The Return Of Steam

Even after the death of the Model E, a handful of inventors kept pursuing steam-car research, seeking the same advantages that attracted Abner Doble: silence, power, simplicity, fuel efficiency, and low emissions. Their efforts all foundered, not only because of auto-industry indifference but also because of the weight of steam engines and the water they require and drivers’ unwillingness to wait half a minute to get up a head of steam.

In 1968, though, a renaissance in steam-car technology suddenly began, amid newfound concern about the pollution caused by internal-combustion engines.

The U.S. government had recently imposed strict emissions limits on automobiles, and in May 1968 several federal agencies held hearings on alternative power plants. Among the first to speak out in favor of steam were Calvin E. and Charles J. Williams, twins from Ambler, Pennsylvania, who for years had been using profits from their family’s construction business to experiment with steam. They drove their steampowered convertible, on which they dubiously claimed to have spent $2 million, to Washington and invited Sen. Edwin Muskie, Sen. Warren Magnuson, and others to go for spins. Bureaucrats were impressed by the vehicle’s silence, acceleration, and supposed 30-mpg fuel efficiency (on kerosene). The Williamses maintained in committee hearings that steamers burn fuel more slowly and steadily, and thus more completely, than internalcombustion engines. Steam power, they said, is also more mechanically efficient.

That same year, Don E. Johnson, the 36-year-old president of Steam Dynamics, in Mesa, Arizona, argued that his 150-pound, 150-horsepower steam engine was much lighter than an equally powerful conventional one. He could make this assertion by ignoring all the ancillary parts of the engine, such as the boiler, burner, and tanks. Johnson had originally developed his engine for helicopters but believed it would work just as well in automobiles.

Ford and General Motors had already gotten into the act, albeit in lukewarm fashion. In March 1968 Ford had announced a joint steam development program with the Thermo Electron Corporation, of Waltham, Massachusetts—the home of Abner Doble’s first laboratory. GM, meanwhile, worked with another start-up steam company, Energy Systems, Inc., and offered to supply several steampowered sedans to the California Highway Patrol for in-service testing.

The man who made the most noise about steam, though, was the brash and overconfident William P. Lear of Learjet fame. At a decommissioned military base outside Reno, Nevada, Lear developed several types of steam and steamlike engines. One was what he called an “involute expander,” which used intermeshing helical screws. Another was a 12cylinder opposed-piston engine based on the British Napier Deltic diesel; the cylinders formed side-by-side triangles. A third was the Lear Vapor Turbine System, which involved a sealed turbine that used not steam but a revolutionary new fluid called Learium. Unfortunately, Learium was never developed.

In the end Lear did build a steampowered Chevrolet Monte Carlo and a steam-turbine bus. With his usual hyperbole, he announced plans for a steam-powered Indianapolis race car, and he even scraped out an oval track behind his warehouse, supposedly to test it. But because he had so many different projects going—plus horrific problems with his engineering staff—nothing ever came of any of his steam-powered visions.

In October 1973 the Arab oil embargo hit, forcing automakers to turn their attention away from steam to the more immediate challenges of downsizing and making the internal-combustion engine cleaner and more fuel-efficient. They succeeded well enough to put steam out of contention. Despite the progress some engineers believed they were making between 1968 and 1973, steam cars continue to pose seemingly insuperable challenges, principal among them being fuel economy. There’s no promise of future improvement, as there is with electric cars, in which batteries are being made smaller and smaller.

So steam cars have been left mostly to hobbyists, and they will likely never again emerge as a serious automotive alternative.