(first posted 2/6/2015) It’s easy to forget that in the early years of the automobile, the internal combustion engine was not universally accepted as the way forward. Both steam and electric propulsion were popular, the main reason being that early IC engines were still rather cantankerous, and could be hard (and dangerous) to start with their hand cranks. Electrics were very popular as city cars, for obvious reasons. But when it came to over-the road performance, the steam engine was quite compelling, especially the ones built by the twins Francis E. and Freelan O. Stanley. When I saw this fine 1911 Stanley posted at the Cohort by monteverde3, I got fired up to tell the short story of its day in the sun.
image via Wikipedia
The Stanley twins started their company in 1897 after selling their photographic dry plate business to Kodak. In 1899, F.O. Stanley and his wife Flora set a world record for driving the first self-propelled vehicle up the brutal 7.6 mile Mount Washington, N.H. carriage road in one of their early steamers. Undoubtedly, they had to stop and refill the water tank a few times along the way, one of the biggest shortcomings of steamers (car and locomotives), until a condenser was fitted in 1915. In 1898 and 1899 they sold 200 cars, making Stanley the best selling automobile in those years.
The vertical boilers (mounted in the front on later Stanleys, like the 1911) were fired by gasoline, and later kerosene, which was substantially cheaper. They were quite light, yet could reach 650 psi, although the burner would automatically cut out at 500 psi. There was of course a safety valve, and there is no documented boiler explosion on a Stanley.
The engine was a simple (non-compound) twin cylinder, working directly on the rear axle on later models. Since steam engines make their greatest torque at starting speed, there was no need for a transmission. Horsepower output increased steadily to at least 20, although it was their silent and powerful starting torque that really gave them an advantage over the gasoline engine. That horsepower rating is actually for the boiler, what its continuous output is capable of generating. The engine could produce up to 100-125 hp for short bursts, before boiler pressure dropped. Fuel economy is about 10 mpg on kerosene, with gas used as the pilot burner.
That’s not to say they couldn’t be fast either. In 1906 a streamlined Stanley set the world land speed record for the fastest mile in 28.2 seconds (127.66 mph). This was not topped by an automobile until 1911, and by another steam-powered car until 2009.
My first exposure to Stanley Steamers was at the picturesque Hotel Stanley in Estes Park, Colorado, which F.O. Stanley built and opened in 1909 after spending a few summers in the clean, dry air of the Rocky Mountains due to tuberculosis. There are several Stanleys on display, and one summer they fired one up. Memorable, especially the gentle chuffing sound of the engine as it moved off.
Stanleys were favored in mountain settings, as one never had to worry about down-shifting, which was often very difficult to accomplish on the go in early automobiles with their crude transmissions. And there is usually plenty of water to be had in the mountains.
The hotel had several Stanley 12 passenger buses to ferry guests. These were very effective in their role, and some ended up in the Alps doing similar hard work.
F.O. Stanley sold his interest in the company in 1918 after F.E. Stanley’s death. That turned out to be good timing, as the company entered a terminal decline about then. The electric self-starter, driver’s impatience with firing up the boiler, and Henry Ford’s cheap Model T combined to make the steamer irrelevant. The Stanleys were expensive; this last year 1924 Model 740D (above) cost $3950 compared to less than $500 for a Ford. The steamer’s days were effectively over, although Doble, the most advanced steamer, kept at it until 1931. But that’s another story.
This site offers a wealth of detailed information on the Stanley Steamer: stanleymotorcarriage.com
Related reading:
CC 1917 Detroit Electric Brougham: Charged Up For Another Century
Check out Jay Leno’s video of his Steamer, it’s funnier than his Tonight Show schtick. The thing’s whistle sounds •exactly• like that of a steam locomotive.
Thanks for the Colorado tie-in. Almost ten years ago, (’07 maybe?) I was lucky enough to see a few at the YMCA near Estes Park steam around in honor of the camp’s 100th anniversary. I loved hearing that distinctive that steam-whistle. and their that locomotive ‘chuffing’ sound. They seemed very graceful compared to the A’s and T’s they were motoring with. If I remember correctly, these cars were used to carry guests all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon to Estes. There are some fairly steep grades and switchbacks along the way.
My great-aunt’s brothers, both ferried Stanley Hotel guests up the Big Thompson in steamers. They ended up developing fiberglass bodies for cars before WWII.
I’ve heard of the Stanley Steamer, and I believe Jay Leno did a video on a later Stanley Steamer car. But I’ve never seen one in person.
About the steam engine driving the rear axle directly: The early Stanleys had chain drive, like the colorized photo second from the top. Someone had patented using a chain to drive the wheels of a car and threatened to sue, so they redesigned their drivetrain to drive the wheels directly. The Stanley steam engine was located under the car, in an oil bath to provide splash oiling.
