LOOKING BACK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 1, 3 January 1933, Page 14

LOOKING BACK.

Interchangeable Pieces,

CARS OF 1920. VALUE OF RESEARCH WORK, USE OF NEW ALLOYS.

Suppose that 13 years ago a brand new car, 1920 model, had been sealed up in a glass case. Suppose also that the seal was such a good one that nothing at all has happened'to' the car with time, but that it is in perfect condition to-day —not a speck of rust; not a bit of tarnish. The price of the car was £400 in 1920. What would you give for it now ?

Before you decide, look the car over pretty carefully. You will see that it does not have four-wheel brakes, nor balloon tyres, nor Duco finish. It is painted all in black, with no relieving colour, except for some stripes of yellow. It has no air cleaner, no oil filter, no ventilator in the crankcaee, no fuel pump, and no shock absorbers. You should know also that, although the eugino is almost the same size as that in the present model of the equivalent make, its power is much lower; the car will not pull hills as well nor run as fast. But then you would riot want to drive it so fast anyway, for it does not steer as easily, the engine does not run as smootHiy, and the whole car does not ride nearly so comfortably as the up-to-date model does.

Now that you know all this, what do you bid for the car? It is safe to say that you would not pay over £100 for it. But why not? This is not a "used" •ear. It is just as good as it was the day it was made. This car sold readily for £400 in 1920. Why is it worth only one-quarter as much to you to-day ?

The answer is that that i differential of £300 is the figure at which you, as a representative customer, reckon _ the value of the research and the engineering work of the past few years. The difference is not that the early car is any worse to-day than it was in 1920, but that the present car is so far superior to it that people think it is £300 better. And in that judgment they are not mistaken. The National Research Council recently sent a questionnaire to a large number of American manufacturers, asking about their activities in research An . analysis of nearly 600 of the replies received showed, that 52 per cent of the manufacturers do some industrial research. Now it is certain that, if such a census were taken within the automobile industry alone, the percentage would' be. much higher. The motor car industry is unique in that every; manufacturer who expects to stay .in the: business must be constantly experimenting and improving his product. And therein lies one of the outstanding reasons why the automobile industry has gone forward by leaps and bounds. Helps from Other Industries. The relationship of industrial research to the automobile is a very intimate one, for it is only as a result of an immense amount of research and experimentation that we have the automobile at all. The motor car is said to have been made possible by three things: rubber, alloy steels, and petroleum. That is the truth, perhaps; but it is not the whole truth, for the scientific and practical developments that have made the up-to-date automobile possible came from a great many sources. Electric lights, for instance, are certainly very essential to the utility of the motor car, even though they do glare at us too much sometimes. But without the single development of ductile tungsten, it would not have been possible for us to put electric lights on automobiles. We all take electric lights on cars and everywhere eke as a matter of course. So some of us may have forgotten that the long research . which resulted finally in the discovery of how to make ductile tungsten wire, was one of the great classics of scientific as well as of practical research. And probably none of us has computed, nor can compute, how much we owe to that one development.

Many of the essential contributions to the motor car have come out of research and development in other industries apparently remote from it, such as in ceramics, storage batteries, abrasives, synthetic resins, celluloid, glue, pulp products, leather and coated textiles, electro-chemistry, and even such an apparently unrelated thing as the setting of diamonds. The automobile draws upon almost every industry in the country, and upon some of them in a large way. Immense amounts of glass, leather, rubber, lumber, steel, aluminium, copper, tin, lead, zinc, nickel, chromium, cotton, wool, glue, paint, varnish, and goodness knows what are used in making motor cars. The motor car, being the ultimate consumer of, many types of manufactured goods, naturally benefits from the research done in: the industries that supply-it. ■

If it had not been for just one of the developments in alloy steels, namely, high-speed cutting tools, it would scarcely be possible to make automobiles or- at least it would not be possible to make them as cheaply and as accurately as is done to-day.

With the aid of these tools, the more than 10,000 parts that every automobile consists of can be shaped with the greatest rapidity, and at the same time with the utmost precision. So hardy are these teeth of steel that they tear away on one piece of metal after another at such a terrific rate that they get very hot at the task. But that does not make them one whit the less effective. Thefinished pieces they turn out so speedily are always "interchangeable." They are every one exactly alike; and, with the exception of just a few pieces, the man who assembles them into the final product need make no selection whatever. Generally he can use one of the pieces just as well as another. And even in the case of those few parts where, in order to get a perfect fit, a selection is sometimes made, the choice lies between parts that differ in size by the fraction of a hair's breadth only.

Anyone who has ever had to "run in on the rim" has a pretty good idea of how large has been the contribution of rubber to the automobile. The slow and bumpy progress that he has to make then was just a little taste,, of what the automobile would be like without tlio pneumatic tyre or of what it would bo .like if he had to run all the time on four unyielding rims. By making it possible to glide smoothly alorig on a cushion of air, the rubber tyre has done more to make the motor car a satisfactory and useful vehicle than people usually give it credit for. But the rubber tyre is altogether a product of research, of research which has been long and persistently pursued, and which is still being carried on intensively.

Constant Work. In the engineering features of automobiles there has been, of course, an immense amount of persistent experimentation from the very outset. In the matter of engines, for example, constant experiments have been made on the best ways to construct them, on how to lubricate them and to cool them, on improving the balance of the engines and the smoothness with which they run, on valves and means of opening and closing them, on shapes of combustion chambers, on means of getting ignition and of controlling it, on carburetion and atomization of the fuel, and on means of equalising the distribution of charge to the various cylinders. Much experimentation has also been carried out on such features as transmissions, differentials, axles, brakes, steering gears, and closed bodies. As a result of this constant research and experimentation, the gradual evolution of the automobile has all been toward more useful, move beautiful, and more economical cars, as well as cheaper ones. And so the motor car is quite definitely a product of research. It -represents a. result of the application of scientific and practical discoveries to everyday life. The huge automobile industry has arisen largely through commercial research having acted as a translator of scientific ideas to a travelling public.