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If you are now in middle age, the chance is good that your grandparents were born before the automobile worked its enormous change on American life. In about four generations electrical power, the telephone, radio, TV, airplanes, computers, even space travel, have changed the way we live beyond recognition. But no invention, save perhaps the electric light bulb, has changed our day-to-day life quite so much as the automobile.
Its change is so pervasive it is hard to grasp.
Many of the names of those earliest automotive pioneers are still around on car nameplates -- Henry Ford, David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, John and Horace Dodge, Walter P. Chrysler here in the United States; Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, Ferdinand Porsche and Adam Opel in Germany; Hirochiro Honda and Hirochiro Toyoda in Japan; Armond Peugeot, Louis Renault and Andre Citroen in France; and in Great Britain, C.S. Rolls and Henry Royce.
And occasionally we see reminders of Charles Nash, the Studebaker brothers, James Packard, John North Willys, E.L. Cord, Fred Duesenberg, the Graham brothers, Robert C. Hupp, Howard Marmon, Harry C. Stutz, Henry J. Kaiser, Joseph Frazer, Malcolm Bricklin, John Z. DeLorean and Preston Tucker. Many more have had their day of glory and passed on as the auto industry whittled down the thousands of makers who have entered the game into the highly concentrated world industry that exists today.
A lot has happened since Karl Benz got that first car working well enough to put it into production.
But it has not really been a very long time.
Grandpa can remember when the world was a lot different.
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