The Stanley brothers also built a schoolhouse in their hometown of Kingfield, Maine. Today the building houses a Stanley museum. I visited once. It’s a small museum, but for me it was a very memorable experience.
For some reason the system won’t let me edit my comment, even though the time hasn’t expired. I meant to add: I beleve that the schoolhouse was constructed of poured concrete. In addition to their other accomplishments, the Stanleys pioneered the construction of poured concrete buildings in the US.
As I recall, the Stanleys needed to construct a building which would’ve normally been made with cinderblocks at the time, but there was a masons strike. So they decided they could construct it themselves from poured concrete, and were successful. I just looked and couldn’t find this information on the internet. Possibly it’s something I learned when I visited the Stanley museum.
I believe Natalie Wood drove one-or at least a replica in “The Great Race”. Haven`t seen it in a while, but I remember Tony Curtis saying something like “it`s a good car for going on a Sunday drive or a picnic, but not up for long distance driving”. BTW,I just love that 1906 racer. Very steampunk, but thats the idea, right?
> Very steampunk, but thats the idea, right?
Except the Stanleys liked steam before it was punk. 🙂
I’m very gratified that you chose my photo of the big Stanley to use today. I shot it last summer at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth, Vermont. Note that it is actually parked at the curb, in keeping with the basic theme of the site, LOL.
Lest you think that this was just some museum piece that they trotted out from one of the barns on the property, rest assured that is not the case. It was driven by it’s owner, Don Bourdon, from Woodstock, Vermont to Plymouth on this fine late August day with a full complement of passengers, a round trip of about thirty miles.
Among other things, Don is a master boilermaker who also restored this magnificent Sentinel steam truck many years ago.
Thanks. I have another post on British steam lorries coming in a couple of hours.
If you have any more shots of the 1911 Stanley, I would add them to this post.
Sure, Paul. I’d be happy to. I have a few more shots of the Sentinel too, including one of how it looked before it was restored that I’ll post if you’d like.
I think under the fifth picture you mean 127.66 MPH.
You read my mind 🙂 Fixed now.
Researched this some for my Industrial Technology classes. They were a big early step in automobiles. Stanley Steemer is now the name of a carpet cleaning company here in the Houston area. I think of these cars every time I see one of their trucks.
Good article and interesting as always.
The carpet cleaning company is franchised, with locations nationwide. But its name is spelled differently: Stanley STEEMER” which in the usual commercialized Internet search usually comes up as the favored entry, over “Steamer.”
These old steamers are fascinating, and I can’t say I have ever been up close to an operating Stanley or any other. It is easy to see why steam would have seemed to be the way of the future. After all, it powered the railroads and most of the early mechanized farm equipment, so there would have been a huge and widely dispersed familiarity with it.
I still wonder that if Doble’s improvements in warm-up time had come a decade earlier than they did, steam might have gained the critical mass necessary for volume sales and production. But perhaps not, as steam has all but disappeared as a power source for mobile machinery.
I doubt steam cars would have lasted any longer.
The advantage of steam is its ability to run sans transmission and sans muffler/noise/vibration. But the disadvantage is the need for a boiler. When you optimize a boiler for small size, minimal weight, and high steam output, which is imperative in a passenger car, you end up with something that is EXTREMELY susceptible to scale buildup and this requires either:
a. lots of maintenance
b. very pure water
c. both a and b
Another issue with steam power is the constant supply of water needed. You can reclaim the spent steam from the exhaust of the steam engine but you can’t re-use it in a boiler until you:
a. condense it back to liquid
b. filter out the lube oil
.
This requires more on-board machinery, more weight, more complexity, more expense.
You may ask yourself why is it that a steam engine does not require a transmission, ie why does it have torque characteristics more like an electric motor and less like a gasoline motor?
The answer is because it has double acting cylinders timed correctly. A typical steam engine is two cylinders, each on its own crank throw 90 degrees apart from each other. This is universal for a double acting twin cylinder steam engine. A double acting steam engine would be comparable to a 1 stroke gasoline engine in that it has a power stroke every time it moves up and also every time it moves down. The steam is pushing on both the top and the bottom of the piston. This means the piston never “freewheels”, or coasts…except for the brief instant it is at TDC and BDC. To eliminate these two dead spots in the rotation, they add a second cylinder 90 degrees leading or lagging the first cylinder. Therefore, a double acting twin cylinder is always producing torque in a steady manner just like an electric motor.
The internal combustion engine simplified things, and thus made cars affordable. There is a very good reason why the first airplane was not steam powered and that reason is weight. Basically, steam power only makes sense when the extra weight does not matter much, which is stationary engines, ships, and trains(or track vehicles). Of those 3 applications, only 2 still employ steam engines(in the form of steam turbines) in large numbers…ships and stationary engines.
great points, John.
