Page:The Triumph of an Idea.djvu/16

 in the United States was opened in Baltimore. Even this visible marvel in transportation was regarded by the public as an achievement of limited possibilities. The idea that a horseless vehicle with no tracks beneath it would ever travel over the open road was too much for the imagination of all save a few dreamers. The "horseless carriage," of which visionaries had talked for hundreds of years, was still as distant, so far as the average man could see, as it had been when Leonardo da Vinci invented the wheelbarrow.

But Henry Ford and the other creative scientists of the day were not average men. In Ford's mind the engine that would be strong enough and light enough  to propel a vehicle for passengers or freight was imminent. He was not the only inventor who worked toward the goal; but he was a lone pioneer, for only in the vaguest way did he know what the others were doing in the early stages of his experiments. Of course, as he learned in later years about the discoveries of chemists and mechanics here and abroad, he studied  their findings, accepted the principles that proved valuable, and rejected ideas that failed to accord with his  own conclusions. He gave credit where credit was due, never hesitating to acknowledge the achievement of a competitor. That he succeeded beyond his rivals was due to an open mind as well as to untiring persistence.

When Ford began to tinker with the Otto engine, not a yard of good road, as we understand the term today, had been laid in America. Desultory efforts to improve city streets included the building of a short asphalted pavement in Newark, N. J., in 1870. Two years afterward a brick surface was used in Charleston,