitable to the new methods of teaching and the new source of material which began to seep in from Arabia. Oxford claims its foundation from a bright point in the darkest period of all--869--the reign of Alfred the Great, but the additional colleges came after the first introduction of new thought. When John de Balliol (who claimed to be King of Scotland until Robert the Bruce outwitted him) insulted an English Bishop in 1263, the King of England demanded as penalty the foundation of a college at Oxford. It was not the demand of a king who despised education. In France a little after 1100 so many scholars stormed the walls, that the great and persuasive Abélard was forced to move his school to the open air of Mount Saint Genevieve because there was no hall in Paris large enough to hold his pupils.

The first public school in England was Winchester, founded by William of Wykeham in 1393. The name "public" had and still has a very different meaning in England from the popular use in America. It signified a school which was not a church school and not run for profit. A "public school" in England receives no support from taxation and regular rates have to be paid for attending. At Winchester all "men" must board at the school--a necessary precautions in my time when, most of the year, classes started at 7:00 A.M.

Education was being freed from the control of the church (and this important development was due to a man who was later Bishop of Winchester). It flourished in the freer atmosphere and paved the way for the explorations and developments of succeeding centuries.

Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of Alexandria

The wrong theory was endorsed by Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of Alexandria, and the only geographer whose work was familiar to Europeans in the late Middle Ages. In 150 A. D., Ptolemy collected all the geographical reports ever written and summed them up in one massive work. He devised the five zones which are now the tropics, the temperate and the arctic zones. For his prime meridian he adopted the Fortunate Islands to the west of both Europe and Africa. He had plenty of source material. Aside from scientific works and memoirs of adventurers, he had Roman strip maps at his disposal. All sorts of travelers' knickknacks had been devised, maps which unrolled at both ends so that the particular locality could be studied without undoing the whole map (a suggestion which modern makers of road maps might do well to imitate); and there were even silver traveling cups, made in the shape of milestones and adorned with a list of stations on the route between Cádiz and Rome.

All this mass of data was compiled by Ptolemy; but its correlation was--to say the least--difficult, and the quality of his map varied considerably. Britain is fairly well represented, but a minute island, isolated in the north and labelled "Scandia," seems to be all that he knew of the great northern peninsula. He had trouble with his scale too. There are sixty geographical miles to a degree, and he took fifty, a mistake which resulted in a general distortion. In spite of this, Ptolemy must be ranked as the greatest of early geographers; and by his time the ancient science of geography had reached its height.

Then, when the men of Alexandria and Rome felt that they had certain knowledge of just where in the world they stood, there came again that disconcerting rumor of another civilization almost half the world away--a civilization which was fit to rival the glory of Rome. The rumor was more insistent this time, so insistent that Ptolemy was forced to make some recognition of it on his map. You can discount travelers' tales, but it is harder to discount the travelers themselves, particularly when they bring their outlandish apparel into the heart of Rome's capital, and show their yellow faces even to the matter-of-fact merchants of the forum.

Via India they had come, ambassadors and envoys, bringing presents from the Emperor of China to Augustus, the Emperor of Rome. The armilla came with them for astronomers; the abacus came; and most important of all, silk was introduced into the western world. There can be no doubt of how eagerly the new cloth was accepted; the armilla and the abacus were interesting additions to science and mathematics--but for the sake of silk the trade routes must be kept open. Pliny and others might rave as they liked about the value of home products and the vanities of women who wanted the ends of the Earth combed for gauze dresses. To such pedagogues the women paid no attention. The silk had to be brought.

Under such circumstances all might have gone well and the trade routes opened once and for all; but as usual trade barriers arose. The Chinese said that the Persians were inferior weavers, but wanted the profits of trade. However that may be, the people of Asia Minor certainly did their best to hinder commerce, and ended, of course, by defeating their own aims. For one brief moment the two great nations faced each other across the intervening continent and held out their arms in friendly gesture. Then the Romans grew tired of paying duty, imported silkworms rather than silk, and the eagerness died.

For centuries afterward the Chinese continued their efforts undaunted; but at best they went only to Antioch or Constantinople, never to Rome; and the few embassies which reached China from the western world certainly traveled without official sanction. The ways of traveling were too hazardous.

In Chios the wonder-working worms were imported and put to feed on the native trees. The women of Rome had their silk so they were satisfied, and China became again a vague rumor, only half-believed by Roman ears.

Ptolemy, like all educated Greeks after Aristotle, had believed that the Earth was a globe; but in 320 A. D., a monk named Lacantius began denouncing all such ideas as heretical, and he literally knocked the spherical theory flat. There was no scientist left to resurrect it, and flat it remained until Roger Bacon a thousand years later puffed it up again with the newly found arguments of Aristotle.

The over-practical minds of the late Roman Empire had done their worst. If science led to no practical or comfortable gains they thought it valueless. In such an atmosphere pure science can never flourish. It had died before Rome fell, and the Dark Ages which showed the result were made to bear the blame for Roman negligence. Without astronomy geography is helpless. Only an astronomer can reckon latitudes or longitudes, gauge zones or even precise directions upon the Earth.

Yet the Middle Ages were not entirely barren of exploration. Trade continued, and the missionaries traveled; but for the most part they went in search of ecclesiastical rather than terrestrial knowledge. In 742 A. D., some missionaries from Constantinople reached China where they were described as "priests of great virtue." The Christian inscription says that they came by "observing stars and the Sun."

