Game Over
In November 1926, a year after his first surgery to remove the tumor, Ward’s cancer returned and he checked himself into the renowned Cleveland Clinic. For weeks, Elizabeth made the sixty-mile trip from Warren, sleeping at the nearby Bolton Square Hotel, returning home occasionally, but only for half days. While the doctors cared for Ward’s body, Elizabeth tended to her husband’s spirits, making sure that he received his correspondence, supplying him with news from home, conferring over his ongoing treatment, and reading to him. Mostly, however, she just kept him company with her steadying, pleasant presence.
Ward had not chosen the Cleveland Clinic randomly. Some years earlier he had become interested in the Clinic’s novel multidisciplinary medical practice, dedicated to education and research. Its founders, led by Dr. George Washington Crile, established the hospital in 1921, after serving in the Lakeside Unit during World War I. Deployed in the spring of 1917, the Unit tended to more than eighty thousand Allied troops near Rouen, France, over twenty months. Intensely ambitious and curious, Crile, the son of Ohio farmers, had already earned international standing as a physician when he opened the Clinic. One of the first surgeons in the United States to use blood transfusions, in 1903 he also designed a pneumatic rubber suit to control blood pressure and prevent patients from going into shock during surgery. (The device was later used during World War II to prevent pilots subjected to high gravity forces from blacking out.) On the battlefields of Europe, he introduced new methods of preventing infections. Upon returning home, Crile and his battle-hardened fellow medics, Drs. William Lower and Frank E. Bunts, along with a local internist, John Philips, decided to build a practice resembling their combat experience, one that included every branch of medicine while integrating research and direct patient treatment; they founded the nonprofit Cleveland Clinic Foundation. The endeavor struck a deep chord with Ward, and he became one of its benefactors, donating $200,000 (roughly $2.6 million today) to the Clinic.
From the outset, the Cleveland Clinic pioneered a number of new fields, such as x-ray therapy, endocrinology, and orthopedic and neurological surgery. When Ward arrived, surgery continued to be the foremost treatment for cancer. Radiation as a medical treatment remained in its infancy. With great foresight, the Clinic’s founders used a portion of their initial building funds to purchase a gram of radium and installed a radium emanation plant that produced radon seeds, the first such plant in the Midwest. Still, in these early experimental days, the ability to accurately measure dosages often made the cure worse than the disease. With radiation therapy reserved for inoperable or recurrent tumors, its use earned grim notoriety as the “last hope.” As Ward entered this bleak stretch of the disease, he still believed that science and technology had the answers to improve everyday life and health.
At the Clinic, the engineer’s own body became a laboratory. While the Clinic’s physicists and radiologists developed the first dosimeter to accurately measure the amount of radiation administered to patients,9 Ward submitted to a series of treatments in which small glass tubes called capillaries injected radium emanation directly into his tumors. A course of deep therapy X-ray waves followed, intended to destroy any remaining cancerous cells.
Far from home, Ward spent his days surrounded by scientists, the smell of disinfectant, and the sound of metal wheels against cement floors. As the weeks passed into months, Elizabeth helped to ease the tedium by reading aloud to her husband. She tore through Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. As she finished P. C. Wren’s adventure novel Beau Geste, the blockbuster silent film Resurrection starring Dolores Del Rio had come and gone at Cleveland’s Allen Theatre Movie Palace, and construction on the fifty-two-story skyscraper, Terminal Tower, at the Public Square downtown was well under way. By the time the building was completed in 1928, it was the world’s second largest skyscraper; the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, had premiered; and Ward was still in the hospital.
• • •
Before arriving in Cleveland, Ward had received an attractive twenty-nine-page pamphlet from Lehigh University. His alma mater was in great need of funds to build suitable laboratories for its growing electrical and mechanical engineering departments, which had long outgrown their facilities. The carefully prepared pamphlet presented a description of the proposed building. Walter Okeson, secretary and treasurer of Lehigh’s board of trustees and secretary of its alumni association, asked, “Who will build it?” For Ward, lying in his hospital bed, Okeson’s appeal became something of a paper memento mori.
