Background
Alexander Winton, III was born on June 20, 1860, in Grangemouth, Scotland, the son of Alexander Winton, II and Helen Fea.
Alexander Winton, III was born on June 20, 1860, in Grangemouth, Scotland, the son of Alexander Winton, II and Helen Fea.
Winton, III obtained a common-school education in his native town.
At twenty he emigrated to the United States and found work in the marine engine department of the Delamater Iron Works, New York City. After a short stay there he obtained a position as an assistant engineer of an ocean steamship and continued in this work for more than three years. In 1884, he gave up the sea and removed to Cleveland, Ohio, where he began a bicycle-repair business. In the succeeding six years he built up a reputation, and at the same time perfected and patented a number of improvements in bicycle mechanisms. These included a ball-bearing device that made balls run on flat surfaces, an invisible crank-shaft fastening, and an invisible handle-bar clamp. Rather than sell these inventions to manufacturers, in 1890 Winton, III established the Winton Bicycle Company and successfully pursued the business of manufacturing bicycles for more than ten years. While thus engaged, the talk of "horseless carriages" reached him, and as early as 1893 he began giving attention to gasoline engine design for automotive use. In 1895 he built a gasoline motor bicycle and in September 1896 completed his first gasoline motor car. This had a two-cyclinder vertical engine with friction clutch, electric ignition, carburetor, regulator to control the engine speed, engine starter, and pneumatic tires. In spite of the ridicule of his banker and his friends, Winton, III proceeded immediately with the building of a second and improved automobile. In March 1897 he formed the Winton Motor Carriage Company, and in July of that year made with his new car the first reliability run in the history of the American automobile - a nine-day trip from Cleveland to New York by a circuitous route, totalling 800 miles in 78 hours and 43 minutes actual running time. Winton's hopes of interesting capital in his machine by this test of endurance were not immediately realized, but before the year was out he had sold sufficient stock in his company to proceed with the construction of four cars. The first of these was completed and sold, March 24, 1898, for a thousand dollars - the first sale in America of a gasoline automobile made according to set manufacturing schedules. Winton, III repurchased this car several years later, and it is now in the National Museum at Washington. He sold the other three machines soon after the first and had sold twenty-five more by the end of the year. All these cars were constructed in accordance with his general motor vehicle patent, No. 610, 466, granted to him on September 6, 1898, one of the early American patents in the automotive field.
Winton, III designed, built, and raced automobiles both in the United States and abroad, his racer, "Bullet No. 1, " establishing a record of a mile in 52. 2 seconds in 1902 at Daytona Beach, Florida. This was the first time the beach at Daytona was used for automobile racing. All Winton's automobiles after 1904 were equipped with four-cylinder engines and all after 1907 with six-cylinder engines. He was the first in America to experiment with straight eight-cylinder engines (1906), and as early as 1902 had designed external and internal brakes on the same brake-drum, the latter but one of the many innovations introduced by him which have become common. With his automobile company a success, Winton, III whose greatest interest lay in engine design and experiment, about 1912 turned his attention to the Diesel engine. That year he organized the Winton Gas Engine and Manufacturing Company, and began the manufacture of improved Diesel engines for marine, industrial, municipal, and railroad power plants. He also organized and was president of the Electric Welding Products Company and of the Lindsay Wire Weaving Company, both in Cleveland. With all these activities, he continued to act as president of the automobile company, maintaining the Winton car in the front rank of American automobiles until February 11, 1924, when this business was completely liquidated in favor of the Diesel engine business. Several years before his death he disposed of this and retired from all active industrial connections. Alexander Winton, III died on June 21, 1932, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Alexander Winton, III was an active member of a number of technical and business associations, including the Interlake Yachting Association.
In 1883, Alexander Winton, III married Jeanie Muir McGlashan, they had six children. In 1906, he married LaBelle McGlashan and they had two children: LaBelle and Clarice. In 1927 Winton, III married Marion Campbell and divorced in 1930; and in 1930, he married Mary Ellen Avery.