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Steam's Last Stand

In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…

Émile Levassor and René Panhard (both graduates of the École centrale des arts et manufactures, an engineering institute in Paris), met as managers at a machine shop that made woodworking and metal-working tools. Starting a combustion car of that era also required procedures long-since streamlined away—cranking the engine to life, adjusting the carburetor choke and spark plug timing—but even at the time most writers considered steamers more challenging to operate. [12] David Beasley, The Suppression of the Automobile: Skulduggery at the Crossroads(New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) argues that oil interests favored the combustion engine, but they had little reason to do so given that all steam vehicles from the late-1890s on burned petroleum-based fuels.

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