The Stanley Steamer: America's Legendary Steam Car (review)

Of all the makes of American automobiles to pass into history, none is more recognizable than the Stanley Steamer, even though the company's history has heretofore remained shrouded in myth and legend. But now we have Kit Foster's encyclopedic volume, The Stanley Steamer: America's Legendary Steam Car, the result of a six-year effort by the Stanley Museum in Kingfield, Maine, to document the story of the company and the Stanley family.

Museum director Sue Davis, together with the author and the underwriter, shared a common vision: the definitive work on Stanley Steamers. They accomplished this goal exceptionally well. Foster's 548-page book contains an immense amount of information and will long stand as the most comprehensive compilation of Stanley data. The book features a seventeen-page index, a six-page glossary (everyone must know how a "feed water automatic" works), a six-page bibliography, and nine separate appendixes, including production data and model specifications. To say that the book is lavishly illustrated is an understatement. There is an eleven-page list of the photos documenting virtually every model Stanley ever made. It is an antiquarian's delight.

The author and his research team—including H. James Merrick, the Stanley Museum's archivist—had access not only to the Stanley family archive held by the museum itself, but also to materials held by collectors and specialists around the world. Many contributed generously, testifying to their high regard for the Stanley Museum and its effort.

The book is almost entirely chronological and documents in sometimes excruciatingly minute detail the various Stanley Steamers built between 1898 and 1927. There are chapters on the Stanley family, the Stanley twins' early years, the first car, the Locomobile sale, return to the car business, major changes in production, racing—including the famous Rocket crashed by Fred Marriott on Ormond Beach in 1906—the sale of the company, and successively unsuccessful efforts to manufacture and sell steam cars in the late 1910s and 1920s.

Readers must understand this book in the context of the museum's mission: "The Stanley Museum keeps and shares the traditions of Yankee ingenuity and creativity as exemplified by the Stanley family. . . ." Christopher Hutchins, a founding member of the museum, underwrote the volume with the ideal of it being much more than a coffee-table book. He wanted to make sure that "20 years down the road the facts will be there to make the second book even more definitive." As delightful and informative as this book is—and it is extraordinarily delightful and informative—it is not an interpretive history. Nor can it be criticized for what it is not. It is exactly what its author and sponsor and publisher wanted. Here lies the invitation for historians to write an interpretive history of the Stanley Steamer.

Some years from now, when the next Stanley Steamer book is written, its author might explore why the Stanleys were so innovative at first and then became so conservative. For example, the boiler, burner, and engine in their 1901 car is virtually identical in general design to the 1925 car in my garage. With so many innovations in the steam-car field—Abner Doble drove past the factory to get their attention and they licensed patents to the White Sewing Machine Company for its steamer—why did the Stanleys fail to change? With innovative manufacturing, marketing, and financing methods burgeoning all around them, why did they continue essentially as they had begun? And, given their intransigence, how did the Stanleys survive for over a quarter-century—far longer than most other manufacturers?

This book hints at some answers. Having sold their photographic dry-plate business to George Eastman and their first steam-car business to two New York businessmen, the Stanleys appeared to be wealthy. Did their financial security and their Yankee personalities combine to allow them to continue operating this exceedingly eccentric enterprise? Let's hope that the second...