Ransom E. Olds

Ransom E. Olds was an American automobile pioneer whose uneven path from failed ventures to the curved-dash Olds helped establish mass production as a force in the young automobile industry. He imagined a car for ordinary buyers, and his company briefly led American manufacturers in sales; yet he left before the industry settled around the standardized, gasoline-powered automobile that Henry Ford would make familiar.## Identity and Early AmbitionOlds had been building automobiles since the mid-1880s, when he made his first vehicle: a three-wheeled car powered by steam. Success did not come quickly. After turning to gasoline-powered cars, he founded his own company in the early 1890s, but it foundered and left him nearly destitute. In 1899, he opened Olds Motor Works in Detroit with the help of financier Samuel Smith, who supplied nearly all the money. Olds gained a company—and a powerful backer to whom he had to answer.Their disagreement was fundamental. Smith favored large, expensive cars with elaborate features, aimed at the high end of the market. Olds was more interested in a car that could reach the middle class. In 1900, fewer than 15,000 cars were on American roads, so mass ownership was still an uncertain prospect. Olds nevertheless saw the possibility that an invention as revolutionary as the automobile could find a broad audience if someone could make it cheaply enough.## Experiment, Fire, and the Curved-Dash OldsOlds did not settle immediately on a single design. During the company’s first year he built eleven prototypes, experimenting with electric, steam, and internal-combustion power. The variety reflected a young industry in which no settled definition yet existed for what a car should look like or how it should run. As a business strategy, however, producing so many different models seemed likely to fail.In March 1901, a factory fire destroyed the prototypes. One escaped: it stood near the door and was light enough for the only man present to push to safety. It was the inexpensive model Olds had envisioned for a much larger market. The fire turned an accidental survivor into a decision. Olds hurried the design into production, and the resulting vehicle became known as the curved-dash Olds, its floor rising in a curve to form the dashboard.The car was ungainly rather than stylish: a horseless carriage started with a crank beside the seat and steered by a tiller, with two forward gears, one reverse, and a small single-cylinder engine. Its crucial advantage was price. At $600, it was within reach of many Americans. The surviving prototype thus gave concrete form to Olds’s central ambition: not a costly machine for a small elite, but a car that could be sold to a much broader public.## Manufacturing and PublicityOlds’s importance lay not only in the vehicle’s design but in recognizing how production and public attention could bring a new technology to market. He became one of the first automakers to purchase different parts from different manufacturers instead of making every component in-house. That approach helped establish a new way of organizing production, even as competitors developed their own methods: Cadillac used standardized components to reduce manufacturing time and cost, while Ford later transformed the industry through the moving assembly line and a relentless focus on making one kind of car cheaply.The market’s response to Olds’s car was swift. In 1903, Olds Motor Works sold 4,000 vehicles, more than any other American manufacturer; two years later, sales reached 6,500. The book identifies Olds as the designer of the first mass-produced automobile in American history. His achievement was commercial as well as mechanical: the car’s modest price addressed a potential mass market, while publicity helped persuade a skeptical public that automobiles were more than a gimmick.Olds devised stunts that made the machine itself evidence of its usefulness. He sent a young driver eight hundred miles across the country in an Olds to the Manhattan Auto Show, attracting attention from the press and automobile dealers while demonstrating that a car could make the journey. He also drove a souped-up Olds in the first race at Daytona Beach. These performances complemented the production strategy: the factory made a lower-priced car, and the publicity made its unfamiliar technology visible.## Departure and an Industry’s SettlementOlds did not remain to enjoy the early success for long. After only a few years, he left Olds Motor Works following a fight with Samuel Smith’s sons. He later started a new automobile company, REO, but, in the account’s judgment, the moment had passed him by. The founder who had helped make mass production possible would not be the person who completed its transformation into a dominant system.Henry Ford carried that transformation further. By the time of World War I, Ford made almost half the cars in America. Steam and electric vehicles had ceased to be serious contenders, and the bewildering variety of early automobile designs had narrowed to a familiar form: the Model T. The end of Olds Motor Works as an independent company was part of that wider consolidation; it had been acquired by General Motors. Olds’s career therefore contains a sharp contrast between initiating a market and controlling what it becomes. He helped show that a cheap, mass-produced car could sell, while Ford and other manufacturers built on the industrial changes that made one model and one production system increasingly dominant.## SignificanceOlds’s story serves as an example of how a new industry develops through a profusion of alternatives before the market narrows its choices. Early American automobile makers tried steam, batteries, and gasoline, and offered vehicles in many forms. The gasoline engine’s eventual dominance was not inevitable: electric cars at one point made up a third of the cars on American roads, and steam vehicles attracted more than a hundred manufacturers. The Stanley Steamer was renowned for both speed and comfort, reaching 127 miles per hour in 1905.The eventual advantage of gasoline-powered cars depended not simply on choosing an engine, but on reaching the mass market. Electric cars could not travel far enough without recharging; steam cars took a long time to heat. Meanwhile, manufacturers of gasoline cars invested heavily in mass production. Olds’s early use of separately sourced parts, Cadillac’s standardized components, and Ford’s moving assembly line mark successive approaches to lowering the cost and time of production. Olds’s achievement is therefore both a particular invention and an early move in a larger industrial contest whose winners were selected over time, not by a single collective decision. His career begins with many prototypes and ends against the image of one car everyone recognized: the Model T.