Ward turned the question over in his head. Given his tremendous success, he believed that he owed a debt of gratitude to Lehigh and that any gift he might make would be a “partial payment.” He moved quickly and, on November 20, 1926, put pen to paper and addressed a series of blunt questions to Okeson, starting with “Will you please give me a little more dope regarding the proposed new building?”
Over the next two months a series of letters ricocheted between Ward, his personal secretary, his attorney, and the eager university. On December 8, after examining his financial arrangements, Ward agreed to donate $1 million (some $13 million today) in Packard Motor Company stock to construct the building in his name. Ward’s “partial payment” turned out to be the entire building. In any era, a bequest of this size would be considered a colossal act of philanthropy, and Ward’s gift quickly catapulted Lehigh into one of the richest universities in the country at the time. News of the endowment made national headlines. “Million to Lehigh Is Packard’s Gift,” shouted the New York World. The Philadelphia Record described it simply as “Lehigh University’s Windfall.” At the time Ward made his generous bequest, he had not visited the university since graduating forty-two years earlier.
• • •
Ward spent the Christmas of 1927 and rang in the New Year from his private room at the Cleveland Clinic. Elizabeth, exhausted and battling the flu, watched as her husband lay in bed on the hospital’s fifth floor, growing ashen and frail. The top physicians had exerted their best efforts, but the cancer had wound through his body. In a veiled acknowledgment that Ward’s condition had reached the point of no return, Dr. William Lower, a stout man with a patrician bearing, suggested on April 20 that it might make better sense for him to return home to Warren, where he would be more comfortable. Ward refused to consider the idea. The following day the doctor once again urged Ward to remove himself to the more familiar surroundings of his Oak Knoll mansion, and once again Ward refused.
As Ward’s universe had been reduced to a hospital room, the world outside was expanding. On the morning of May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh had bounced down a muddy Roosevelt Field on Long Island in a wobbly silver monoplane and, equipped with 451 gallons of gas, four sandwiches, and two canteens of water, lifted off the ground, clipped a tangle of telephone wires, and then glided east across the sky. An entire ocean and thirty-three and a half hours later, Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis in Le Bourget Field near Paris.
In these postwar years, the world had unbuttoned itself and the contours of the American landscape shifted in darkness and excess. Al Capone moved his headquarters to Chicago’s Metropole Hotel, where he presided over an empire of speakeasies, distilleries, gambling houses, horse tracks, whorehouses, and more. The Yankee slugger Babe Ruth was blasting his way toward a sixty-home-run streak. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The play Porgy would soon debut on Broadway. Although the British novelist and futurist H. G. Wells had predicted the “speedy decline of radio,” by 1927 nearly every American household owned one, and families eagerly gathered in their living rooms to listen to sermons, sports, dramas, and news of the “Red Menace.”
After bobbing up and down, the stock market surged ahead, transforming the way investors looked at the market. As the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 200, it was no longer a place to park long-term investments; the stock market had become a wheelhouse where anybody who entered would leave rich. Attempting to quash critical murmurs of trouble ahead, on January 12, 1928, E. H. Simmons, president of the New York Stock Exchange, proclaimed, “I cannot help but raise a dissenting voice to statements that we are living in a fool’s paradise, and that prosperity in this country must necessarily diminish and recede in the near future.”
As the decade approached its end, the automobile had firmly established itself as the most popular method of American transportation, and the business of automobiles was fast becoming the American industry. Ninety-five percent of the world’s cars were now manufactured in the United States. After raw cotton and oil, autos were the third largest American export. More than four million people earned their livelihood from automobiles, and the industry consumed 18 percent of American steel production, 85 percent of rubber, 74 percent of plate glass, and 27 percent of aluminum. It was the third largest consumer of railroad equipment. When Ford retired the Model T in 1927, having sold 15 million of them, America registered one car for every 5.3 people.
As the number of cars mushroomed, the number of auto manufacturers plummeted. From the sidelines, Ward watched as the American automobile industry, once a model of competitive ingenuity, was radically altered. Economies of scale and mass production had led to consolidation, bankruptcies, and a tremendous shakeout. Between 1921 and 1927 the number of major auto manufacturers in the country dropped from eighty-eight to forty-four. Ford’s emergence as an auto giant, followed by the massive success of General Motors and the late entry of Chrysler at the tail end of the 1920s, put the smaller makers in a headlock. Packard occupied a shrinking pool of major independent car makers, once the lifeblood of the industry. Names like Jordan, Kissle, Hudson, Essex, and de Soto soon became footnotes in the industry’s history. In the spring of 1928 Chrysler Corporation announced its merger with the Dodge Brothers, signaling an entirely new automobile world, in which three companies now produced 80 percent of all cars. As the New York Times of May 31, 1928, summarized, “New Union Creates ‘Big Three’ in Autos.”