To the north, Christianity reached Scandinavia about the middle of the tenth century, and the king was so fired with religion that he sent the young son of Eric the Red to convert the colonies which Eric had founded in Greenland. Young Leif Ericson accordingly sailed toward his father's home, but bad weather drove him far off his course, and instead of landing in Greenland he found himself on the coast of an unknown country where "self-sown" wheat grew in abundance and the grapes for wine were plentiful.

Leif Ericson was sufficiently scientific to take back with him samples of wheat, of maple wood and of the wonderful grapes; so he sailed back to Greenland with his trophies and his stories of North America, which he named (with what sounds like unconscious irony to modern ears) "Wineland the Good." The discoveries created great excitement in Greenland and even in Scandinavia. A second expedition set forth, and four years later a third which consisted of one hundred and eighty men and women who intended to start a colony. Leif's father had named his island "Greenland" to attract colonizers; and the son seems to have followed in the father's footsteps. The new colony found the reports of self-growing wheat much overrated; the Indians had come and after three years' trial the Norse colony was too discouraged to stay longer.

What happened we do not know. The Norse colony returned home safely to Greenland but somehow, someone was lost and remained wandering about the new world. Perhaps the Gaels, so "incredibly fleet of foot," who were sent scouting on the second expedition, lost their way. Tablets, bearing tragic tales of Norse wanderings, have been found in Minnesota, and even recently in Colorado; but whether the scouts penetrated so far, or whether the Indians carried the stones about with them as souvenirs, it is hard to say.

Alexander was annexing the whole of the eastern world

About the time that Alexander was annexing the whole of the eastern world, men were becoming very much interested in the west. Over seven hundred years had passed since the Phoenicians first came to an island in the Northern Sea where there was tin to be had for the mining; but the Phoenicians had kept their secret well. They did not want their competitors to know the route to the tin-bearing islands. But the existence of England could not remain hidden from the world forever. The great traveler Pytheas of Marseilles visited it in about 300 B. C., and reported an island named Thule, six days sail to the north, where there was unbroken daylight in the summer and long winter darkness. That might refer to the Faeroe Islands, or even Iceland or Norway, we do not know; but Pytheas was the first of the really scientific travelers, and his remarks are not to be dismissed lightly. He had established a training course for astronomers, and determined a substantially correct latitude for his home town.

Soon after Pytheas, the Romans came in contact with the Carthaginians, who were the natural heirs of the Phoenicians, and from them discovered the secret. There was an island to the north, an island which bore not only tin, but pearls as well. The Gallic people had named the high mountains which separated their country from Italy, by their own word for hills, and called those mountains the "Alps." The little island received the same name, a name that meant a high white hill--and all the early travelers called it Albion--from the first view they had of it--the chalk cliffs of Dover.

The rumor of pearls, as well as his incurable habit of conquering, took Julius Caesar to that coast. The ladies of Rome were very fond of jewelry. He gave the same account of Britain that most travelers give when they spend only a few weeks in a country and return to impress the people at home: "Hopelessly primitive natives they have there--why they don't even know how wonderful our country is." As a matter of fact the people were more than moderately civilized, and if they acknowledged Phoenician and Gallic customs more than Roman, that is hardly remarkable. The Phoenicans and the Gauls had acknowledged them.

In the meantime scientific geography had progressed in Greece with great rapidity. Eratosthenes, who had all the resources of the Library of Alexandria at his command, had measured the circumference of the Earth, and drawn a map with seven parallels of latitude and seven meridians. His main parallel ran through the Cape of Saint Vincent, the Straits of Messina, the Island of Rhodes, to Issus on the Gulf of Iskanderus. His prime meridian stretched from the first Cataract on the Nile, through Alexandria to Rhodes and the city of King Byzas, which was later to be called Constantinople or Istambul. His great book was divided into three parts: a history of geography and its physical features, a mathematical treatise on the nature of the world, and a history of political and social geography.

Eratosthenes was also the first man to recognize the implications of a spherical Earth. "If it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic sea rendered it impossible," he wrote, "one might even sail from the coast of Spain to that of India along the same parallel." More than fifteen hundred years were to pass before such an attempt was made, and even then the first man who tried to go from Spain westward to India did not believe in the vastness of the Atlantic.

Only fifty years after Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, the famous astronomer, undertook to show all the fallacies which his predecessor had committed. The latitudes, Hipparchus said, should be drawn at equal intervals, say at half an hour's difference in the length of the day; and the longitudes should be likewise regulated, preferably from observation of eclipses. The length of the degree, which Eratosthenes had computed, Hipparchus accepted without question (it was wrong), but he accused the librarian in no uncertain terms of reckoning by travelers' tales instead of science. "And as for his claim that the ocean surrounds the Earth--it makes no more sense than to say that the Red Sea is surrounded by land!"

His whole argument was just a little unfair and capricious. It was hard enough for anyone to calculate longitudes with the poor timekeepers available, without wandering over the Earth in those perilous days of sea voyages; and eclipses hardly came often enough for one man to use them exclusively for his measurements. Hipparchus had made an excellent map of the sky so he thought he know all about the business of cartography. He never tried to make a map of the Earth.

The work of Eratosthenes was for the most part copied by Strabo, who lived from 50 B. C. to 24 A. D. Strabo however rejected the idea of Thule and decided that the most northerly habitable land was Ieme ( Ireland) which he set far to the north of Britain, where some of the Irish Free-staters might well wish it set today. But in something far more important, Strabo agreed with Eratosthenes. He insisted that there was much more water than land on the globe. He was right; but perhaps it was not a pity that he was judged wrong. As usual in geography, the wrong theory led further.