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From Primedia Publications

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The Stanley Steamer
A museum in Maine recalls the days when steam-driven automobiles where the wave of the future.

By Tom Bross


	F.E. and F.O. Stanley take their first steamer for a ride around Newton, Massachusetts, in 1897.

On a fine September day in 1897, Francis Edgar (F.E.) Stanley and his twin brother, Freelan Oscar (F.O.), appeared on Maple Street in Watertown, Massachusetts, driving a most peculiar contraption. Although strange enough to terrify a passing horse, the tiller-steered vehicle was actually quite silent, merely making muffled pumping sounds and a faintly audible, puffing whoosh of steam. It wasn't the first steam-powered car—elsewhere in the Boston area, Sylvester Roper had pieced together a steam-driven "quadricycle" 34 years before—but Stanley's scratch-built vehicle was the first of what would ultimately become the most famous make.

The genesis for Stanley's project was provided by his wife, Augusta, who simply couldn't master her wobbly bicycle. "Don't worry, Gusti," her husband said. "I'll make us something we can ride in side by side." At the time, "motor carriages" had just begun to capture national attention, sparked by developments in Europe. Germany's Karl Benz had introduced a three-wheeled internal-combustion gas buggy in 1885, and the French Daimler-Panhards debuted nine years later.

Setting to work in a friend's garage, F.E. pondered the merits of gasoline versus steam. Gasoline engines were considered smelly, oily, noisy and difficult to start. They also required cumbersome clutches and transmissions. Steam, on the other hand, had a long record as a reliable means of propulsion. Scotsman James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769; Robert Fulton's Clermont steamboat made its inaugural run on the Hudson River in 1807. By century's end, steam was a universal, performance-proven power source.

Within a year of his machine's debut on Watertown's streets, F.E. completed a second steamer for his brother. In November of 1898, the promotion-savvy twins won a Boston automobile show's speed and hill-climbing trials at the Charles River Park Velodrome in neighboring Cambridge. Suddenly, contrary to what they claimed was "an interesting hobby, not a trade," F.E. and F.O. were in the motorcar business, receiving around one hundred orders for Stanley Steamers in the following weeks. Needing Watertown space to manufacture them, they purchased an old bicycle factory on today's Hunt Street. The sign nailed onto their small factory read "Stanley Dry Plate Co."—strong evidence that these Yankee tinkerers and entrepreneurs had been running an entirely different kind of operation before steam cars rolled into their lives.

The Stanley twins had been born in Kingfield in western Maine's Carrabassett Valley. The brainy sons of intellectual parents, "Frank" and "Freel" started their careers as teachers. F.E.'s invention of the airbrush for portraiture in 1874 led to success as a studio photographer, and in 1886 he and his brother patented a dry-plate coating machine. The brothers formed a partnership in 1884, running plants in Lewiston, Maine, and Montreal, Quebec, to manufacture dry plates for U.S. and Canadian customers. Business boomed to such an extent that in 1889 they moved to Watertown, putting them closer to suppliers and into larger facilities. The brothers are still remembered in Kingfield, now home to the Stanley Museum. It's housed in the circa-1903 Stanley School, a building the twins designed and donated to Kingfield. Amid copious old-auto memorabilia and pictorial archives, visitors can see two beautifully polished Steamers on permanent display, both of them five-passenger touring sedans: 1910's Model 70 (original cost $1,500) and 1916's Model 725 ($2,200).

Additional space is devoted to F.E.'s photographic equipment and airbrush portraits as well as the handcrafted, concert-quality violins the twins built as another "interesting hobby."

"The brothers made their fortune in photography and their fame in steam cars," says Sue Davis of the Stanley Museum. Only a year after entering the automobile business, they sold their steam-car operation and patents for $250,000 to what became the Locomobile Company of America. They agreed to stay on as vice presidents/manufacturing-promotion consultants during the next year.

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Tom Bross is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Boston and travels extensively on assignments throughout New England and Europe.

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