Like with any other reciprocating engine, more cylinders gives you a smoother power delivery. Many marine reciprocating (and some locomotive) steam engines were three or four cylinders, often as compounds.
If the Stanleys had been compounds, theoretically it would have extracted more energy and reduced the work done by the condenser. Compounding probably would have required a prohibitively large and heavy LP cylinder though.
Now, they clean carpet….
I would like to know how about the engine valvetrain on the Stanley cars.
To optimize HP and TQ relative to engine speed, variable-speed reciprocating steam engines require adjustment of the cutoff ratio, effectively the valve timing. This is also how steam engines reverse direction without a transmission. On Steam Locomotives, cutoff is adjusted by the skilled hand of the locomotive operator. How was this done on an automobile?
Also, what are the bore, stroke, and maximum operating RPM of a Stanley engine?
There were a few Stanley’s and at least one White steamer running around at last years Old Car Festival at The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. The whole festival was surreal to me, especially watching and hearing the steamers roll around.
A few stills taken from Iphone video:
Another.
Rear.
White steamer
So many questions! Can you let it idle overnight for commuting to work in the morning? What fuel economy did it get? Would two more pistons mean more torque at the wheel? AWD?
I’m thinking that the IC engine will be gone in 100 years, a museum curiosity like the Steamer. Cars will be all electric. I envision a battery with mandated dimensions and specifications that will be used in all vehicles. It can be pulled and reconnected within a few minutes at the station, about the same length of time it takes to fill up now. You’ll pay for the recharge plus a small pro rated surcharge for wear and replacement of the battery.
You mean keep the boiler fired up overnight? I don’t think so. That was the one big drawback of steamers, although Doble did finally build a boiler with a flashboiler that cut the steam-up phase down to as little as 30 seconds.
I don’t have details on fuel economy. Undoubtedly they switched from gasoline to much cheaper kerosene to reduce fuel costs. generally, steam engines are not as efficient as IC engines, but there’s a lot of ifs to that. Keep in mind that early IC engines were very inefficient too. Early cars had quite high fuel costs, and gasoline was not really cheap back then.
Check john’s comment up the thread a bit about steam engine torque.
Update: here’s a site with gobs of info: http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/FAQ/index.htm They say about 10 mpg.
The most efficient steam engines ever devised are modern coal fired power plants. These are gargantuan stationary steam engines that consist of multi-stage turbines instead of pistons. They are used to spin massive 3 phase generators that send electricity to all the powerlines in the grid.
The most efficient of these are those which employ super-critical boilers and the still-in-development ultra super critical boilers. There has never been an engine of any kind ever built that exceeds the efficiency of these…as far as I know. They are more efficient than any IC engine…of which the most efficient of which are the colossal marine diesels by Wartsilla(sp?) of Finland…the modern coal fired power plant is more efficient than these…to my knowledge.
Because the boilers were filled with water, if daytime air temperatures were consistently below freezing, the owner of a steam car had two choices : either drain it dry and store the car for the winter (a very common practice for all types of cars in the earliest of motoring), or leave the pilot light lit overnight.
I’ve heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of people who owned a steamer and a gas car leaving the steamer “on” overnight. Not only would it be ready for the road more quickly the following morning.but it would keep the garage or barn warm enough that the gasoline car wouldn’t freeze up either and be easier to crank.
I have also heard stories of barns burning down in the middle of the night. 😉
when in high school I was working at a gas station/garage. One day a guy pulls up in one of these, pretty much just like the lede image.
Didn’t need gas, though. needed water 🙂
Fascinating reading .
-Nate
Amazing machines. Thanks for the link, I always wanted to know more about these interesting automobiles.
Very fascinating piece–for example I never knew these cars did not require transmissions. Quite an elegant solution for the time, even if the technology did not last very long!
Not needing a transmission is something shared with two other types of potential automotive propulsion systems. Series wound electric motors and hydraulic motors (turbines) both have max torque at start. Obviously everything has its’s limitations and I have learned quite a bit more about the drawbacks of the steam powered automobile than I knew before. In spite of everything I think there is more potential for EVs with range extenders than anything else. Hydraulic hybrid systems have been trying to find success in trucks for some time now.
Nice article Paul, but both links to the Detroit Electric are broken, and Google search’s link to it is broken too. Can’t figure out why. Did the link change for the upcoming repost maybe??
Yes, that’s why. It’s re-running Saturday. I fixed it for now.
I wonder if there’s a scaling issue with steam engines, which makes a car-scale steamer fundamentally too inefficient in the long run. Certainly the boiler loses heat proportional to its surface area, which increases per unit of volume as the boiler gets smaller.
