While the development of the automobile business is in itself a wonder story, no less amazing is its effect on all the allied industries.  On rubber alone it has wrought a revolution.

Ten years ago practically all the rubber that we imported went into boots, shoes, hose, belting, and kindred products, The introduction of rubber tires on horse-drawn vehicles only drew slightly on the supply.  To-day more than eighty per cent. of the crude article that reaches our shores goes into automobile tires; and the biggest problem in the whole automobile situation is not a question of steel and output, but a fear that we may not be able to get enough rubber to shoe the expanding host of cars.  You have only to look at the change in price to get a hint of the growth of this feature of the business.  In 1900 crude rubber sold at sixty-five cents a pound; now it brings about two dollars and fifty cents.

The facts about rubber have a peculiar human interest.  When you sit back comfortably in your smooth-running car, you may not realize that the rubber in the tire that stands between you and the jolting of the road was carried on the back of a native for a thousand miles out of the Amazon jungle; that for every twenty pounds of the crude juice brought in from the wilds, one human life has been sacrificed.  No crop is garnered with so great a hazard; none takes so merciless a toll.

The natives who gather rubber in the wilds of Brazil, in the Congo, in Ceylon, and elsewhere must combat disease, insects, war, flood, and a hundred hardships.  The harvest is slow and costly.  Only the planting of vast new areas in Ceylon has prevented what many believe would have been a famine in rubber, and this would have been a serious check to the development of the whole automobile business, for as yet no man has found a substitute for it.  In such a substitute, or in a puncture-proof tire, lies one of the unplucked fortunes of the future.

Meanwhile, it has started a speculative mania that almost rivals the tulip excitement in Holland.  In London alone hundreds of fortunes have been made by daring plungers in a crude article which only a few years ago was regarded as being absolutely outside the pale of the gambling marketplace.

Closely allied with the rubber end of the trade is the growing demand for sea-island cotton, which is used in the tires.  A few years ago we used only fifty thousand yards a year; now we absorb ten million yards, worth seven and one-half millions of dollars.

Now take machinery, and you find that the automobile business has created a whole new phase of this time-tried industry.  In many motor-cars there are three thousand parts.  In view of the extraordinary demand for cars, the machinery to produce them must be both swift and accurate.  The old standard tools and engine lathes were inadequate to perform the service.  The automobile-makers had to have new machinery, and have it in a hurry.