The Test Of Time

Northern Advocate, 30 July 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Test Of Time

It is a real education to visit the Ford Museum at Greenfield Village, Detroit, where can be studied dozens of the early forerunners of cur present-day motor cars. Not only are the first Fords on display, but one may look over practically every pioneer make of jallopy that chugged along the dirt roads of America and Europe when our great industry was in napkins. Crude single-cylinder engines were mostly under the seat fitted with chain drives, or at the back mounted on the axle of these buggy-like contraptions. They were rightfully named “horseless carriages.” Steering sticks bent up from the whip-well on the very early ones, then the first approach to our present cars came when the straight up steering post with a little wheel on top was introduced. It is a long, long way from these relics of the days when the automobile was born, to the sleek, powerful cars of present manufacture that glide smoothly and swiftly over our super highways. We do not realise as we drive the luxurious cars of today, the countless hours those pioneer engineers spent in creating what has grown to be one of the most useful and indispensable commodities of our business and economical life. It is to those inventors and the engineers who have in the intervening years perfected the horseless carriage, that we owe a very sincere vote of gratitude for their ingenuity and the important part they played in developing one of the world’s major industries from which millions derive their livelihood. It is interesting to note most of these old cars fn the Ford Museum have Champion plugs of very early vintage. The great majority of the cars on display have names that long ago have been forgotten, yet Champion spark plugs have marched down through the years with the leaders of the industry. They are the preferred plug of today as they were over a quarter of a century ago.