Although Ward had removed himself from active involvement in the motorcar company he launched, his stock kept his fortunes growing. Rather than go mass-market, as many American manufacturers had done, Packard leveraged its luxury position. In a letter to shareholders Packard’s president Alvan Macauley, the man Time magazine described as “cool, self-possessed, quiet, sure of his facts & figures,” emphasized the company’s commitment to prestige motoring: “We know that the single standard of high quality will produce better motor cars than were we to attempt to secure the business of the world by building to all the pocket books in it.”
The company continued to cater to the special requests of its devoted clientele. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, the Swiss-educated monarch, was in the habit of ordering six custom automobiles at a time, with hood ornaments that resembled his crown. Packard built gorgeous inlaid cases made from rare woods into the front and back seats of his limousine where the king kept his royal sword, maps, a picnic service of gold and silver, and his monogrammed silver cigarette case. His Highness the Maharajah of Gwalior in India, who had earlier replaced his pack of two dozen elephants with ten Packards, ordered one for his royal consort, with a special request. He asked that the upholstery match the texture and delicate pink of a dress slipper he sent to the Detroit factory. The Packard factory not only set up special looms to weave the cloth but also developed special dyes to perfect the match.
The last name in American luxury had a global spin. Packard Motors Export Corporation, headquartered in New York, managed 450 international sales outlets, where its associates demonstrated the company’s dedication to craftsmanship, detail, and engineering. When a mining engineer in Colombia ordered a Packard expressly for joyriding over a thirty-mile road that circled the top of the 6,000-foot mountain where he lived, the company went to great lengths to deliver it. At the mountain’s base, the car was disassembled and its parts loaded onto pack mules and carried up a long and winding trail, with the chassis, body, and engine fastened to parallel poles.
Even as the company expanded abroad it remained deeply committed to Ward’s founding principles. Packard had earned the moniker “America’s master builder.” The company erected a million-dollar proving grounds on nearly six hundred magnificently manicured acres in Shelby Township, twenty-two miles north of downtown Detroit. Packard’s famed chief engineer, Jesse Vincent, built a state-of-the-art version of the crude test track that the Packard brothers had built more than two decades earlier. A four-lane, 2.5-mile paved oval would soon claim title as the world’s fastest closed track. Packard boasted that the track was “so beautifully banked” that you could “take a Packard safely around the turns at one hundred miles an hour without even having your hands on the wheel!”
By the end of 1927, with the Dow breaking records, the company would ship 32,122 cars and record a net income of $11 million (nearly $146 million today). Its board of directors would increase the regular dividend on the common stock from twenty to twenty-five cents per month per share. Macauley told the New York Times, “Prospects never looked better for the Packard Company. I believe there is a pent-up demand for automobiles and for the products of general manufacturing that will be realized. There is no reason, I believe, for a closing down in business.”
• • •
On July 20, 1927, a week after Babe Ruth had swatted his thirtieth home run, Ward marked his eighth month of hospitalization and Elizabeth traveled once again to Cleveland. By now the trip had become more or less a ritual, and she brought with her more books, correspondence, and news of home. On this trip, however, she also brought something that was sure to lift her husband’s spirits: three pocket watches, a Vacheron Constantin and two Patek Philippes. Ward had commissioned the luminous pieces before he fell sick, and the two Pateks had actually arrived in the spring, a month apart, on March 8 and April 6.
