#81 Henry Royce (Founder of Rolls-Royce)

**David Senra** (0:00)
The historic first meeting of Henry Royce and CS. Rolls took place on May 4th, 1904
The two men could have hardly come from more different backgrounds.
CS. Rolls had been educated at Cambridge and moved comfortably in London society among his aristocratic and wealthy friends.
Henry Royce had known poverty and hardship all his life.
The only university he'd graduated from was the one of Hard Knox.
The one characteristic they both had in common was a certain prickliness, perhaps in both cases, born of shyness than arrogance.
Here's a quote from Rolls describing his meeting with Royce a few years later. He says, You may ask yourself how it was that I came to be associated with Mr. Royce and Mr. Royce with me. Well, for a considerable number of years, I had been actively engaged in the sale of foreign cars. And the reason for this was that I wanted to be able to recommend and sell the best cars in the world, irrespective of origin. The cars I sold were, I believe, the best that could be got at that time. But somehow I always had a sort of feeling that I should prefer to be selling English instead of foreign goods.
In addition, I could distinctly notice a growing desire on the part of my clients to purchase English-made cars.
Yet, I was disinclined to embark in a factory and manufacture myself, firstly on account of my own incompetence and inexperience in such matters, and secondly on account of the enormous risks involved. At the same time, I could not come across any English-made card that I really liked.
Eventually, however, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Mr. Royce, and in him I found the man I had been looking for for years.
Okay, so that's from the very first chapter of the book that I read this week, and the one that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Rolls-Royce, The Magic of a Name, The First Forty Years of Britain's Most Prestigious Company, from 1904 to 1944
When I started reading the book, I wasn't sure exactly who I was going to profile, and then as you start to read, it becomes extremely clear that I need to solely focus on Henry Royce.
So it's probably important to note that I didn't know anything about Rolls-Royce, other than that they make cars that cost as much as houses, and I had no idea about the founders. I stumbled upon this book accidentally. There's a thread on Twitter where people were recommending the best books to read on the very beginning of iconic companies. So I went through that thread, ordered a bunch of those books, and then one day I just picked this one up and started reading it. And wow, Henry Royce is one of the most incredible people that I've come across since I started reading all these books for the podcast. And I think a good introduction into the life, or more specifically the mind of Henry Royce, is to look at the night before he died. And this is from his Wikipedia page. The night before he died, he sat up in bed and drew a sketch on the back of an envelope, which he gave to his nurse and housekeeper, telling her to see that the boys in the factory got it safely. He died before it reached the derby. This was the adjustable shock absorber. And I think that story just illustrates the life and the mind of Royce. He found something that he was extremely passionate about, something he dedicated all his resource and energy to almost to the point of death, which obviously I don't recommend, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. And he did so, and he thought about it up until the very time, the day before he died. Okay, so let's go back into the book. We're going to go, starting with, you know, Rolls, his partner, is selling other people's cars at this time. And he was introduced through this guy named Edmonds to the work of Royce, because like he just said, he wanted to see if there was any high quality British cars. And so this is this idea that he came across first from Yvonne Chouinard, which is the founder of Patagonia. It's a quality as a distribution strategy. And this is Rolls being introduced to the work of Royce.
He says, Rolls at this time had a prejudice against two cylinder engines, and he climbed into the high passenger seat of the little Royce, prepared for all this vibration and roughness that were usually associated with that type. So right off the bat, he's like, no, I want to sell four and six cylinder engines. And he's talking about, listen, the two cylinders are crappy. I'm trying to sell quality. And he was fully expecting that Royce's two cylinder is going to be crap too. And it says, to his amazement, he found that the car had the smoothness and even the pull of the average four, four cylinder, allied to a quite phenomenal degree of silence.