So when the lid—the Selden patent—was lifted from the automobile industry, it sprang to the front. The year 1911 was the epochal year in volume of production in the business. From that year dates the present era of automobile high production. It wasn’t that many new companies entered the field. It was that those already in it expanded and increased their output. There was no longer an Old Man of the Sea, in the form of a tax on production, clinging to their necks and shoulders. The age of standardization had come, and the soundness of Ford’s quantity production idea had been demonstrated. Thence on, the automobile industry had a clear course, if not in all cases easy sailing, and it has traversed it on a straight line, with a current of popular demand running strong in the direction it has been headed. GASOLINE CAR IN POPULAR DEMAND. Pioneers in manufacturing gasoline cars during the period beginning at the time—1898—when the first gasoline car, a Winton, was sold, were Clarke Bros., makers of the Auto-car, E. R. Thomas whose name the Thomas Flier took, Stearns, Chalmers, Jeffery, Wilkinson, who designed the Franklin car, Olds who changed from steam to gasoline, Brush, Ford, Leland who produced the Cadillac, Haynes and Apperson. Many familiar cars came into the field later, or were developed and advertised by men who became identified with them at a later date. Although its manufacture was started in 1903, the Overland car, which ranks second to Ford in quantity production, did not become the factor in the industry it is today until John North Willys, a salesman, became identified with it and gave it its remarkable vogue through his personality and spectacular salesmanship. The gasoline car was struggling to perfection when the electric and steam types of cars were reasonably well established on the market. In 1896, New England saw its first motor race of electric cars. The names of make or makers of electric cars familiar from that date on include those of Riker, Pope, Waverley, Baker, Woods, Barrows, Studebaker, whose first cars were electric, Columbus Buggy, Rauch & Lang, Detroit, Ohio and Anderson. But the electric car industry never has reached the proportions of the gasoline car industry. It has never advertised in the lavish manner adopted by gasoline car makers. It has not entered races to the extent its gasoline competitors have. It adopted conservative methods which have given it a slow growth. It is only within the last five years that shaft drives have been perfected in electric car construction, while producing controllers that would not arc, whatever the provocation, have been matters of slow evolution. But that the electric car is a perfectly balanced piece of mechanism and the one type of the automobile with the least fits and starts, is conceded, and this superiority will doubtless enable the electric type to make up in the future in the motor truck field what it has lost to the gasoline type in the passenger field.