Oldsmobile Curved Dash Runabout

Henry Ford is the man commonly given credit for transforming the automobile from a rich man’s toy to every man’s transportation.It was another Michigan resident, however, who set the stage for Ford’s revolution. Before Ransom E. Olds, the few cars that were being assembled were fabricated individually in machine shops and sold on a catch-as-catch-can basis to those few rich enough to afford the high asking prices. Olds was the man who orchestrated the innovation from the shop to the assembly line, making the automobile reasonably priced to a far larger audience, thus setting the stage for Henry’s Model T.

Inveterate tinkerer

The son of a machinist, Olds studied accounting at a Lansing, Michigan, business college, but he always considers more at home in his father’s shop. With his schooling over, he joined the business, which operated in the thrilling world of repairing farm machinery. An inveterate tinkerer, Olds had dreams far beyond fixing plows.

In the late 1880s, several men from around the world were coming to the same assumption: self-powered vehicles could be practical. Across the Atlantic, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz   were experimenting with gasoline-powered vehicles, as were the Duryea brothers in Massachusetts. In Michigan, Olds filled his idle hours by dabbling with vehicles powered by electricity, steam,  and gasoline, while keeping a weather eye out for the scant news of his contemporaries’ progress.

In 1887, he finished work on his first self-propelled vehicle, and by 1892 he was all set to give a public demonstration of the next-generation of his handiwork, the Olds Steamer. Scientific American magazine thought enough of that vehicle to give it a gleaming report in its May 21, 1892, issue. However, success in the marketplace was not nearly as immediate. Olds sold the Steamer to a British company, which quickly shipped it to India where it disappeared into the mists of history. Three lean years followed until Olds partnered with a local carriage maker’s son named Frank Clark. Their idea: quite plainly the horseless carriage.

Conventional wisdom made it

Equipped with a gasoline engine, their carriage amazed several members of the Lansing business community enough to ante up $50,000 to incorporate the Olds Motor Vehicle Company. With an extremely short wheelbase and a large diameter wheels, the vehicle they built had a buggy-like body sitting above the mechanical components. It was with brass side lights  and was  tiller-steered, for night-driving. The company built four of these vehicles in its maiden year, but sales didn’t come effortlessly, and it was starving for cash.

Fearless, Olds traveled south to Detroit to try to tap into some of that city’s lumber money as a source of capital to build his business. He found just such a source in Samuel L. Smith, a timber and copper  baron, who bought into Olds’ vision of an automobile factory.

This time with half a million dollars to tinker with, Olds reorganized his company as the Olds Motor Works. His idea wasn’t just to assemble automobiles, but to assemble automobiles on a significant scale, enjoying the economies per unit that such a scheme would bring his enterprise. That, not the car itself, was Ramsom Olds’ big  brainchild.

The promising car baron used some of the invested capital to build a three-story factory on the Detroit waterfront. Meanwhile, he reserved his Lansing facility, turning it into his engine plant. But the big question was: what to construct?

Conventional wisdom told him that a big,  high-priced machine built in small numbers was the way to success in the infant car business. That’s simply how it was done.

A dollar-a-pound car

Olds, though, decided that if he could make his new car small, light,  and inexpensive enough, he could broaden his market significantly. From this concept was born the Curved Dash Olds.  Put side by side to other cars of the day, there wasn’t much to the Curved Dash Runabout.   At 66 inches, its wheelbase  was less than a foot longer than its track. The Runabout’s frame was made of angle iron, and buggy-type springs reinforced its four corners. Above its midships-mounted mechanicals sat a leather-upholstered bench seat, which faced a elegantly turned-up dashboard, actually more of a foot protector, not a dashboard in the current sense.

The Curved Dash Oldsmobile road on 3-inch wide tires, whose detachable rims were attached on 28-inch diameter wood-spoke “artillery” wheels. The very direct steering was by rudder.

The engine was rather unremarkable for its era, a “one-lung” single cylinder with a five-inch bore and six-inch stroke, it produced what Oldsmobile has variously illustrated as four or seven horsepower. It was started by twisting a crank on the driver’s (right) side of the car.  Power was transmitted to the back wheels via a two-speed planetary gear-set that also suggested reverse. Once the driver established some forward movement, which was, of course, leisurely, deceleration was completed by brakes at the rear wheels and at the differential. The Curved Dash was ecumenical in its fluid capacities, carrying five gallons of water and five gallons of  gasoline.

While the Oldsmobile’s power output was less than many current riding lawn mowers, a saving grace was the truth that its engine didn’t push around much weight.  All set to ramble off into the countryside, the car weighed just 650 pounds, a number that was matched by its price, $650. (Fascinatingly, the dollar-a-pound figure was the target of the Ford Mustang design team 60 years later.)

While the Curved Dash Olds wasn’t mechanically prepossessing and its style would properly be dubbed serviceable or, at best, “cute,” it was very well-promoted. To gain publicity quickly prior to the 1901 New York Auto Show, Olds sent Roy E. Chapin, who would later head Hudson Motor Car Company, on a journey from Detroit to Manhattan. Given the state of the road network in those days, a series of  rutted, muddy paths, it’s a miracle he was able to finish the journey at all, but he did (in seven and a half days), and the public relations stunt made Olds the hit of the show. Incredibly, the Curved Dash Oldsmobile averaged 14 miles per hour and used just 30 gallons of gasoline in the course of the journey.

Setting the stage for upcoming progress

The Olds Motor Works had already survived a disaster that year when the Detroit factory was damaged by fire. The warm reception at the New York show gave the company a new lease on life as it repaired to a new factory in Lansing on the location of the old state fairgrounds.

This factory utilized a progressive assembly system, the precursor to the recent assembly line. Instead of one group of artisans completing a whole car, individual chassis were placed on castered carts and then wheeled from assembly point to assembly point where different specific operations would be performed.

In addition to utilizing an assembly line process, Olds also used nearby businesses as suppliers to his enterprise. Some of the engines for the Curved Dash Runabout were manufactured by a machine shop operated by the Dodge brothers, who would eventually lend their name to a line of mid-priced automobiles, and the transmissions were delivered by Henry Leland’s Leland and Faulconer company. Of course, Leland would go on to found Cadillac and then Lincoln.

Using these techniques, Olds was able to build and market far more vehicles than his promising competitors. Curved Dash production reached its height  in 1903,  a 3,924 units.   However, the next year, with sales down, Olds argued with his board of directors over the direction a new model might take, and when he lost the discussion,  he quit the company. Later in 1904, he started another manufacturing concern he called the REO Car Company, using his initials as the calling card.

Olds served as president of that company until 1923 and watched as his former firm became a key building block in General Motors. The man who drew the blueprint for mass production died in the summer of 1950, knowing the car he produced half a century before would be ever-immortal if only because of the 1905 Gus Edwards ditty “In My Merry Oldsmobile.”

Tagged with: 1800's • General Motors • Model T • oldsmobile • vintage automobile

Filed under: Top Classic Cars