Although quite weak, Ward undoubtedly brightened at the appearance of this trio of timepieces. The Vacheron Constantin was something of a departure from the many complex pocket watches that he had acquired, a highly unusual, ultrathin skeleton pocket watch that boasted a transparent rock crystal case, with the edge set in sapphires and the bow, crown, and wheel made of platinum. The transparent case had no metal around the movement, allowing Ward to view its elaborate construction. The movement, a work of art in itself, was made from fourteen-carat gold, beautifully damascened and polished; even the mainspring coils were visible, like a dainty princess sitting in a glass carriage. The watch, no thicker than a small child’s finger, resembled none of his other pocket watches. Its bridges were made of solid gold, and the minuscule amount of metal surrounding the crystal was hand-engraved and ornamented. The dial’s numerals were painted in black enamel on the inside of the crystal. Its unusual hands incorporated Ward’s initials into its design.
Ward received this ultrathin Vacheron Constantin skeleton watch while at the Cleveland Clinic in 1927. Encased in rock crystal and rimmed in sapphires, it was a stunning timepiece and something of a departure for the automaker.
Picking back a tiny latch on another of the wooden boxes, Ward opened the lid and gingerly lifted a minute repeater from its cradle. The Patek Philippe pocket watch, movement no. 198014, was eighteen-carat gold with richly carved rims and edges. The dial was made of gilded silver, and large and luminous radium numerals appeared just as Ward had imagined. It was perhaps his most sentimental commission. Delicate skeletonized hands, like the numerals, were filled with radium-saturated yellow wax, allowing it to glow in the dark. The same radium that the Clinic’s doctors used to destroy Ward’s cancer, the substance would later be outlawed from commercial use because it contained dangerously high levels of carcinogens. At twenty-nine lignes (two and a half inches), it was a large timepiece, weighing nearly two pounds, necessary to accommodate the watch’s raison d’être: the customized musical alarm that played Godard’s Jocelyn lullaby.
The third watch, however, most enthralled Ward. It was the piece that he had contemplated on that cold, rainy night five years earlier, as he entertained his father-in-law and Dr. John Kingsley of the Essex Institute. This was the watch whose commission had caught the attention of Henry Graves, Jr., and awakened his own enthusiasms. It had taken five years to produce and set the horological world on fire. Unquestionably, the watch, with movement no. 198023, known as the Packard, was the masterpiece of his entire collection and the apotheosis of his relationship with Patek Philippe.
The dial with Arabic numerals housed four sub-dials. The eighteen-carat gold case shimmered in the harsh hospital light; it was elaborately engraved with Ward’s initials in blue enamel encircled by a burst of rays. Just nineteen lignes in diameter (one and two-third inches), the watch contained the greatest number of complications in the smallest amount of space.
In all, there were ten complications, each customized to Ward’s fancy and calibrated precisely to his hometown. Manifesting nearly nine decades of experience and knowledge, Patek Philippe had mobilized its best engineers, craftsman, and mathematicians from Geneva to the Jura Valley to produce this masterpiece. The watchmakers had walked a tightrope between technique and art. Dozens of escapements were drawn. Teeth were cut on one wheel and then the next. The tiniest of pieces were built, polished, tested, and tested again. Layer by layer the movement took shape. The craftsmen sat pressed at the edge of the bench, loupe to eye with forefinger and thumb cradling the slimmest instruments and working the lathe; every move made a difference.
On the silver dial, the minute and hour hands of blue steel marked the time, but that was almost an afterthought. A sunburst minute hand displayed the difference between mean solar time (the time we go by) and true solar time (the time told by a sundial). The moon phase aperture, located at 12 o’clock, included a moving moon disc made of blue enamel. The numbers surrounding the disk were calibrated to show the moon’s phase, and a pointer indicated the month. At 6 o’clock a small dial with three hands running on concentric tracks indicated the day of the week, day of the month, and seconds. The perpetual calendar automatically adjusted to compensate for uneven months and leap years until the year 2100. A dial at 9 o’clock pointed to the time of sunrise, and one at 3 o’clock to the hour of sunset, both calibrated specifically for the latitude and longitude of Warren, Ohio. Ward had a soft spot for minute repeaters, and this watch was no exception: the mechanism rang on three gongs set to indicate the hours, quarters, and exact minute.
Pressing down on the watch’s winding crown, Ward popped open the back case to reveal an inside cover aperture and its true charm, a blue enamel celestial chart of five hundred stars, each represented by a gold point in six sizes according to their precise magnitude, and designed to match the night sky above Warren, at exactly 41 degrees 20 minutes. This miniature nocturnal scene rotated daily, following the same heavenly path that appeared outside Ward’s mansion bedroom. Looking at the stars in the palm of his hand, Ward could imagine that he was back in Warren gazing into the night sky.
