Booklist has chosen The Detroit Electric Scheme as one of The Top Ten First Crime novels of the year! (See the full list here: http://www.booklistonline.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pid=4772921) This has been a VERY GOOD WEEK! Add Comment Big News for me - St. Martin's has offered me another two-book contract! Will Anderson will have to survive his adventures for at least a few more years. Books three and four will involve mental health in the early teens (think Will being committed to an asylum to try to find a killer) and women's suffrage, respectively. There were a lot of nasty things going on in asylums at this time, so I've got a lot of fodder for Will's trials and tribulations in that book. For the other, I've got politics and death threats to work with. The Michigan ballot for the 1912 presidential election contained a constitutional amendment to legalize the vote for women. The campaign was filled with dirty tricks and behind the scenes machinations, and ended with a recount, "lost" ballots, and a stolen election. Both nice backdrops for mysteries, I think! Motor City Shakedown is launching this September, book three will be published in fall 2012 and book four in fall 2013. Okay, time to write some books! “Detroit—Where Life’s Worth Living” (Part 2) The People of Detroit In 1915, the Detroit Convention and Tourists' Bureau put out a lovely brochure touting the many highlights of the city. At the time, Detroit was the seventh-largest city in the country. The population was estimated at 645,000, up from 465,000 in 1910. (A 39% increase in 5 years!) As a point of comparison, the 2010 census puts Detroit at 713,000 today--a 25% decrease from 2000 and the lowest number of any official census since 1910. In 1915 Detroit:
The southern migration had begun with Ford’s “Five-dollar day” in 1914. (Up to this point, most unskilled laborers made a little over a dollar a day.) The five-dollar day sparked the growth of the middle-class, creating for the first time a large group of people who could afford to buy cars and eventually move out of the city centers where they worked. In that way, Ford first was responsible for a large part of Detroit’s growth and then for the decline of the city as those who could afford to leave did. "Detroit--Where Life is Worth Living" I've been perusing the Detroit Convention and Tourists' Bureau's 1915 brochure. They used the above slogan for the city, which was taken from this poem: IN DETROIT by Edgar A. Guest, Poet Laureate of Detroit In Detroit, life's worth living. Every day; In Detroit, we are giving, Joys away, In Detroit, it is true, That our skies are always blue, There's a smile for me and you, Blithe and gay. In Detroit, life is cheerful, All the while, For our people soothe the tearful, With a smile, We've a helping hand to lend, To a stranger, foe or friend, And our resting time we spend, On Belle Isle. In Detroit, we have pleasures By the score; And the rarest of our treasures, Yes, and more, Is our river, Oh! so bright, Cool and restful, day and night, Source of infinite delight, O'er and o'er. In Detroit, life's worth living, Every day; Folks are gentle and forgiving, If you stray, In Detroit may I be, When God's angel beckons me, O'er the silent unknown sea, Far away. I've spent a lot of the last three years trying to imagine Detroit as it was in 1910-1913. Walking the streets, studying photos, reading about the culture, entertainment, everyday life, and commerce, I thought I could just about see it. Now I wonder. I can see the buildings and parks, the river steamers and mansions, but I don't think I can feel what the city was like back then. I don't know that any city in the twenty-first century could have the power and vibrancy of Detroit a hundred years ago. Now, I don't think people have changed much, and the have-nots always outnumbered the haves by a gigantic margin, but I think even they had a hope that is not evident in the city today, except in a few individuals who believe Detroit can rise again. My hat is off to those folks (who include my daughter Nicole). In future posts I'll share some of the interesting info in the 1915 brochure, which is what I had intended to do with this post until I read "In Detroit." Will anyone--ever again--look at Detroit as Eddie Guest did once upon a time? Killed in the press  The Detroit Electric Machining Room circa 1910 I had no idea how often something like the scene at the beginning of The Detroit Electric Scheme happened in real life. (Not the murder part, just the press "accident" part). Two men at one talk this winter told me about their experiences, one at a Chrysler plant, the other at a Buick plant. One of the men had to clean out the press after a repairman had been working on the press from the inside and it stamped him. He was completely pulverized. Nothing left but liquids. The other knew a machine operator who had been leaning inside the press and put his hands up on the side of it to lever himself out. His head was still inside when one of his hands hit the switch. Last night at the Cromaine Public Library, one of the men in attendance said he used to work at Fisher Body, and he told me about the evolution of these press accidents and the attempted solutions by management. He had to clean up after one man was crushed in a press and paid close attention to it from then on. Initially there was one man at the control (single switch) while four other men would put the metal in the press, align it, and remove it when it had been stamped. When the man at the switch got distracted or hit the button accidentally , any of the four could lose a hand, arm, or head, depending on what they had in the machine at the time. They went to a two switch system, so the button couldn't be pushed accidentally, but they still had the problem with the distracted operator. Also, machine operators for whom pushing two buttons was too much effort would push in one button and wedge it in place with a toothpick, so he'd just have to push one button to start the press. Additionally, men were losing legs because they would put their leg up to stretch at just the wrong time. Next came all four men having to stand on certain spots or all hold onto a bar outside the press in order for it to work. In the meantime, hundreds (thousands?) of men were maimed or killed by these machines. Think of the outcry today if something like that was happening (in this country. I'm sure there are similar problems in sweatshops around the world, but we don't hear about those.) Life was cheap in the U.S. in those days, particularly when the men were easily replaceable and there wouldn't be publicity problems for the company. It was just the cost of doing business. Of course, the families of those men wouldn't feel the same way. Coming September 13th!  