inch, were to fit together with automatic precision. And Ford announced that he would produce 10,000 cars in a single year.
The manufacturing world was stunned by the announcement. Then it laughed. Very few people believed that Ford would go far with such a radical departure from all accepted practice. But the new building was finished, Ford installed his machinery according to his plans, and when the wheels began to turn the world learned a new lesson in efficiency.
Still Ford's success in the automobile field was not easily won. As a poor, hard-working mechanic, he had fought weariness and poverty and ridicule, to build his motor car; as an unknown inventor, still poor, he had struggled for a foothold in the business world and got it; now he was in for a long, expensive legal battle before he should be able to feel secure in his success.
The Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, a combination of seventy-three of the biggest motor car companies, brought suit against the Ford company to recover tremendous sums of money because of Ford's alleged violation of the Seldon patent.
Seldon held a basic patent covering the use of the gasoline engine as motive power in self-propelled vehicles. When automobiles began to be put on the market, he claimed his right under that patent to a royalty on all such vehicles. Other automobile manufacturers almost without ex-
