It was the noise that did it. Not the usual rumble of an old internal combustion engine but a sort of phut, phut, phut. It immediately caught my attention and made me a fan of a once revered car that was destined to become an automotive dead end.
It was a Stanley Steam Car, more than a hundred years old and a vehicle in a class of its own. It made stately progress, leaving behind a wispy trail of water vapour. It was magnificent.
American twins Francis and Freelan Stanley made their first car in 1897 with the money they made from selling their photographic plate business to Eastman Kodak. It was only 12 years earlier that Karl Benz had come up with what is considered to be the first ever production car – his petrol-powered Benz Patent Motorwagen that looked more like a motorised bath chair.
In their first two years the Stanleys sold 200-plus cars – more than any other American carmaker at the time – before setting up the Stanley Motor Carriage Company in 1902, a year before Henry Ford set up shop and threw a metaphorical spanner in the works.
Steam power had hit the road in the mid-1800s when the traction engine took over from the ubiquitous horse. But shovelling coal into a firebox was no good for the budding motorist.
The Stanley steam car‘s secret was that its boiler was warmed by a petrol burner and later by kerosene. It was clean and efficient and in 1911 a Stanley steam car set a world record for the fastest mile in an automobile – at 127mph! For six years it was the fastest car on the planet.
The drawbacks: it could take half an hour or more to raise enough steam to turn the wheels and you might only get two miles to the gallon – of water – until they started fitting condensers to re-use expelled vapour and give you up to 10mpg. A gallon of kerosene might take you 10 miles, but it was cheap. The various valves needed careful maintenance.
“Easy to drive, cheap to run, simple to control,” argued the UK dealers’ ads. “Silent, powerful, fast. No gear changing worries. Just push the pedals with the feet and the gears are in. No trouble from vibration. The motion is a silent, fast glide.”
In the Western Morning News in 1921, Devon dealer Chenhalls boasted: “Unapproachable by any petrol car on the planet.”
But it wasn’t long before improvements to petrol powered cars made them so much more convenient, faster on the road and – crucially – considerably cheaper. In today’s money you’d have paid the equivalent of £25,000 for an entry-level Stanley in 1909. You could pick up a new Model T Ford for less than today’s £9,000.
The Stanleys mounted a PR campaign calling the petrol engine the “internal explosion engine” and pointing out the huge number of moving parts to go wrong in a petrol car compared to their claim of just 37 in a Stanley. But the last Stanley Steamer was made in 1924.
The company had been sold to a nephew-in-law after Francis died in 1918 when his own Stanley car hit a pile of logs as he swerved to avoid farm wagons travelling two abreast.
There were a few other steam car makers, all of them across the Pond, and one even began retro-fitting steam engines to a variety of petrol cars. The last one went out of business in 1930.
Today it is reckoned there are around 600 Stanley Steamers still on the world’s roads out of the 11,000 or so that were built. In the UK there is a thriving Steam Car Club of Great Britain with more than a hundred Stanley owners plus other makes and some one-off conversions including a steam powered Morris Minor, a couple of Morgan lookalikes, a steam powered milk float and even a moped converted to steam. Pre-Covid they held regular meet-ups and tours.
These days you can only see the eye-catching Stanley Steamer in action at vintage events. That’s where I saw my first one; a 1911 example in gleaming green, being driven by its County Durham owner at the South Tyne Steam Rally in Northumberland a few years ago. If you’re ever at a rally keep an eye out for one – or rather, an ear. It’s a real treat.