Other than the fact Henry Ford lived in the area, is there any reason to think that if Henry Ford was from Chicago or Milwaukee those cities wouldn’t have become the center of the American auto industry.
He didn’t just live there, he started his first motor car company there: The Detroit Automobile Company. This venture failed fairly quickly, but was replaced soon after by the Henry Ford Company in the same building.
It was essentially just that some central figures in the early years of automobile production were based on Detroit: Ransom Olds, Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, etc. Events conspired to have them do well in the early 20th century and it snowballed from there.
A hundred years ago it was not practical for a large manufacturer to be too far removed from its suppliers; you couldn’t economically build cars if you were getting the parts from all over hell’s half acre. So when the car industry got its start there, that’s where the engine makers and parts makers set up shop, and so that’s where car production became centralized. Today, automobile production is everywhere - Ontario produces more cars than Michigan now, and I think Tennessee might, too - in part because shipping parts around is far, far cheaper.
Actually, a fair amount of the very early auto industry was in Cleveland - Winton, which was the first American company to sell an automobile, was in Cleveland, as well as Baker, Peerless and White. Very early on, Winton was probably Ford’s chief rival, and Baker was one of the biggest Electric manufacturers. Electrics held a sizeable chunk of the market at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, every carriage maker was morphing into an auto maker, and there were automobile manufacturers springing up everywhere. This wiki article on the Brass Era provides a list of mass market makers in the US in 1904:
What’s significant is that if you look at that list, you will note that the ones in Detroit are the ones that survived. To a startling degree.
But is there anything in particular to Detroit that made it successful. Supposing for instance these automotive pioneers had lived in Chicago or Milwaukee and had opened their first plants in those cities.
Natural resources (like the availability of iron from Minnesota and Canada), distribution (ports and rails), an available workforce, serendipity (like minded manufacturing mavens). Some things just sort of happen. Why is Silicon Valley where it is? Once the infrastructure gets established, others will take advantage of the economy of scale and congregate to an area.
Kellogg’s and Post, the two major produces of breakfast cereals were/are based in Battle Creek, MI. How does that happen? Why were Sear and Montgomery Ward both in Chicago? Why were Schlitz and Pabst in Milwaukee? Metal production in Pittsburgh? Furniture in Grand Rapids? There’s no particular reason why they should be there as opposed to some other place. While it doesn’t necessarily hold true any more, when manufacturing flourished in America, manufacturers of similar products found an advantage in being geographically close. Maybe is was based in having an available skilled workforce that they could glom off the comptetition.
Any big Great Lakes city would likely have been just as good a spot, had Ford and the rest happened to set up there. Chicago is obviously a major crossroads anyway, so sure, it could have happened there.
Kellogg’s and Post may be an accident but not the rest. Chicago was the largest city in the Midwest and the transportation hub. It had the largest printers, the best means of getting mail to the rest of the country, and the best location for gathering products and shipping them. Milwaukee had perhaps the greatest concentration of German immigrants in the country and they brought their beer industry with them. Pittsburgh was the city closest to the coal fields in Pennsylvania so it became the center for heavy industry that required heavy fuels. These weren’t accidents.
Other cities did start industries of their own along these lines but they tended to consolidate in the areas that were most favorable to those industries. Rockefeller got started in Cleveland but eventually moved to Pittsburgh because that city could better support his refining empire. Pittsburgh was also on the Pennsylvania Railroad which was one of the major lines of the day, giving it another boost.
I don’t know enough about the auto industry to answer the OP, but here’s a page that claims that the auto industry grew out of Detroit’s previous success as a center for making internal combustion engines for ships. Its position as a Great Lakes port certainly makes this plausible.
Buffalo’s experience backs up these other examples. It was the terminus of the Erie Canal and grew as a hub bringing in all the goods being shipped east and west. It was once one of the ten largest cities in the country. Because of the power of Niagara Power it supported heavy industry that needed large amounts of energy. It was a leader in the auto industry, but eventually lost out as Detroit took over. It was second only to Pittsburgh in steel and chemicals, but lost out as those industries went overseas, and they pulled back to Pittsburgh as a center. So its location made it grow, but its lack of absolute dominance allowed it to shrink.
Industries consolidate because you need large pools of expertise to draw upon. That’s true even today as Silicon Valley proves. That’s why New York kept drawing talent from all over the country and became the headquarters for many of the industries whose operations were based elsewhere. The logic of consolidation because of materials and talent holds fast even in the Internet age, as India’s growth in Bangalore and other centers depends on there drawing the talent to them.
Location first, then the people who see the advantages of that location is the answer, I think.
Having just visited Kellogg’s Cereal City in Battle Creek a few months ago, I can assure you that it’s not coincidence - Post was a guest at the Battle Creek Sanitarium where Kellogg invented Corn Flakes, and stole his process to start his own company.
Check out the excellent movie The Road To Wellville for a fictional account of the goings-on in Battle Creek, including the sort of industrial espionage cmkeller mentions.
Bear in mind that Detroit was already heavily industrialized prior to the advent of the auto industry. There were ship builders, bicycle manufacturers, train car and locomotive industries, and carriage industries. Pair that with Michigan’s waterways and access to natural resources and train routes, and it’s apparent that something would happen there.
Now that things and knowledge move around the world so cheaply and quickly, none if this is really that relevant. For example, the Detroit company that I work for is profitable the world over, except for our operations at home in the States. (Luckily I speak Canadian and Mexican, and speaking some sort of Chinese is next on my list, I should imagine. ;))
Up through the 1920s there were hundreds of auto makers located in many US cities. Massive consolidation happened in the late 20s, and the depression killed a lot of the companies that were left. Probably for reasons already listed, many of the survivors were in Detroit, or had moved there. Cleveland based Winton, for instance, quit producing cars in 1924 (kept making engines into the 30s). New York based Maxwell (once a very major player) moved to Detroit and folded up in 1925. Indiana based Auburn finally closed down in 1936. Also Indiana based Apperson in 1926. Buffalo based Pierce-Arrow was bought by Studebaker (South Bend, Indiana) in 1928, and went bankrupt in 1938. Locomobile of Bridgeport, CT, was bought out in 1922 and finally closed down in 1929.
The auto industry didn’t really start in Detroit - it wound up there by attrition. Mostly because the guys who really knew how to make a go of it just happened to be there.
BTW, a surprising number of those marques that died in the 20s were basically making the mistake of trying to sell to the high end of the market. It got very crowded, with lots of auto makers trying to build vehicles that only a few customers could afford.
Addendum.
To illustrate the point, as well as point out an interesting list, Wiki’s “Defunct motor vehicle manufacturers of the United States” lists around 300 companies:
Glancing over the list, for instance, Kissel (Hartford, WI) once sold a fair number of cars, as did Franklin (Syracuse, NY).