Page:The Triumph of an Idea.djvu/22

 Englander named Norcross was established through a button, the only whole thing left intact about him after the explosion. Another happening of that year was New Jersey's establishment of the first Highway Department in the country.

Random discussions of good roads had gained sufficient headway by this time to attract the attention of railway operators. One rail executive was quoted as declining to deliver material to a road contractor on the ground that he did not wish to encourage such competition. Perhaps he had just heard that in 1892 the Massachusetts Legislature voted to initiate the country's  second Highway Department, an example soon followed  by six other states.

In the early spring of 1893, a few weeks after Grover Cleveland started his second term in the White House,  a motorcar moved through a Detroit street with Henry  Ford on its single seat. He had built the automobile in the previous autumn, but months of testing were  needed to make it run satisfactorily. It looked like an old-fashioned buggy. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, the inventor has described the car as follows: "There were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the rear  axle. I made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine  that I had bought. They developed about four horsepower.  The power was transmitted from the motor to the counter-  shaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel  by a chain. The car would hold two people, the seat being  suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There  were two speeds one of ten and the other of twenty miles  an hour obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by"