Book 2 in the Will Anderson series features Will and Elizabeth facing off with some of Detroit's early mobsters - the gangs of Vito Adamo and Tony Gianolla. My favorite character in the book is Izzy Bernstein, the youngest of the brothers who eventually ran the Purple Gang. In the book he's a newsboy who I can see in this character at the left. (And I appreciate that he's holding up an ad for my book!) My Izzy is a foul-mouthed little tough guy trying to keep up with his older - and tougher - brothers. I have no doubt it was a difficult task. The gang is thought to have been responsible for as many as 500 murders. (That's probably hyperbole, but they were definitely bad dudes.) Izzy, however, was the least criminally-inclined of the Bernsteins and spent much of his life in the "legit" world. I'm very excited to announce that Alex Glass of Trident Media Group has agreed to represent me for my future projects. Alex is one of the finest literary agents in the world, and it is such an honor for me to be able to work with him. This just keeps getting better and better! I had a new and wonderful experience this week. Becky Cooper of Western Michigan University's Academically Talented Youth Program (ATYP), which offers advanced programs for high achievement middle and high school students, had me in this week to talk to the classes about writing, research, and best of all, conspiracy theories! We had great conversations about a lot of stuff, including electric cars - the conspiracy theories and what really happened back in the day. My favorite theory about early electrics is that Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller conspired to kill the electric car in order to buy oil from Saudi Arabia so they could finance Islam with petrodollars. I'm not clear on exactly when this was supposed to have happened, and oil was discovered in what is now Iran in mid-1908, but Henry Ford a Muslim? Really? (Anyway, everyone knows Rockefeller was an alien, and I've never heard of a Muslim alien.) The class let me judge their tinfoil hat contest (necessary to keep the government from intercepting our thoughts - I've got to get me one of those). But the best part of the day was after class, when one of the girls came up to me and said, "I really liked what you said about doing something that makes you happy, not just makes you money. You might have just changed my life." Gives me goosebumps even now. Thanks, Becky. I hope the kids got as much out of it as I did! Batteries & Cost In 1911 you could order a Detroit Electric with Thomas Edison's new nickel-steel batteries. Edison had been promising his new batteries for a decade and unsuccessfully tried to manufacture them numerous times before, but by 1910 he finally had them ready to go. For electric car manufacturers, this was the moment they'd been waiting for. The average mileage on a charge would go from 50 to 100! With the roads being what they were at the time, 100 miles would take you just about anywhere you wanted to go. In fact, Detroit Electric ran a mileage test in the fall of 1910 with Edison batteries and set a mileage record of 211.3 miles on a single charge. (Chronicled in The Detroit Electric Scheme.) And then Baker Electric one-upped them in December with over 243 miles! A 1911 Detroit Electric cost between $2,000 and $3,500, depending on the model. The Edison battery added $600 to the cost. Ouch. As a contrast, a Model T roadster cost $600 for the whole car! Of course, it was nothing - at all - like a Detroit Electric. Still, the average cost of a new car in 1911 was $1,130. Unfortunately, batteries, whether nickel-steel or lead-acid, didn't get significantly cheaper. Gasoline automobile prices kept diving, driven by intense competition and improvements in manufacturing efficiency. The electric car companies never gained that advantage, and their prices stayed very static. The price gap kept growing, and the self-starter for the gas cars eliminated the greatest advantage the electrics held--easy starting. By the time "The Great War" began, electrics were on the ropes. By 1920 they were all but gone. (Although, believe it or not, Detroit Electric was in business into the 1940's!) Who Killed the Electric Car (Part 2) The "Self-Starter" In the early years, electrics had a very significant advantage over gasoline and stem-powered cars - they were easy to start. All you had to do was flip a switch, and, assuming the batteries were charged, the car was ready to go. With a steam car, you had to stoke up the boiler and wait for the better part of an hour before you could get going. Not exactly convenient. Add to that the possibility of the boiler exploding if you weren't an expert, and it was pretty clear that this method of combustion was not going to be long-lived in automobiles. Gasoline cars were easier and more convenient to start than that, but you still had to get your spark and throttle controls set just right and then crank the engine started. For all but the most adventurous women of the day, it was unthinkable to engage in such unladylike behavior. For men, it was all part of the adventure of the automobile, but it was still a pain - sometimes literally. People were injured, maimed, and even killed by the crank spinning back on them. In fact, this is what inspired the invention of the first reliable self-starter for a gasoline automobile. Byron Carter, the founder of the Carter-Car Company, stopped to help a woman whose car had stalled. He didn't check the spark before he tried to start it. The engine backfired, and the crank spun back, breaking his arm and smashing his face and jaw. He died of gangrene a few weeks later. His friend, Henry Leland, at the time the owner of Cadillac, vowed to develop a self-starter for a gasoline automobile that really worked. Self-starters had been around for a while - they just didn't work well or often. So Leland brought in Charles Kettering, the inventor of the electric cash register and an electricity generator known as the "Delco" (a sign of things to come for Kettering). Kettering introduced his self-starter in early 1911, It was first used in the 1912 Cadillacs to great reviews, and went on to sweep the industry. The advantage in easy starting that the electric had over the "infernal combustion" vehicle was gone, and with it a significant percentage of the electric business. | AuthorI am a novelist, self-described history buff, father of three, and husband of one. ArchivesApril 2012 CategoriesAll |
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