Automobile Industry

Thesis Statement

Automobile has consistently growing after World War I and dropping abruptly during the Great Depression.

Introduction

The automotive industry includes the manufacture of automobiles, parts, and accessories. 20th-century Cleveland is part of a nearly worldwide automotive culture dependent on this industry. The city has played a major role in the rapid and revolutionary rise of the automotive industry since the 1890s, largely in the Midwest. In fact, only Detroit has a better claim to being the heart of the automobile revolution. The automobile was developed in Germany and France in the 1880s and 1890s, with Americans making only minor contributions to the technology. However, when Americans read newspaper accounts of the Paris-Bordeaux automobile race of 1895, in which 9 of 22 vehicles finished a 727-mi. course, they recognized that the automobile had come of age, and American inventors and manufacturers scrambled to enter the market.

History

On the eve of World War II, the automotive industry in Cleveland was a major American center of parts and accessory manufacturing. During the war, Cleveland's automotive industry shifted to military production, although Euclid Rd. Machinery expanded its production of trucks for both civilian and military purposes. Thompson Products became Cleveland's largest industrial employer, making both vehicle and aircraft parts. Many automotive workers found their skills much in demand by wartime plants, such as the Fisher Aircraft Assembly Plant, built near Cleveland's airport to assemble B-29s and P-75s. Immediately following the war, American automakers returned to automotive manufacturing to satisfy pent-up consumer demand, and the Cleveland automotive industry shared in the prosperity. The manufacturing census of 1947 listed 36 motor vehicle and parts companies in the Cleveland district, employing 22,452, more than 10% of the total industrial workforce (Zeitlin, pp 34-288).

Over the next 10 years, the 3 dominant American automakers made major investments in the Cleveland area. In 1949 the Chevrolet Division of GM opened the largest of its new U.S. plants in Parma, devoted largely to automatic transmissions. The FORD MOTOR CO. built 2 engine plants (opened in 1951 and 1955) and a foundry at BROOK PARK. By 1953 Brook Park was making most of Ford's 6-cyl. engines and all of the popular V-8 Mercury engines. In 1978, when Brook Park produced its 30-millionth engine, about 16,000 worked there. Ford also built a stamping plant in WALTON HILLS in 1954. Chrysler intended to enter the Cleveland area with the construction of a steel-stamping plant at Brooklyn, but eventually located it at Twinsburg (Zajac and. Olsen, pp 131-145). After the steam engine was developed in the 17th century, various attempts were made to apply this source of power to self-propelled road vehicles.

Early efforts were unsuccessful, except for those that produced interesting toys such as the machine developed about 1680 by the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton, which was propelled by the back pressure of a jet of steam directed to the rear. The first successful self-propelled road vehicle was a steam automobile invented in 1770 by the French engineer Nicolas Joseph Cugnot ...