Blissfully unaware of the Graves Supercomplication under production in Geneva, Ward believed his place in horology was secure. After thirty years, he had outdone himself. The Packard stood alongside the two other most celebrated grandes complications in history, the Marie-Antoinette and the Leroy No. 1. Although it possessed ten complications (six fewer than his earlier grande complication), it represented a tremendously complex world contained inside the space of just one and two-third inches, and for decades horologists would debate its supremacy as the ultra complication of all time. Fittingly, the debate was based on a technicality. In the annals of watchmaking, it was only the second watch produced in modern times that was equipped with a celestial chart. Ward emerged on top. For those keeping score, the auto pioneer had won the war of complications, and the Packard had won the battle.
• • •
Henry Graves, Jr., wasn’t the only aficionado who took an intense interest in Ward’s watches. Over the years Paul Moore had followed news of Ward’s acquisitions with a high level of curiosity. As head of the research division at the National Research Council in Washington D.C., Moore spearheaded government surveys for the National Academy of Sciences, but it was in his position as secretary of the Horological Institute of America that he had become acquainted with Ward’s watches. Like Ward, Moore admired mechanical perfection, specifically complicated watch mechanisms. But more than just an admirer, Moore believed that timepieces and watchmaking represented civilization, and he worked tirelessly “to elevate and dignify the art, science and practice of horology.” For Moore, the Packard collection did more than just demonstrate timekeeping; it revealed “the highest development of human ingenuity as applied to horological mechanisms.”
Moore believed innovation and watchmaking were inextricably linked. Since the end of World War I, he had feared that America’s ability to invent and manufacture was on the decline, in the process dragging down the nation’s capacity for mechanical watchmaking. Under the aegis of the Research Council, he worked to develop standards for horological schools, certifying requirements for watchmakers in this country. His great desire was to raise American workmanship and horological science on par with Europe. “While the factory system and mass production have done much for America,” he wrote, “they have wrought evils also. Many watchmakers all over this country are not equal to the demands of this age for repair work. On the other hand the public should not expect too much of a cheap watch.”
Moore’s greatest ambition was to establish a time museum in Washington under the auspices of the Horological Institute of America, dedicated to the science of time and timekeeping. As he explained, “Time is as important as music or art or many other ‘causes,’ for which money is forthcoming to erect buildings.” His push to build such a dedicated monument in the United States gained little momentum, but Ward’s standout collection fit in perfectly with Moore’s desires. He believed that, if he could acquire the Packard watches, they would attract interest on a large scale and would broadcast the significance and importance of his planned museum. Furthermore the museum would serve as a magnet to attract other individual pieces and collections over time.
Aware that Ward’s collection was set to be handed over to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Moore traveled from Washington to the hospital where Ward lay gravely ill and laid out his case. After describing his vision for a time museum, he explained that, if Ward’s intention in giving his watches to the Cleveland Museum of Art would be to give the pieces the widest possible audience, they would in actuality be better placed in the care of the Horological Institute. There, his magnificent watches would be used “for educational work in developing for America the finest mechanicians.”
Ward and Elizabeth apparently agreed, and the Cleveland Museum of Art graciously relinquished its rights to the collection, transferring them to the Horological Institute, along with the $2,000 for the collection’s future care.
• • •
In 1928 Ward spent his last New Year’s Eve at the Cleveland Clinic. In the fiercely cold January, he anxiously passed the time awaiting word on the progress of his namesake engineering building. Elizabeth’s brother and Ward’s personal attorney, Judge R. I. Gillmer, traveled to Lehigh shortly after the New Year to check on the building’s development. The meeting was cordial but troubling, as the project managers informed Gillmer that it now appeared that Ward’s gift would not cover the undertaking. Walter Okeson showed Gillmer drawings of the proposed building. The architects had designed a massive four-story, Gothic-style structure of cut limestone. Equipped with the latest in heating and electricity, it was planned with an eye toward the most modern boilers, generators, and measuring devices. The designs called for two main labs for electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, housing every phase of study, as well as several specialized labs for the study of internal combustion engines, wired and wireless telegraphy, radio, high voltages, and refrigeration. Provisions were made for mechanics’ shops, drafting rooms, offices, instrument rooms, classrooms, and an extensive library. Extremely well thought out, the design left nothing unconsidered, including plans for live steam, exhaust steam, and concealed wiring.
