Lost Car Companies of Detroit

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INTRODUCTION

The first motorcar was most likely the steam-powered auto built by Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest while he was living in China in 1678. It’s interesting that a Jesuit minister was the inventor of what parents in the 1950s considered the number one corruptor of morals. The next notable motor-powered vehicle was the 1769 steam vehicle of French army officer Nicolas Cugnot.

By 1801, English inventors Richard Trevithick and Sir Goldsworthy Gurney had built notable steam carriages. And the battle was on—not only to produce new motorized conveyances but to decide what to call them! At first, horseless carriage was often used, especially when many of the early autos were built on buggy frames. As time went on, motor car came into prominence as many new car companies used motorcar in their company name. It is spelled as either two words or one word—motorcar. In Latin, auto means itself and mobile means moving. Automobile technically meant moving by itself. First used in France, the name automobile in the United States is traced most often to an 1897 article in the New York Times lamenting the new automobiles that had become so popular. That same year, reporter Charlie Shanks wrote about a Winton long-distance trek, calling the vehicle they were traveling in an automobile.

In the United States, Oliver Evans demonstrated a steam carriage in 1805 that worked on land and sea. Steam-powered vehicles were the rage as the Steamer twins, Francis and Freelan, manufactured the Stanley Steamer and other steam vehicles from 1896 all the way up until 1925.

Richard Davenport is credited with building the first working model of an electric car in 1836. By 1900, they were the most popular type of car, at least for women, probably because they were silent, didn’t give off noxious fumes and didn’t require a crank to start. Even so, all motor-powered vehicles, or horseless carriages, were not too well regarded in their early days.

In Vermont, an 1896 law required a pedestrian to walk one hundred feet in front of the vehicle to warn anyone who might be in the vicinity. In England, the Red Flag law was passed in 1865 stating that a motorcar couldn’t go faster than four miles an hour in the country and two miles an hour in the city and that an attendant had to walk ahead of the vehicle with a red flag as a warning to others. This law wasn’t repealed until 1896.

Gasoline-powered vehicles were made possible through French inventor Jean Joseph Lenoir’s 1863 development of a one-cylinder gas-powered engine. The first to use the engine to power a vehicle was Austrian Siegfried Marcus in 1864. From Germany, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz refined the engineering and began to produce vehicles powered by gasoline. The Daimler Benz Motor Company was formed.

In 1884–85, John Clegg and his son, Thomas, built a vehicle known as the Thing and drove it on the streets of Memphis, Michigan. It was a four-seater, powered by a single-cylinder steam engine with a tubular boiler carried in the rear.

The 1893 Benz Velo, short for velocipede, is credited as being the first standard automobile. Author’s collection.

The Duryea brothers, Charles and Frank, as the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, built the first successful commercial gas-powered vehicle in the United States in 1893. They had sold twelve of them by 1896.

In 1896, Charles Brady King’s motorcar was the first to be driven on Detroit streets, with Henry Ford following in his own car a few months later. Also in late 1896, Ransom E. Olds drove his first vehicle on the streets of Lansing, Michigan.

The earliest days of the auto industry, starting in the 1890s and before, were referred to as the Veteran Era. Next was the Brass Era, which was from the 1900s to 1915 and was called that because of all the brass used in the early vehicles, usually in the lights or radiators. The next era, from 1915 until 1935, was called the Vintage Era. The short Prewar Era, from 1936 to 1941, ushered in the War Era, which lasted until 1951. The period from 1952 until 1959 was referred to as the Postwar Era, and from 1960 until 1985 was the Classic Era. Everything since 1985 is known as the Modern Era.

By 1900, the U.S. auto industry had been producing vehicles for sale to the general public for barely four years. Steam vehicles comprised about 40 percent of the market, electric vehicles captured 38 percent and gas-powered vehicles brought up the rear at about 22 percent of the market. But both steam and electricity had their drawbacks as fuel for motorcars. Steam cars could take thirty minutes or more for the steam to heat up enough to power the car. Also, riding on top of or alongside the boiler of live steam was dangerous, and many people were scalded to death.

Electric cars had their drawbacks as well. The farthest the best of them could go without a recharge was fifty miles. Running out of power in an area with no electricity was a frequent problem.

Charles Brady King and Henry Ford, along with many other competitors, began producing gasoline-powered motorcars in the 1890s. More than two hundred different companies tried their luck at producing all three types of vehicles, but only a few survived. The companies that lasted bear the names that are the most well-known. They are the Big Three—Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Chrysler Corporation.

