Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/375

 They Sing of the Automobile and Motor-Truck

��Seeing him sitting here at the right so peace- fully, you would not picture Ray Harroun in goggles on a Van- derbilt racer; but that was where he got his start. There was nothing in the world so natural to a racing driver as something to smooth bumps and to act as a cushion when you hit a competitor going only a hundred miles an hour when you are doing a hun- dred and twenty. The idea came to him when he was fiddling with two little steel springs and watching them in- teracting on each other. It's a bumper that lifted him from the realms of the cir- cular track to an office desk at so many thou- sands per week that we blush to speak of it

����The story of L. H. Perlman and his demount- able rims (regular equipment — no extra charge) would be meat for a short-story writer. The picture shows him looking over the wheel that rolled him through the patent office and the courts; but the check for three million dollars which was the first payment made the Perlman Rim Corporation is framed in another room. Perlman was first a printer and then a tinkerer with automobiles and tires, and he did hate to put on new ones! He put together a wedge and a screw and secured patents on the combination

��At left: You see this man's work (Edward Hartford) on the back of every high priced car and even on the front. His papers — the same ones which put him on this page — are his because he applied the shock- absorber to the automobile and made even delicate debutantes will- ing to ride in broughams. He pro- ceeded with caution by first buying the Truffault patents which had to do with bicycles and then applying them to the automobile, and then taking out more patents. But even then he had to fight his way through the courts to establish his claims. You see by the picture that be can afford a nice watch chain

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��Mosler (below) went into partnership with an inventor from Man- istee, Michigan, before he had much use for the initials A. R., which he now always uses. The patent (the Can- field patent) concerned a spark plug with an air-gap between the insulation and the in- sulating shell. The fortunate inventor died happy leaving his part- ner with a duty and a fortune looming before him as his particular Nirvana. And how Mosler did fight! The case dragged for years, as is our happy Ameri- can custom, but Mos- ler won. Have you wondered who all those limousine owners in New York city are — those men who go to work at three in the afternoon and quit at three-thirty? They are A. R. Mosler, his sons, uncles, nephews and other relatives

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