But the incoming bids exceeded the million-dollar pledge, and the university was considering revising its plans in order to make the building smaller or use cheaper construction materials. Gillmer disagreed. Although Ward put no conditions on his endowment (except that it bear his name and be the “finest plant of its kind in existence”), he had been apprised of its preliminary design and wholeheartedly supported it. Before leaving Bethlehem, Gillmer told the university representatives that he was “quite sure that Mr. Packard would not wish to have the building other than [the university] desired it and he [Gillmer] was confident that if necessary Mr. Packard would provide additional funds to enable the building to be completed as planned.”
On February 1, 1928, Okeson received a letter from Ward’s secretary and a check for $200,000 (about $2.69 million today). “Mr. Packard realizing the importance of the undertaking and the efforts being set forth by everyone concerned,” the enclosed correspondence explained, “does not wish to leave a single item omitted in making this gift of his to Lehigh the finest of its kind.”
• • •
On March 18, 1928, Ward’s health took another turn for the worse. Drifting in and out of sleep, he momentarily broke free from his lethargy to plead with his wife not to marry after he had gone. “Seems so trivial at this time,” she wrote in her diary later in the day.
The following morning Elizabeth found her husband’s condition “alarming.” At nine in the morning on March 20, she arrived once again at the hospital and, to her horror, her husband lay weak and incoherent, unable to recognize her. She sat beside him as his breath grew increasingly shallow for two and a half hours before stopping. Sixteen months after he first checked into the Cleveland Clinic, Ward died, “peacefully and without realizing that the end had come,” as Elizabeth recorded in her diary. Ward had believed in deploying science and technology to improve the human condition, but science could not save him.
At his death, James Ward Packard was sixty-four years old. One of America’s 15,000 millionaires, he left an estate valued at $7 million ($94.3 million today). At the time of his death, net annual profits of the Packard Motor Car Company had reached $10 million. Packard Electric had become the leading manufacturer of automotive, appliance, and aircraft wiring, employing more than six thousand people. Four years later General Motors would buy the company.
Ward was buried at the Packard family gravesite at the Oakwood Cemetery in Warren, Ohio. Photograph by Stacy Perman.
Newspapers and magazines celebrated the remarkable inventor who had quietly helped transform America. “With his passing,” reported the New York Times, “the little circle of men who built the first ‘horseless carriages’ in America near the close of the last century and were the forerunners of the mammoth automobile industry of today loses one of its most prominent members.”
The Packard News Service, the company’s internal marketing arm, wrote a lengthy obituary that it sent to the national media. Newspapers and magazines across the country reprinted chunks of the lavish praise. Henry R. Luce, the managing editor of Time and a proud Packard motorcar owner, personally sent a copy of the magazine’s planned obituary with a telegram to Packard Motor asking its marketing department to kindly read it and report back “if you detect any error of fact.” The final read in part, “Yet few of the men who built the first automobiles are still alive; Maxwell, Haynes, the Dodge Brothers—these were among the most important and all of them are dead. Last week Death, in his quick chariot, overtook one more. This was James Ward Packard, famed maker of Packard cars.”
At 2:30 p.m. on March 26, friends, relatives, and many of Ward’s business associates from across the country filed into the Oak Knoll Drive mansion, where the funeral took place. For a full hour before the Reverend R. E. Schulz, rector of Christ Episcopal Church, began the service, its bells chimed in requiem.
• • •
On June 8, Ward’s nephew Warren traveled to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where more than one thousand alumni watched as he laid the cornerstone for the James Ward Packard Laboratory of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. Within months, arrangements began for the transfer of Ward’s watches to the Horological Institute of America.
Ward’s death marked the beginning of the end of the golden age of mechanical watchmaking. The pocket watch that had captivated Ward and Henry Graves, Jr., was a rich man’s dinosaur on the brink of extinction.