The Two Towers: Main

Eighty-five percent of the horse-drawn vehicle industry of the country is untouched by the automobile. The man who predicts the downfall of the automobile is a fool. the man who denies its great necessity and general adoption for many uses is a bigger fool; and the man who predicts the general annihilation of the horse and his vehicle is the greatest fool of all.
      --Address, National Association of Carriage Builders, 1910

George H. Haynes

Quite a number of the grads [of Tech] are the owners of machine and electrical shops in this city, and the same is true of some who were professors on Boynton Hill.
      --Donald Tulloch, 1914

Professor Gallup and his students also made an automobile which he claimed was the fastest in the world under a thousand pounds. It could travel eighty miles an hour.

The automobile was just beginning to catch the fancy of the general public. Only a few cars were seen in Worcester in addition to Charles Crompton's, which was of his own design and had reportedly cost fifty thousand dollars. John Higgins had a Stanley Steamer, George Rockwood a Mobile, Frank Knowles a Winton. In 1905 a new phrase appeared in Worcester's medical records when George N. Jeppson was X-rayed for a "chauffeur's fracture." Charlie Allen eliminated this risk by inventing his own starting system. It was simple, he said--just throw some gas underneath the car and light a match.

Among the Worcester Tech alumni who notably contributed to the development of the automobile was Elwood Haynes; his first gasoline horseless carriage eventually found its way into the Smithsonian Institution. When in 1914 he visited Tech and his cousin-- Professor George Haynes--he was given a hero's welcome. Although he was still president of the Haynes Automobile Company in Indiana, he had shifted his attention to "stellite," a metal alloy, harder than any other metal, and one which "would hold its cutting edge while red hot." He had been working on this "stainless" steel since his schooldays at Tech, when a razor he had made annoyed him by frequent rusting and tarnishing.

The first truck in Worcester is said to have originated in the Washburn Shops. It was used primarily for carrying supplies back and forth to the hydraulic laboratory in Holden. Roads were unreliable; so was the truck. Each time the boys succeeded in making the trip to Holden and back without mishap, they put a cross on the dashboard, which, it must be said, never became overcrowded. Ralph Morgan, a Tech student, also did much of his testing in the Washburn Shops for his three-ton power truck driven by steam. From experiments on this truck he went on to Pope-Toledo as chief engineer to design and supervise the making of the first motor vehicle with four-cylinder gas engine power.

Windsor T. White, another Tech man, had developed the White Steamer in Cleveland. Henry J. Fuller (President Fuller's son) had become president of the Rolls Royce Company of America and A. Atwater Kent had become a manufacturer of automotive supplies.

So many Tech graduates were now managers and owners of the businesses in which they had started out as engineers that special emphasis was given to a course in Shop Management. This course was especially popular because of its synchronization with the theories and methods of Frederick W. Taylor, who has become known as the pioneer of Scientific Management.

Continuing in the spirit of the lecture courses instituted as early as 1888, Worcester Tech kept its community well informed of the technological changes in the world. There were public lectures on water, evolution, high building construction, even "On the Brain"