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A famous car of the '20s 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 its maker, Ned Jordan, wrote in 1923. The ad, headed "Somewhere West of Laramie," did not dwell 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'm talking about," Jordan wrote (so legend has it) on an envelope while riding a train over the Wyoming plains bound for San Francisco. "She can tell what a sassy pony that's a cross between greased lightning 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 beautiful woman on a horse he saw out the train's window as it was pulling away from a small station in Wyoming. A horseman himsalf, 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 west of Laramie," his friend told him. The ad, which was published in the Saturday Evening Post just a week after Jordan feverishly penned it and forever changed the way cars were marketed, went on in this vein, then concluded: "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."
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 wooed a daughter of Thomas B. Jeffery, owner of the Kenosha auto maker bearing his name which in 1916 was acquired by Charles B. Nash, former president of General Motors, and became the Nash Motors Co. 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 Co. in Cleveland. During the '20s, Jordan's health, marriage and firm failed after 65,000 cars had been produced.
In the '20s, just about 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 to buyers who by and large already owned one. And they all functioned in more or less the same way.
So what made a Jordan Playboy different? Romance. Or, as we call it today, image. The romance typified by that woman on horseback somewhere west of Laramie. Apparently not too many customers bought it. But the industry did.
The auto industry began selling not only cars but dreams.
In many ways, the auto industry changed in the '20s 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 were concerned with defining the automobile's role in the life of the consumer.
In the '20s, auto advertising began to stress intangibles -- image, romance, fun -- instead of the automobile's mechanical attributes and its utilitarian value compared with the horse. Sloan ordered the design of an automobile for a marketing purpose, a car to fit in the economic slot above GM's Chevrolet and below its Buick which would use parts common to one or the other (this car became the Pontiac, introduced with great success in 1926). And Sloan hired Harley Earl, a Hollywood designer of custom cars for movie stars to style the new Cadillac LaSalle for 1927 and to completely design the 1928 Cadillac.
The '20s were a revolutionary decade for the auto industry.
It could be argued that since the development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, the invention which has had the most profound effect on the way we live has been the automobile. There have been many advances in technology which have had important and far-reaching effects, but few have changed the way we actually live as completely and as rapidly as the automobile.
We reserve for the car an emotional relationship we do not have with other machines, such as refrigerators, or airplanes or even the curiously human computer. The car has been venerated as an object of affection, excitement, even love. And when it fails us, we heap upon it the bitterness and intense anger we generally reserve for our loved ones.
Think for a moment about the world of 100 years ago. Travel was slow and difficult. A trip to anywhere was a major undertaking. Dearborn was a day's journey from Detroit on the road to Chicago. Most roads were just gravel or dirt.
Cities, usually built on streams or lakes or rail lines were compact and congested. They were quickly transformed by the car into sprawling urban complexes, held together and in some ways split apart by the freeways and interstates that bind them.
Buildings have been razed and farmland paved over to provide parking for the almost 300 million vehicles we own in the United States alone, more than twice that many worldwide. And along those roads are motels (motor hotels), shopping malls, drive-in restaurants, drive-in movies, drive-in banks, drive-in florists, even drive-in funeral homes.
In this century, the automobile has spawned whole industries where none existed before. Depending on whose figures you accept, one in six or one in seven working Americans is engaged in the building, selling or maintenance of motor vehicles. The Census Bureau says auto dealerships account for 28.5 percent of all the retail business in the United States.
Auto makers are the biggest or among the biggest consumers of steel, aluminum, copper, glass, zinc, leather, plastic and platinum and they use most of the lead and rubber consumed in the United States.
The automobile is not cheap. In addition to its voracious consumption of resources at the societal level and our income at the personal level, its toll of death and injury easily surpasses war many times over. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death of Americans from age 5 to 45.
But there is no talk or banning the auto or even seriously restricting it. Most of us consider a driver's license a right, not a license. Controversy rages over such "invasions" of our rights as laws requiring use of air bags, safety belts and 55-mph speed limits. In Germany, in fact, a bitter battle has been raging for some time over the imposition of any speed limit on the autobahns.
The automobile is, like no other machine, part of us.
The automobile's time had come in the rich technological age of the 1880s. Here and there around the world, men were at work on motorized vehicles, unknown to each other, separated in time and space the way we are now from other planets. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany; Louis Renault, Rene Panhard, 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 by various names. For the most part, they 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. Just when his first delivery took place is not clear. It could have been late 1885. It seems more likely that it took place in spring of 1886. In the United States there were tinkerers, but no industry until 1896.
In fact, when Benz first got his three-wheeler chugging into movement in Mannheim, it was not the first time a vehicle had propelled itself. What was new was that Benz perfected his machine, put it into production and people bought it.
Isolated instances of automotive promise had come and gone. As early as 1769, Nicolas Cugnot fitted a wagon with a steam engine, fired it up and ran it across a field in France, thereby becoming, as far as we know, the first person to make and operate a non-animal-powered land vehicle. Incidentally, Cugnot's machine did not handle well and he ran it into a wall, the world's first auto accident. Legend has it he was arrested for his trouble and so might also be credited with the world's first moving violation.
The first internal combustion engine was built in 1860 by Ettienne Lenoir in France, but it ran on illuminating gas and was quite different from the modern engine. But in 1876, Nikolous Otto patented in Germany the four-stroke gasoline engine of the type used today in almost all cars.
Benz's first automobile had a mid-mounted engine (now very trendy in sports-car circles) 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 (about the size of the base engine in a present-day compact car) one-cylinder unit which put out 1.5 horsepower.
Meanwhile, in Cannstaedt, near Stuttgart, Gottlieb Daimler was working on a four-wheel, gasoline-powered automobile, which he had running and put 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. (Like almost all current automotive trends, assembly of cars in this country by foreign makers has been done before.) 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.
A flamboyant Austrian businessman named Emil Jellinek, who was Austro-Hungarian vice-consul in Nice, France, had bought a special Daimler racing car in 1897 and in 1900 joined the Daimler board of directors, where he urged a new approach to auto design. Jellinek wanted cars to be longer, lower, lighter and faster.
Daimler's engineers were at work on such a car and Jellinek said he would buy the first 36 himself to sell in France, provided his distributorship territory was expanded and that the car with the three-pointed star insignia be named after his 10-year-old daughter, Mercedes.
In 1926, the Daimler and Benz companies merged and Mercedes became Mercedes-Benz.
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