Samuel Smith

Samuel Smith is the financier who made it possible for Ransom E. Olds to establish Olds Motor Works, while also becoming a boss whose ambitions conflicted with Olds’s. Smith favored large, expensive cars for affluent buyers; Olds saw greater promise in a low-cost car for a much wider market. The disagreement frames the company’s early uncertainty and the different possibilities that its eventual success might have taken.

Financing Olds Motor Works

Olds had worked in the automobile business since the mid-1880s, when he built a three-wheeled steam-powered car. His later move into gasoline-powered vehicles and attempt to run a company of his own had not brought success: that earlier venture foundered and left him nearly destitute. He could start Olds Motor Works in Detroit in 1899 only after persuading Smith to provide nearly all its funding. Smith was therefore not a distant observer of the company’s choices; his money helped create the enterprise and gave him a position of authority within it.

A dispute over the market

The conflict between the two men concerned what Olds Motor Works ought to make. Smith wanted to serve the high end of the market with large, costly cars equipped with elaborate features. Olds, by contrast, was drawn to the possibility of a car ordinary buyers could afford. The distinction mattered in a market that was still tiny: in 1900, fewer than 15,000 cars were on American roads. Olds believed an invention as consequential as the automobile might find a mass audience if manufacturers could bring its price down; Smith’s preferred approach aimed at a smaller, wealthier clientele.

The surviving prototype and the company’s direction

Olds did not initially settle on one design. During the company’s first year he built eleven prototypes, ranging across electric, steam, and internal-combustion power. In March 1901, a fire destroyed the factory and nearly all of them. The sole surviving vehicle was the inexpensive model Olds had hoped could reach a broad market: it stood near the door and was light enough for the only man present to push to safety. Olds hurried it into production as the curved-dash Olds, a plain, ungainly car priced at $600. The account does not state how Smith responded to the fire or the decision to produce that model, but the outcome vindicated the mass-market possibility that had distinguished Olds’s vision from Smith’s.

Significance

Olds’s subsequent publicity efforts helped make the automobile seem practical to a skeptical public, and the company sold 4,000 vehicles in 1903, more than any other U.S. manufacturer; two years later it sold 6,500. The book identifies Olds as the designer of the first mass-produced automobile in American history. Smith’s role in that history is less as a continuing presence than as the financier whose support enabled the company—and whose contrasting preference makes clear that mass production was a contested direction, not an inevitable starting point.