Try for Steam Cars

Right from the nineteenth century’s beginning; scientists in America had been trying to create a steam car. Pick up a newspaper from those times, and you’ll find stories and reposts about how someone tried, tried really hard – but failed to make the steam car work.


Then, towards the end of the century, things changed. By 1890 a man named Ransom E. Olds had already built his second steam powered car; one of the two he built was sold to someone in India, but the ship transporting it there was, unfortunately, lost at sea. Then it began. In the February of 1893, the brother’s car built by Charles and Frank Duryea made the first gasoline powered car ever, right here in the United States, and by September of the same year 1893, it was prepared for its road trials. It ran for the first time on public roads on the 21st of September, 1893 in the town of Springfield, MA. The carriage over the engine was a used horse drawn buggy, bought for $70. Then came the interesting part – the engine itself. It was a 4 horsepower, single cylinder gasoline engine. The vehicle, when it was ready, had low tension ignition, friction transmission and also a spray carburetor It was last driven on November 10, 1893. The very next year, in 1894, the car was put into storage. It remained untouched till the year 1920, when Inglis M. Uppercu decided to get it out of there and donate it to the U.S. National Museum and stayed there until 1920 when it was rescued by Inglis M. Uppercu and presented to the United States National Museum.

Although the now legendary Henry Ford’s engine was up and running right in 1893, it wasn’t until 1896 that he built his first vehicle, and by the end of the same year, Ford had sold it! The ‘Quadracycle’ which sold for $200 – a hefty sum back then – allowed him to get enough money to build another model of the same car. Then, backed by Detroit’s Mayor, William C. Maybury as well as by some rich patrons from Detroit, Henty Ford started the Detroit Automobile Company in the year 1899. Although he’d built some prototypes, not one single production car was ever made. It would be four more years until Ford would next sell a car.

Now that automobiles were being built, automobile racing couldn’t be too far behind. The very first closed circuit automobile race in the world took place at Narragansett Park, Rhode Island, in the month of September in the year 1896. In that very year, the very first production car was built in 13 units – they were Duryeas. It so happened that two years later, the brothers parted ways and they shut down the Duryea Motor Wagon Company. Charles, the elder brother, made use of his experience in years and achieved a lot of publicity and got quite a few patents. His younger brother Frank joined the Arms and Tool Company and then formed the Stevens-Duryea Company which was eventually sold to Westinghouse in 1915. Frank got paid half a million dollars for the Westinghouse deal and lived very comfortably until his death in 1967.

Now, a little about the Oldsmobile. This car was up and about by the year 1896. However, no cars were produced by the Olds Motor Vehicle Company of Detroit until the year 1899. Owing to their failure, early on, with luxury cars, they came up with the first ever production that was extremely successful, with the classic Curved Dash Oldsmobile. The Curved Dash Oldsmobile was equipped with a single cylinder engine, tiller steering and chain drive and it was sold for $650. Six hundred units were sold in the year 1901, and the figured just began to rise from then onwards (1902 - 2,500, 1903 - 4,000, 1904 - 5,000). In the month of August in 1904, Ransom Olds quit the Olds Motor Vehicle Company of Detroit and formed the REO or Ransom Eli Olds company, which went on to become the very first mass producer of gas-powered automobiles in America.
Surprisingly, between the years 1899 and 1900, electric cars were selling like hot cakes, the most popular of them all, the ‘Colombia’, which was built by the owner of the American Bicycle Company, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope. In 1895, came the Lutzman. It was typical of what American design was and would remain like in the middle of the 1890s. The engine was under the floorboards and it had an extremely high center of gravity. That, plus tiller steering. The renowned German automobile designer and builder Gottlieb Daimler participated in the famous ‘London-to-Brighton’ run in the year 1896. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1900, and he hadn’t even met with another famous automobile builder – Benz. Daimler would have been pleased to know that thanks to his German engines, the automobile industries of France and Britain could keep on going.