FOUR-CYLINDER ROADSTER, 1911

THE automobile first appeared on the American scene in the nineties, as an importation from Europe, and it was not regarded as having practical, workaday uses. Like yachts and tally-hos, it was an elaborate plaything for the rich. Its owners were referred to in the press as 'automobilists,' as one might say 'yachtsmen' or 'polo-players.'

Nevertheless, it excited the curiosity of American mechanics, who began to construct imitations and adaptations of the European models. By 1900 there were eight thousand automobiles in the United States, and manufacturers had become interested in the possibility of producing cars in quantity.

Unfortunately for their purposes, the automobile of those days did not lend itself to mass-production. Early American makers tried to surmount this difficulty by imitating such features of European cars as could be made in quantity; but most of the best features could not be mass-produced. And there were other difficulties. Few manufacturers foresaw that the gasoline engine would become standard for automobiles. The overwhelming majority of cars at the New York Automobile Show of 1900 were electrics and steamers.

Electric cars were slow, and the law required that to operate a steamer a man must procure a steam-engineer's license.

These difficulties might have been overcome fairly soon if it had not been for another: unlike Europe, America had no good roads. Even as late as 1908 it took Augustine Cunningham four days of hard driving to travel from Rochester to New York City, a distance of 370 miles. It was not until well after the first World War that the United States had a sufficiently developed road-net, and enough garages and service stations, to make cross-country travel feasible for in expensive, mass-produced cars.

Most of the early manufacturers suffered the usual fate of pioneers: of the thousand companies that had started up around 1900, only fifteen survived as late as 1925.

STOCK 1919 ROADSTER

TOURING CAR WITH VICTORIA TOP, 1920

Cunningham, although it was not interested in mass-production, was interested in making automobiles. In 1896 it had entered into negotiations with the Duryea brothers to manufacture their cars. These proved inconclusive, but at the turn of the century the firm actually produced some electric-powered buggies, mainly for purposes of experimentation.

In 1908 the firm embarked on automobile production, not for the popular market, but for customers of the sort that bought its carriages. The Cunningham car would be as good as the best European car, and it would be a development of the Cunningham tradition of fine coach-making. Necessarily it would be expensive: the cars made in 1908 and 1909 sold for $3,500.

At first the company made only automobile bodies and assembled the rest of the car from engines, transmissions, axles, and radiators made by proprietary companies, but by 1910 it was producing all of these itself. Prices rose to $4,500 and $5,000.

In 1916 Cunningham produced a V-8 engine, and the Cunningham car became outstanding for its clean, classic lines. It was the first car to do away with running-boards, using instead steps of brass-framed aluminum. As in the carriage-making days, most of the metal- and wood-work was done by hand.

Owners did not entrust repairs to local garages. The company dispatched its own mechanics from Rochester.

After 1916 the car was improved as new mechanical development warranted, but not radically altered. There were no annual models; it did not go out of fashion. It remained a luxury car, for use in town and for travel across country as well, being built to withstand the roads of the times and to negotiate the long distances between service stations. Part of its equipment for that purpose was a built-in air pump, with a tire hose which unreeled from beneath the seat.

By the end of the first World War, America began, belatedly, to construct the roads it needed. In 1919, New York State raised the speed limit for travel in open country from twenty to thirty miles an hour. Service stations appeared at strategic corners. Highways began to be marked; the practice of numbering them would not come in for several years.

DEPALMA SPEEDSTER, 1922

TOWN CAR, 1918

The automobile age began in earnest. In 1919 there were about seven million cars in the United States. In 1929 there were twenty-three million; thirty years later, seventy-four million. But in 1919, and for a long time to come, the proliferation of mass-produced cars did not appear to threaten Cunningham's market.

That year the famous racing driver, Ralph De Palma, made a record-breaking run in a Cunningham stock car at speeds over ninety-eight miles an hour. This stimulated sales of a roadster, at $6,200. The average price for a town car was $8,000; but cars made to order might cost as much as $15,000. It was in one of the latter that Cunningham installed the first automobile radio.

A new class of buyers appeared in the early twenties: Hollywood stars and directors, Latin-American millionaires and politicians, Japanese industrialists, even Chinese war lords. Cunningham satisfied their sometime capricious demands without vulgarizing its product; the firm's more conservative customers remained loyal to it.

Already the company had felt justified in increasing its capitalization from two million dollars to more than three million; but there was no attempt to compete with Detroit. Employing about 450 workers, Cunningham produced cars at an average annual rate of one and a half per worker, sufficient indication of its lack of interest in mass-production.

Detroit was in another world, a rather bleak world of assembly lines, speed-ups, and labor disputes. Thirty years later few of its customers would have any clear recollection of the cars they had bought in the twenties; none of its workers would remember it with anything resembling affection. By contrast, no one who owned a Cunningham car ever forgot it, and retired Cunningham workmen in the sixties still speak of the old plant with a certain fondness. If Cunningham could not afford to pay wages as high as some in Detroit, nevertheless, 'it was a hell of a nice place to work.' 'The management knew you by name.' 'You felt at home there.' Like the men who had worked for James Cunningham almost a hundred years earlier, they grumbled a bit at exacting specifications, but 'you knew you were making the best car there was.'

