The Man Who Held the Auto Industry Hostage—Or Did He?

George Selden’s 1895 patent.

(National Archives)

A machine as complicated as the automobile must, necessarily, have many inventors. But in the 1890s the law said there was only one. He was George B. Selden, a patent attorney from Rochester, New York, who received the very first patent in the world for an automobile 110 years ago today. It was a patent on the whole idea. Yet he never even built a car, at least not to his patent’s specifications. Rather he used his patent to try to hold up the entire new industry for more than a decade—or so the history books misleadingly say.

Selden had dreamed of building a car since he was 14, when he overheard his father declare the idea impossible. The elder Selden, a judge, disdained “mechanical enterprise” and steered his son into the law. Selden chose to be a patent attorney as a compromise. With what money he saved he tinkered in his spare time, making use of knowledge gleaned in libraries up and down the East Coast and, in the absence of true genius, at least a modicum of inventive talent. He knew that a self-propelled vehicle would need a relatively light engine, and that steam power, which required a steady supply of coal and water, was too inconvenient. He experimented for years with different fuels, but his moment of revelation came at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, in 1876. There he caught a glimpse of the Brayton internal-combustion engine, one of the first to use liquid hydrocarbon fuel.

He immediately set about adapting the Brayton engine to his needs. After two years he had cut 790 pounds from the prototype and increased its horsepower from 1.4 to 2. His engine never ran for more than five minutes at a time or exceeded 50 rpm, but rather than wait to perfect it, he applied for a patent, on May 8, 1879.

Had his patent been granted immediately, it would have expired in 1896, before it could have had any commercial value in the nascent industry. His invention would have been at best a footnote in history. However, he took advantage of a law that allowed repeated two-year extensions for amendments before a patent was issued. By continually amending his application at the last minute, he dragged the process out for 16 years. He kept abreast of developments in engines and automobiles during that time and broadened his claims in response, with each amendment making his patent less specific. The final document bore little resemblance to the original, and it included statements like “By attaching the cylinders, which may be of any convenient number …” and “Any form of liquid-hydrocarbon engine of the compression type may be employed in my improved road-locomotive.” In the end he made a hundred changes—largely to include under his umbrella the new compression engines constructed by Nicholas Otto and Charles and J. Frank Duryea—and replaced each of his 19 original claims.

Here historians diverge on Selden’s motives. Was he stalling in anticipation of the day his patent would have earning power, or was he waiting in vain to find backing to produce his own vehicle? He juggled his experiments with a growing law practice, and his day job took too much time and paid too little to allow him the freedom he’d have needed to rank in history alongside Ransom Olds or Duryea. “Can’t carry on about a dozen patent law-suits and do much experimenting at the same time,” he wrote. “If ever I get a road wagon it will be by accident. Of the almighty effort which an invention requires, who knows but the inventor?”

There is evidence that he sincerely sought funding, and at one point he nearly secured $5,000 from a Rochester investor before scaring him off with predictions that the car would someday replace the horse. He was used to ridicule about his vision—he had grown up with constant disparagement from his father—but the fact that everyone called him crazy convinced him he was the first to conceive of a gas-burning car and deserved recognition.

In 1895—whether spurred by the first stirrings of the automotive industry, the 500 other automotive patents pending, or a new law that required holders of interminably pending patents to explain themselves or face rejection—he finally stopped stalling. And on November 5 he was granted patent 549,160, for an “Improved Road-Engine.” No single feature in his patent was new; what he claimed as original was the combination of a liquid-hydrocarbon-burning engine with the rest of the features that constituted a car. But in the 16 years since his application, American inventors advanced the state of the art enough that his hypothetical machine was obsolete as soon as it was patented. It had no gearshift, the steering mechanism resembled a horse carriage’s more than one in a car built in the last decade, and as for going in reverse, the driver had to turn “the driving wheel … completely around underneath the driver’s seat whenever it becomes necessary to propel the carriage backward.” But the specifics of his design were no longer important. Legally he owned a patent covering every petroleum-burning car.

So did he now start bringing lucrative lawsuits? No. He didn’t have the money to enforce his claims. But one day short of four years after his patent was granted, he sold it to a syndicate of Wall Street financiers promoting a project to sell electric cabs. The Electric Vehicle Company said it bought the patent as a hedge against the possibility that gasoline engines would become standard, yet it lost no time in bringing its first suit. However, neither plaintiff nor defendant had enough capital for a prolonged court battle. Then in 1903, EVC and several other manufacturers formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers to administer the patent.

Any company wishing to buy a license to make gasoline-burning cars paid a fee of 1.25 percent of the list price of each car made, two fifths of which went to EVC, one fifth to Selden, and two fifths to the ALAM, for the “benefit of the industry.” The ALAM’s professed aim was to regulate the new industry and protect the consumer from, as Motor Age put it, “piratical hordes” that would “flood the market with trashy machines, made only to sell and not intended to go.” To earn a license, manufacturers had to prove prior experience in the business, which caught them in a Catch-22: Prior experience meant having infringed on Selden’s patent. For all intents and purposes, the ALAM’s rules barred new firms from entering the industry, with the intention of creating a cozy monopoly for its members.

This is where a 40-year-old Dearborn, Michigan, resident named Henry Ford comes into the story. The ALAM rejected his request for a license in 1903, and Ford, who despised the idea of patents and chafed at the notion that his cars were someone else’s intellectual property, decided to fight the patent in court.

The resulting battle lasted eight years. Of course, there can be little suspense about the outcome. Rochester is not the Motor City, and no one has driven a Selden lately. A district court ruled against Ford in 1909, but in 1911, the year before the patent expired, the Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Selden’s patent applied only to cars with two-cycle engines and was thus not being infringed. Ford—and later historians—depicted Ford as David challenging Goliath, when almost the opposite was true. The ALAM was never an effective monopoly. The member firms competed against one another, and of the 218 American car manufacturers in 1907, only 32 bothered to secure a license. Ford took a gamble, but an educated one. By 1911 his company was the largest American automobile manufacturer. Had he lost, he could have easily afforded the penalty.

As for Selden himself, he benefited little from his patent, financially or historically. His total earnings from it hovered around $200,000. He finally found enough money to produce his own cars in 1905, but the ALAM refused him a license to his own patent, because he didn’t have any prior experience. He bought a plant that had a license the next year and finally realized his dream. But he ultimately had no influence over automobile design, although he did unwittingly affect the automotive industry. The prolonged Ford suit convinced the industry that patent litigation did no one any good, and in 1915 the manufacturers set up a system of cross-licensing for most patents. There hasn’t been another patent suit among car makers to this day.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.