COMMERCIALIZING THE MOTOR VEHICLE. In the production of the automobile, America did comparatively little in the fundamentals of invention which are now found in the modern perfected car. Selden invented the three-cylinder gasoline engine, by which the rapid revolution of the crankshaft of his day was converted into slower but higher powered motion of drive wheels. White invented a generator for steam cars. Haynes was responsible for a discovery that caused alloy and specially heat-treated steel to be introduced, and Knight produced a superior motor. But these were discoveries, inventions or improvements that were supplemental and perfecting, not elemental. It was chiefly the English, the French and the Germans, with the exception of Evans of Philadelphia, who first conceived the idea of the horseless carriage, and helped it to its final development by a series of successive inventions. The names of Cugnot, Trevithick, James, Pecqueur, Hancock, Gurney, Lenoir, Bollee, Benz, Daimler, Levassor and Serpollet should form the nomenclative setting of commemorative friezes on the walls of the grateful motor clubs of the future, as those of Liszt, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod, Handel, Massenet, Bach, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Chopin take honored place in the shrines of Music, the “heavenly maid.” Even in the production of automobiles in any quantity for use—the commercializing of the idea they represent—the United States did not lead at first. This honor belongs to France, as does the original conception by Cugnot of the horseless vehicle. The first steam cars manufactured in the United States, on any basis entitling their manufacture to the dignity of a business, were made after 1894, and the names of Riker, White and Stanley are the prominent ones in the steam automobile field. Electric carriages were sold as commercial commodities in comparatively small quantities, beginning with 1897, and the first American gasoline car sold in the United States was made and sold by Alexander Winton in 1898. Beginning prior to 1892, the French were selling automobiles by the hundred, while manufacturers in America were selling them by the dozen. Panhard and Peugeot were selling gasoline cars, and DeDion-Bouton was putting the steam automobile on the world’s market. But the race is not always to the swiftest. While France started bravely on its commercialization of the automobile, and had in its favor what were then good roads of an old and well settled country to run them over, and perhaps the thriftiest people of any nation to buy them, there were causes existing in the United States destined to make of it the greatest automobile producing country in the world, and its people the largest users of the new invention, while at the same time operating to cause the United States to sell more cars outside its confines, to Europe and elsewhere, than are sold by any other country.