Why Detroit? A Study of the Early History of the Automobile and the Automobile Industry in Detroit, 1896-1903

Abstract

A substantial portion of this work is devoted to an attempt to dete~ine just why Detroit became the automobile manufacturing center of the world, for the "why underlying the how" is too an essential part of the tale. As will be shown, the city was emerging as the nation's leading producer of gasoline-powered vehicles by 1903. Several explanations of this phenomenon have been offered, none are satisfactory, for each emphasizes only one or two factors or conditions of the many that existed in the period 1896-1903. In attempting to answer the question why Detroit, this work combines a number of the known conditions with the popular (and not-so-popular) explanations in a comparative study.