ROADSTER, 1929

TOURING CAR, 1930

In 1927, Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris aroused new interest in aviation. In that optimistic year it seemed possible that the private plane would one day replace the automobile as a means of cross-country transportation; at any rate, the aircraft industry, which had been making slow progress after the first World War, felt the stimulus, and there was now a rush to make airplanes, as there had been a rush to make automobiles in the late nineties.

Cunningham foresaw correctly that the buyers of private planes would come from the same class of people that bought its cars and launched a subsidiary, the Cunningham-Hall Aircraft Corporation. This was not an attempt to produce quickly for an already existing market but rather one to prepare for the future. Sensible men were aware that there were tremendous obstacles in the way of developing private aircraft and that it would take time to overcome them. Experience would count.

The primary aim of the corporation was to build an airplane that would combine stability with speed. The first Cunningham-Hall plane, designed with these requirements in mind, was a modified biplane: the lower wing was considerably larger than the upper, and slotted, so that a current of air could be made to flow between its surfaces. This enabled the plane to land at speeds as slow as thirty-nine miles an hour. Its top speed was 110 miles an hour. It was first tested in the small town of LeRoy, New York; Rochester in 1929 still lacked a proper airfield.

Cunningham-Hall continued to make aircraft until 1938. Its X-14324, produced in 1934, was a low-wing monoplane, all metal, that cruised at 145 miles an hour, with a top speed of 165, somewhat faster than most private planes in use today. The company produced as well primary trainers, a six-place cabin plane, other passenger and cargo craft, and experimental planes for the Army and Navy.

But these were depression years, and the difficulties of continuing were insuperable. The plant was not suited for making air-frames, and the market for private aircraft had almost disappeared. However, the experiment had not been entirely fruitless. Cunningham gained experience in using high-precision equipment and dealing with the close tolerances that manufacturing aircraft demands; and this would stand it in good stead two decades later.

In 1928, when Cunningham, still a successful producer of automobiles, first ventured into plane production, very few expected the stock-market crash of 1929 and the general economic crisis that followed it. Probably no one accurately foresaw the social changes that would come about in the course of the Great Depression; and yet for Cunningham the first signs of change were beginning to be manifest.

Detroit was learning to make good cars, and with its strategy of turning out new models annually it was providing fashion as a substitute for style. Prestige now came from owning the newest car. Trading-in had become commonplace. Cunningham was aware of the challenge to its kind of excellence and made efforts to catch up with Detroit, but in the nature of things it could not hope to succeed. The point is that what Cunningham represented: luxury, elegance, high style, was becoming outmoded, and the firm was not equipped materially or temperamentally to adjust to the new trend. A cheap, mass-produced Cunningham was unthinkable.

SEMI-TOURING CAR

SEDAN, 1925
Built for Air Force Major M. K. Lee on a 142 inch wheelbase chassis. This car had shatter-broof glass, a 50-gallon gas tank, an oil supply good for 5,000 miles, a Kellogg one-shot lubricator (pressing the foot pedal lubricated all chassis points) and triple windshield wipers. The dashboard contained a combination of 42 instruments, switches, and miscellaneous gadgets including many normally found only in aircraft cockpits. Among them were a tachometer, radio switch, fuel gauge, altimeter, voltmeter, ammeter, oil gauge, light switch, ignition switch, an imported French speedometer engraved with Major Lee's name, two motometers, aviator's compass, air speed indicator, etc. There were 8 lights beamed forward, 2 headlights, 2 "ditch" lights, 2 inside adjustable spotlights, and 2 sidelights. There were also parking, dome, dash and running board lights.

It is not that Cunningham's potential customers were wiped out by the depression. There was still a fairly large class of people in the United States who could afford to buy expensive cars. What happened during the depression was that the habits and tastes of these people were modified: yachts, big country places, ostentatious living, became unfashionable. In the twenties, a Wall Street man who was unusually tall had ordered a custom-built limousine from Cunningham: the roof had to be raised six inches so that he could wear a top hat in dignified comfort. His counterpart in the thirties solved the problem by discarding the top hat. He preferred to appear as indistinguishable as possible from people of middling incomes. One unreconciled woman on the North Shore of Long Island is said to have remarked, 'If this thing keeps up, we'll all be in the Buick class.' She was prophetic, though not in the sense she intended. The depression intensified a trend that was already operating, and is was that this trend, as much as the depression itself, that brought Cunningham's years of automobile-making to an end.

By 1931 the company had ceased to produce cars. For five more years it made bodies for other manufacturers; in particular, a town car body for Ford, which added $2,000 to Ford's current price of $600; and then in 1936 it was entirely out of the automobile business.