The founders of these corporate automobile survivors include Henry Ford, who, after driving the second auto down the streets of Detroit, went on to form two unsuccessful auto companies before striking gold with his third, the Ford Motor Company. The world headquarters of Ford is in Dearborn, Michigan.

General Motors was formed by William Billy Durant by absorbing other auto brands, including Buick and Chevrolet, and was the largest company in the world for many years and remains one of the largest. Its world headquarters is in Detroit.

Chrysler Corporation, formerly owned by Daimler and acquired by Fiat in 2009, was first formed by Walter Chrysler in 1925 and is the third of the Big Three Detroit corporations.

The stories of the independent auto companies intermingle through the stories of the Big Three, and as their accounts unfold, so do those of the Big Three. These stories take place in states and cities around Detroit that are pieces of the puzzle explaining how Detroit came to be the Motor City.

Many innovations having to do with auto history originated in Detroit. One was the first mile of paved road, which was on Woodward Avenue, between Six and Seven Mile Roads, at the site of Ford’s Highland Park Model T plant.

The first stoplight was at Woodward Avenue and Davison Road, which later became the site of the first urban freeway. It took one day to figure out that the bus stops they had built into the Davison Expressway weren’t going to work on a freeway.

The railroad industry had developed the system of using red lights to indicate stop, yellow for caution and green for go in the 1830s. In 1920, a Detroit policeman, William L. Potts, invented a traffic light using these colors to direct the growing numbers of autos on the city streets. The Potts design is still used today, with the red light on top and green on the bottom.

It helps to know some of the lingo and definitions that the auto industry developed. The Society of Automobile Engineers (now SAE International) was established in the early 1900s to standardize definitions and engineering concepts. It decided that a touring car was an open car seating four or more with direct entrance to tonneau (the back seat). A touring car has also been defined as an open car seating five or more. Tonneau could also mean a cover, either hard or soft, used to protect unoccupied passenger seats in a convertible or roadster, or a tonneau could refer to the cargo bed in a pickup truck.

Now, if tonneau seems like a confusing word with way too many definitions, the tonneaux (with an x at the end) was a little different—it was a compartment or rear part of an automobile body containing seats for passengers.

The definition of a coupe was a closed two-door car body style with a permanently attached fixed roof or a four-wheeled enclosed carriage for two passengers and a driver. A roadster was defined as an open car seating two or three. It may have additional seats on running boards or a rear deck. Additional seating in the rear was called a rumble seat or a dickey seat.

A cyclecar was a small, two-passenger, lightweight and inexpensive car, built with basic materials and usually conceived as something between a motorcycle and an auto. Steering was usually by a tiller, which in some cases was in the back seat.

Brougham was originally the term for a light, four-wheeled, horsedrawn carriage. The term was adopted for autos built in the carriage style. This style was where the term horseless carriage came from, and it was also referred to as a highwheeler.

Motors or engines used in the early cars were often referred to by their brand names. For example, a Continental was an engine made by the Continental Motors Company, and a Lycoming was a product of the Lacombe Company. Marque and nameplate are two different terms to designate a brand name of an automobile. It would often designate a division of auto within an auto company, such as Hudson’s Essex and Terraplane. The badge was a metal plate with the logo of the company that went on the front grille.

Great Britain had many terms different from the United States. Here are some of the main ones:

bonnet—the hood of a car

boot—the trunk of a car

coupe de ville—town car

estate car or shooting brake—a station wagon

gearbox—transmission

mudguard or wing—fender

petrol—gasoline

saloon—sedan

sedanca de ville—town car

silencer—muffler

track—tread

two-stroke—two-cylinder

windscreen—windshield

There were a multitude of U.S. car companies, especially in the Midwest. While the majority of these companies didn’t survive, there were quite a few that had many prosperous years. Several companies existed only on paper (and in dreams) and never assembled a single car. Companies were formed that produced a single prototype and then took it to the Chicago, Detroit or New York Auto Show to see if they could get anyone interested in buying or producing them. Companies as diverse as Sears and Roebuck, International Harvester and Briggs and Stratton all tried their hand at auto manufacturing. Most were never heard from again.

Most of the early auto companies failed, many because of inefficient assembly procedures, questionable management and business practices and bad marketing decisions, such as making luxury cars in a market already glutted with luxury cars. Nowadays, classic cars whose parent company has folded are called orphan cars. Each company had unique stories, but even if this book had unlimited pages, it would still be hard to chronicle them all.

The Big Three companies have many