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The first internal combustion engine was built in 1860 by Etienne Lenoir in France, but it ran on illuminating gas and was quite different from the modern engine. In 1876, Nikolous Otto patented in Germany the four-stroke gasoline engine type used today in most cars. Karl Benz's first automobile had a mid-mounted engine with semi-elliptical leaf-spring suspension in the rear and none in the front. It had a tiller for steering. The engine was a 1. 7 -liter one-cylinder unit that put out 1. 5 horsepower. The automobile's time had come in the rich technological age of the 1880 's.
Everywhere around the world, men worked on motorized vehicles, unknown to each other. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany; Louis Renault, Rene Packard, Emile Lavassor and the Peugeot brothers in France, and in the United States, Frank and Charles Duryea, Ransom E. Olds, Charles King, Elwood Haynes, David Buick and Henry Ford all were working on vehicles they called various names. For the most part, they all worked in ignorance of each other. Benz in Germany was the first to put an automobile into production, a three-wheeler he built in 1885. The date of his first delivery is not clear.
It could have been in late 1885, but more than likely it took place in the spring of 1886. In the United States, there were tinkers, but no industry until 1896. In fact, when Benz first got his three-wheeler running in Mannheim, it was not the first time a vehicle had moved on it's own. The new thing Benz did was he perfected his machine, put it into production and people bought it Meanwhile, in Cannstaedt, Gottlieb Daimler was working on a four-wheel, gasoline powered automobile, which he had running and put it into production in 1886.
By 1888, he had begun talking with William Steinway, of piano fame, about licensing his car for manufacture in the United States. Daimler also got involved in an English Daimler operation and served as a director until 1898, but the British and German Daimler firms went their own ways. Ned Jordan got into the auto business not as a mechanic or engineer but as a writer. As a reporter in Wisconsin, he met and fell in love with the daughter of Thomas B. Jeffery, owner of the Kenosha automaker bearing. In 1916, the bearing company was acquired by Charles B.
Nash, former president of General Motors, and it became the Nash Motor Company. Jordan married Miss Jeffery, who was old enough to be his mother, and Jeffery appointed him advertising manager in 1906. After Jeffery sold the firm to Nash in 1916, Jordan established the Jordan Motor Car Company in Cleveland. During the 1920 's, Jordan's health, marriage and firm failed.
He had produced 65, 000. A famous car of the 1920 's was the Jordan Playboy. Despite its flashy name, it was nothing special. It represented no technological advance. Sales never hit 10, 000 a year and it was gone before the stock market crashed in 1929. It is remembered because of an ad that is its creator, Ned Jordan wrote in 1923.
The ad, headed "Somewhere West of Laramie, " did not focus on the technical aspects of the Playboy. In fact, it did not mention them. "Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting steer-roping girl who knows what I am talking about, " Jordan wrote (so legend has it) on an envelope while riding on a train over the Wyoming plains bound for San Francisco. "She can tell what a sassy pony that's a cross between greased lightening and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is -- the Playboy was built for her. " Jordan was inspired by a woman on a horse he saw out the train's window as it pulled away from a small station in Wyoming. A horseman himself, Jordan was fascinated as the woman took chase of the train on her horse. "Where are we?" he asked a friend he was traveling with. "Oh, somewhere southwest of Laramie, " his friend told him. The ad was published in the Saturday Evening Post just a week after Jordan feverishly penned it and forever changed the way cars were marketed. The ad finished with, "Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things grown dead and stale.
Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight. " In the 1920 's, almost every family had a car. The automobile was accepted and reliable. There were literally hundreds of nameplates to choose from and now cars had to be sold mostly to buyers who already owned one. And now, they all functioned basically the same way. The auto industry began not only selling cars but also dreams. In many ways, the auto industry changed in the 1920 s into something quite different from what it had been.
Leadership began shifting from the original mechanical wizards like Henry Ford, Ransom E. Olds, David Dunbar Buick, William Knudsen, Henry Leland, Charles Kettering and the Dodge brothers who invented and figured out how to build the automobile, to men like Alfred P. Sloan and Harley Earl Of General Motors, Walter P. Chrysler -- and Ned Jordan -- who where concerned with defining the automobile's role in the life of the consumer.
In the 1920 s, advertising began to focus on intangibles, image, romance, fun instead of the automobile's mechanical features and its all-purpose functions compared to the horse. Sloan ordered the design of an automobile for a marketing purpose. A car priced above GM's Chevrolet and below Buick, which would use parts common to one or the other. This car became the Pontiac introduced with great success in 1926. Sloan hired Harley Earl, a Hollywood designer of custom cars for movie stars, to design the new Cadillac LaSalle for 1927 and to completely design the 1928 Cadillac. In 1926, the Daimler and Benz companies merged and Mercedes became Mercedes-Benz.
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