By Mary Giorgio
On a hot July day in 1894 Elwood Haynes test drove his first automobile. The Portland, Indiana, native went on to become the first American to successfully create a commercially-viable automobile.
As a young man, Haynes showed an aptitude for metallurgy. He enrolled at the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science in Massachusetts in 1878. He later attended Johns Hopkins University for one year.
Returning to Indiana, Haynes became a field superintendent for gas and oil companies during Indiana’s gas boom. He also began experimenting with automobile prototypes.
Soon after, Haynes settled in Kokomo, Indiana. In 1894, with the help of Elmer and Edgar Apperson, Haynes built a prototype automobile named the “Pioneer.” The car utilized a one-cylinder, one-horsepower gasoline engine similar to one Haynes had seen modeled at the Chicago World’s Fair years earlier. The car weighed over 800 pounds, only held one person and didn’t have a reverse gear.
A man’s work in life is not very great at best, when compared with the sum total of human effort, and after all, it is the good that we may be able to do for our fellow-men and not the glory of achievement that really counts.
—Elwood Haynes