Winton Motor Carriage

1898 · Runabout with Underfloor Engine · Work 259 of 1,871

Winton Motor Carriage, 1898, Runabout with Underfloor Engine

A Winton Motor Carriage on a Cleveland street, panelled runabout body with padded bench, single-cylinder engine mounted under the floor, pneumatic tyres on wire wheels, tiller and warning bell.

What it was used for
Alexander Winton built petrol cars in Cleveland for affluent Americans. On 24 March 1898 he sold one to Robert Allison, a retired machinist from Port Carbon, Pennsylvania; according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History the price was $1,000. According to Cleveland Historical, 21 more cars followed that year; elsewhere the same page gives more than a hundred Wintons sold in 1898. A photograph at The Henry Ford shows an 1898 Winton delivery wagon. One buyer was James Ward Packard. He is said to have complained, and Winton reportedly challenged him to do better – in Cleveland Historical's cautious wording. On 6 November 1899, according to the Hagley Museum, the Packard brothers presented their first car in Warren, Ohio.
What was new
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History calls the sale to Allison the first of an American-made standard-model petrol car. That holds only with the qualifier "standard-model": the Duryea Motor Wagon Company had built 13 identical cars in 1896. A widely told story is uncertain: according to Cleveland Historical, Allison had seen an advertisement in Scientific American; but the well-known Winton advertisement there appeared, according to Rare Newspapers, only on 30 July 1898, four months after the purchase. Winton's successor firm gave the car to the Smithsonian in 1929.

Further reading