Page:The Triumph of an Idea.djvu/20

 by Dunlap, and New York had its famous March blizzard, which could not have held much interest to  the young inventor, reared in a region of heavy snows. Probably he gave not a thought to the tragedy of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolph, whose death by  suicide or murder has been a historic puzzle from that  day to this. Certainly he did not know that the next year, 1889, was distinguished by the birth of Richard  E. Byrd, explorer and flyer, though he may have given  passing notice to the inauguration of President Benjamin Harrison, the Johnstown flood, the opening of  Oklahoma for settlement, and the admission of four  new states: the Dakotas, Washington, and Montana. In 1890 he started to construct a double-cylinder engine,  after having built various experimental engines, and decided that for transportation a single-cylinder was impracticable because its flywheel weighed too much.

At first he planned to put the double-cylinder engine on a bicycle, but figured out that with the gas tank and  necessary controls it was too heavy. Moving his workshop to the shed in the backyard of a modest city house, when he accepted a $45-a-month job as engineer and  machinist with the Edison Illuminating Company of  Detroit, he continued experimenting in his "leisure"  hours. He has said that in the years of testing and planning he was never doubtful of succeeding, and that his young wife was even more confident in the future of  the gasoline-driven automobile. He called her "The Believer."

In the two-year interval before he completed his first car, minor inventions pointing toward the automobile  were reported, but none that appreciably influenced