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  3. The Dodge BrothersA) It was 100 years ago this week tha

The Dodge BrothersA) It was 100 years ago this week tha

游客2023-08-15  27
问题                         The Dodge Brothers
A) It was 100 years ago this week that the Dodge brothers founded the powerful car brand that still bears their name. But few have heard the tale of how the two-fisted brothers started their business in Canada. John and Horace Dodge spent nearly eight years working in Windsor as machinists, founding their first company here, and learning how to massively produce manufactured goods.
B) The Evans & Dodge Bicycle Company is nearly forgotten now. But it taught the brothers how to run a leading-edge technology business—which it was in those days, says Windsor automotive historian Mickey Moulder. After selling out to CCM in 1900, the brothers took $7,500 in capital out of the little Windsor Company back to Detroit and founded Dodge Brothers. So laid the foundation of the gigantic fortune they managed to produce before both dying in 1920.
C) What a pair the quarrelling Dodge brothers were, with their red hair, their barrel chests and tendency for heavy boozing and bar fighting. Horace was the quieter mechanical brain, doggedly working out problems on his work bench with a micrometer until midnight. John was the play boy, the salesman, the spokesman for the both of them. Although born four years apart, John in 1864 Horace in 1868, they were inseparable. Which is what brought them to Windsor. They had moved to Detroit from rural Niles, Mich., in 1886 at ages 22 and 18, taking jobs in the same factory, Murphy’s Boiler Works. If they needed any toughening up, which is doubtful, they learned it there and the nearby waterfront taverns.
D) But a fit of tuberculosis eventually made the heavy work impossible for John, so in 1892 he came to Windsor looking for lighter duties at the Dominion Typograph Company on Sandwich Street(now Riverside Drive).
E) According to family legend, the owners of the company, located in the Medbury Block just west of Ouellette Avenue, wanted to hire only one machinist. But John announced both he and Horace would be hired as a team or neither of them would work in Canada. The two leading technologies of the day were typesetting machines and bicycles. And Dominion happened to make both. That especially suited Horace.
F) Moulder, a car collector and former Ford of Canada executive, has been a lifelong student of automotive history. He’ s also co-chairman of the Canadian Transportation Museum in Essex, and he tells the Dodge story with enthusiasm. "Bicycles were the high-tech mechanical device of the 1880s and 1890s. Everybody and the two brothers(literally) were fascinated by them," Moulder says, "The Dodge brothers, the Leland brothers(Cadillac, Lincoln) and the Wright brothers all built bicycles before their gasoline machines".
G) John became foreman at Dominion Typograph, Horace a "skilled machinist," according to the Windsor City Directory of 1894. Within five years its owner, Fred Evans, had taken in the brothers as full partners and they devoted themselves to building bicycles exclusively.
H) Their products were known for being extremely smooth, reliable and robust, just as their cars would be a few years later. By November, 1897, Evans & Dodge employed 100 people in Windsor.
I) But the overpopulated bicycle industry began consolidating, and Evans and Dodge decided to sell. Although John had married a Canadian from Walkerton, Ont, and Horace was married on his lunch-break at a church in Walkerville, the Dodges had never lived in Windsor. So they took their little nest egg back to Detroit and rented a new shop. They started taking orders for difficult-to-machine parts. Business took off due to high quality work and respect for deadlines.
J) Their first big customer: Ransom Olds, father of the first mass produced American automobile. They built engines and transmissions for him, quickly making big money. "The Dodge brothers got a reputation for being really, really good suppliers," Moulder says.
K) Henry Ford came knocking next, and they were soon supplying him with nearly complete cars. Ford was broke, was a poor machinist and couldn’t make much himself. "The Dodge brothers essentially provided the heart and soul of the first Ford cars built in 1903 and 1904," Moulder says. "The running chassis(底盘) was made by Dodge Brothers. Ford just put on the fenders, the windshield, the headlights, the seats, dressed it up. Ford didn’t make its own first car. Dodge Brothers did. And that’ s why Ford became so well known, because the car was so well built".
L) "They were geniuses. They were tough bastards, too," says Moulder. "They were big guys, and you didn ’t cross either of them or badmouth them because they’d hear about it. And if they happened to see you in a bar at the wrong time—even if you were a lawyer—after they had a few drinks in them ... The Dodges would either drag the offending party out into the street for their punishment or break up the whole bar. Then next morning they’d come back and pay for all the damages. They were tough birds, which is why they took on Henry Ford. Everybody else was afraid of him, but they took him on and won."
M) Ford’s defeat in a dispute over stocks the Dodges owned in his company came in the form of a lawsuit which netted the Dodges $25 million—more than enough to launch their own car brand in 1914. They started by incorporating all the ideas Henry Ford had rejected. Technologically, they were well ahead of the pack.
N) "We’ve got a beautiful Dodge Brothers car, a 1920 four door sedan," Moulder says. It’s on permanent display at the Transportation Museum on the Arner Town Line. "It’s full of advances that you would never find on any other car at the time." For instance: the first metal weather stripping to keep rain out of the passenger compartment, the first one-piece roof stampings, the first silent starters, and the first 12-volt electrical systems. A Dodge always started in the cold due to those 12-volt systems, which is why the rest of the world eventually followed suit, Moulder says.
O) The brothers got to enjoy quite a bit of their vast wealth, building castle-like mansions outside Detroit and commissioning giant yachts. But their premature deaths at ages 55 and 52 shocked the world at the time. John sat for days on end at Horace’ s bedside when his younger brother was stricken by the Spanish flu, leaving only when he himself collapsed from it, dying a few days later. Horace rallied and lived a few more months before following his beloved older brother into a crypt in the family’s huge tomb in Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery. John’s Canadian wife ran Dodge Brothers the company until 1925, selling out for $147 million to a Wall Street investment firm, which flipped it three years later to Walter P. Chrysler for $175 million. [br] The two brothers both died at their fifties and the company was eventually sold out by John’ s wife.
选项
答案 O
解析 此句意为“兄弟二人都在五十几岁就去世了，公司最终被约翰的加拿大妻子卖掉了”。这与最后一段的意思相近，因此，正确答案是O。
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