There were a few experimental eco-steamers tried in the 1970s, since external combustion can be made very clean, and you can run a steamer on darned near anything that burns.
The only way I can think for a younger generation to hear about Stanley is…
Stanley! From Cars series…
There used to be a little old-car museum near my home. You had to have heard about it by word of mouth, because it didn’t advertise. I learned of it when I learned that they fixed cars — I scheduled mine in for an oil change (seriously, so close to my house) and there were all the cars.
The mechanic was primarily the curator of the collection, owned by some wealthy dude who actually lived in Arizona. The owner wanted all of his cars to be runners, so the curator kept them running and drove them all from time to time.
Including a Stanley Steamer. The curator told me, as he changed the oil on my ex-wife’s Corolla, that he drove it up and down the little road his shop was on, about twice a year. Told him to call me the next time he did that, as I’d like to watch. He didn’t, of course.
A Stanley (a/k/a The Rolling Fog Bank) getting started on a very humid morning during the Stanley club’s tour in Bennington, Vermont in June, 2008….
There is a large collection of these cars (15 according to Wikipedia) at the Auburn Heights Preserve in Delaware. If you are in the mid-Atlantic area it is a worth a trip. Went there with my family in December. They occasionally have special event days when they pull one or two of the cars out and give people a ride around the property. Here is a picture of their 12-passenger bus, which was one of the vehicles they were running when I visited in December. Website is http://auburnheights.org/.
There is an annual steam tractor show here, and it is not unusual for a Stanley automobile to show up.
I got to see the speed of these once. I was following a group in a touring car like the top photo when the driver decided to pass a slower car ahead. The best part was the cheery toot-toot he blew on the whistle as he went by them.
I volunteer to run stationary steam engines at one of these shows, and I volunteer to maintain their boiler in the off season. I used to have my own boiler shop and used to maintain my own R-stamp, A-stamp, and PP-stamp. I no longer have, but used to have all the antique tools to repair antique riveted boilers and to replace antique threaded stay rods…as well as all the tube expanders and beaders to install boiler tubes.
I was coming out of the AAA office when a steamer rolled in. Only thing I remember was how quiet it was. Had the boiler at the back.
I thought they were just used for carpet cleaning.
♫ Call 1-800 STEAMER, Stanley Steamer is cars not cleaners! ♫
Heehee! Now that will be stuck in my head for several hours.
Is that racer on the sands at Daytona?
I know we’re here to discuss cars, not literature, but was the Hotel Stanley the one that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining? Or am I thinking of a different hotel?
Yes, it inspired the Overlook Hotel in the book. The Stanley Kubrick film of the same name used the Timberline Lodge in Oregon for exterior shots.
Back in the mid 70’s I was walking down Main St. in Buzzards Bay Mass. when 3 Stanley Steamers had to stop for a red light. I darn near wet my pants at the sight of not one, not two but three Stanley’s on the road making steam. I’ll never forget the gentle chuff chuff sound of them departing on the green light. As the day went on, more Stanley’s were seen on the road as well as a few Locomobiles! Soon it seemed like a brass era car was expected to be seen regularly. Crane, Simplex, Brush, Oldsmobile, Buick, Ford, Winston and the list went on. As luck would have it, I visited Martha’s Vineyard the next day and all of those brass era cars that I saw and a whole lot more were ferried over to the island for a brass era tour. I don’t want to exaggerate numbers but there were scores and maybe hundreds of brass era museum quality cars in use that day. I saw about a dozen Stanley’s under power. Nearly 50 years later that time is still fresh in my mind.
Sweet looking cars; I approve. Attended a classic car show many years ago in Sussex, England. Someone brought their vintage steam driven vehicle (no idea what model it was). After a few hours building up the pressure, they hitched a fully loaded 45 foot container to it and pulled it around the grass paddock to loud cheers of the assembled crowd.
If it was built in England, I’m sure they would have included a tap to supply hot water for their cups of tea. British people are “bonkers” and I love ’em for it!
Great story! Thanks.
I grew up in Estes Park, we had our high school prom at the Stanley Hotel six months after Stephen King stayed there. ( the place was widely considered to be haunted, long before The Shining…)
Been in the lobby hundreds of times and was always fascinated by the car on display in the lobby. Very primitive, but also a marvel of engineering. The Stanley Bros. had it figured out very well.
I saw a Stanley Steamer at our local car show a number of years back. It was driven in by the owner. No trailer queen this was. The 1st time I saw one outside of a museum. It looked to be in good original shape, no museum piece. We had lots of questions for the owner about the car. He did say on average it takes about 45 minutes to start up the car. If someone is really good at it (he confessed he was not) one could start it from cold in as quick as 20 minutes. That car was very quiet and had no problems keeping up with traffic on a 55 mph posted road. Not sure about the brakes though.