Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/374

 "You Made Me What I Am Today*

���There are numbers of patents that have made money and lost more in the automobile game, not counting all the accessories for ruining a man's pocketbook, such as spotlights, roller cur- tains, mud scrapers, dust suckers, tack pullers and perfume bottles. The Tillinghast patents covered single-tube tires, and Theodore Dodge made money before that tire blew out; Dunlop made money; the Grant patent for solid tires reaped a fortune and Harry F. Baker is riding in ease on Kardo patents for ball bear-| ings. But it is William Barber of Brooklyn who smiles at us above, over his valve cages used by valve-in- head cars and motor- cycles. Great auto- mobile companies pay him royalties

���Since all great men are linked with their enemies, George B. Selden ought not to object to our mention of him in the same breath with Henry Ford. Back in 1879, Selden quietly took out a basic patent on the modern automobile. The document dealt with a gas engine, using a clutch and transmission to drive the wheels of a vehicle, and it caused more battles than the Indians ever fought. The first great cases were won by Selden. Ford with the aid of Briscoe won the second batch. The patents were eventually declared invalid. Over eighty manufacturers paid a total of $2,000,000 in royalties under the Selden patents. Look in any old magazine and see their names in advertisements

��will look a long way through Who's Who in America without finding these names, but it is an oversight that Leonard Huntress Dyer is not in there. Most of these lights of the automobile game were just crazy inventors — according to their neighbors — but Dyer is a well-known lawyer of Chicago and New York. The papers in his case — we ought to call them limousine papers be- cause they all led to closed car opulence — had to do with a series of gears which employed a direct drive in one line with the clutch engine and driving wheels. Fortunately Dyer knew some- thing about the courts. So he fought only a short distance down the ages and then sold the rights to an association of manufacturers of automobiles

��Oscar Hedstrom, who is older now than when he posed for the picture at left, showing him with his first motorcycle, was a bicycle rider in the old days before gasoline did the work. He risked his neck before Glen Curtiss made his famous speed record in Florida. He wanted a way to pace a rider without wearing out the legs of two or three men; so he put a gas engine on the bicycle and patented the idea. He has never recovered since, because the royalties have been coming in a golden stream and because he came to be regarded as such a valuable motorcycle engineer that he was given a contract with one of the biggest of the manufacturers in the business

��358

�� �