Ransom Eli Olds was a pioneer of the American automobile industry.
Background
Ransom Olds was born on June 3, 1864, in Geneva, Ohio, the fourth son and youngest of the five children of Pliny Fisk Olds and Sarah (Whipple) Olds. Both parents came of New England stock. The father, son of a Congregational minister, owned a blacksmith and machine shop in Geneva, but gave it up in 1870 and moved his family to Cleveland, where he took a job as superintendent in an ironworks. Ill health forced his resignation four years later, and after a less-than-successful try at farming in Parma, Ohio, and a second sojourn in Cleveland he moved in 1880 to Lansing, Michigan, and again opened a machine shop.
Education
After ten grades of school Ransom Olds undertook a six months' course at Bartlett's Business College (1882 - 1883).
Career
After college Ransom was engaged in bookkeeping at his father's shop. He became a partner in the firm in 1885. Stimulated by successful manufacture of a small steam engine heated by ordinary gasoline stove burners, Olds built a three-wheel self-propelled vehicle in 1887, and five years later a four-wheel, dual-engine horseless carriage powered on the locomotive principle. Increasingly interested in the internal combustion engine, Olds adopted it for his third vehicle, completed in 1896. The following year he formed the Olds Motor Vehicle Company and, to supersede the family machine shop, the Olds Gasoline Engine Works. The engine company prospered, but the motor vehicle company did not. Thus in 1899, with financing by Samuel L. Smith, a wealthy lumberman, the assets of the latter were incorporated into a new company, the Olds Motor Works, and operations transferred to Detroit. Smith, with 95 percent of the stock, maintained control, but Olds became vice-president and general manager. After several unsuccessful box-front models, Olds designed the popular and stylish Oldsmobile, in which the floor curved upward in front to form the dashboard. Fire destroyed the Olds plant in 1901, forcing the company to rely for production on subcontractors, a stimulus that led such future automotive leaders as Henry Ford, William C. Durant, and Henry Leland into the business and established Detroit as the nation's automotive capital.
The curved-dash, "merry" Oldsmobile, low-priced and easily constructed, was the first automobile produced in quantity with a progressive assembly system and pointed the way to mass production through the application of interchangeable parts. In marketing innovations, Olds introduced the policy of insisting that dealers pay cash for cars delivered to them, a practice which became standard and provided much-needed immediate capital for the fledgling industry. In 1904, when Smith insisted on substituting a larger and more expensive touring car for the curved-dash model, Olds resigned and, with financial backing, formed the Reo Motor Car Company (a name derived from his initials) in Lansing, himself taking the position of president and general manager. To ensure a nearby and steady source of parts, he organized several subsidiary firms: the National Coil Company, Michigan Screw Company, and Atlas Drop Forge Company. By 1907 the Reo company had gross sales of $4 million and Olds was again among the leaders of the industry. The following year William Durant proposed a merger of the Reo, Buick, Ford, and Maxwell-Briscoe companies, but the plan collapsed when first Ford and then Olds each demanded $3 million in cash. Reo continued to expand, adding the Reo Motor Car Company of Canada and, in 1910, the Reo Motor Truck Company.
The company's share of the automobile market nevertheless began to decline, despite the introduction in 1911 of a new model, "Reo the Fifth, " which boasted a windshield, a top, and a self-starter. Four years later Olds was replaced as general manager by Richard H. Scott, an associate of long standing. Olds played a lesser role in Reo's affairs after 1915. He gave increasing time to other ventures, including the Ideal Power Lawn Mower Company to manufacture a mower he had invented, the Capital National Bank (forerunner of the Michigan National Bank), and R. E. Olds Company, an investment firm. His most ambitious project was Oldsmar, a Florida community on Tampa Bay, begun in 1916, which he sought to make into an agricultural and industrial settlement for people of modest means. He divided the 37, 000-acre tract into rural and urban sections, provided farmland and bungalow sites, and attracted several factories, but by the early 1920's it was clear that Oldsmar was not a success, and Olds began to liquidate his $4. 5 million investment. Olds resigned the presidency of the Reo Company in 1923 for the honorary position of chairman of the board.
He became concerned, later, with the severe effects of the depression on the company and successfully waged a proxy fight against Scott in 1933. Although briefly in control again, Olds failed to persuade the company's executive committee to manufacture a cheap four-cylinder car or to adopt the Hill diesel engine, in which he had a substantial stake. As a result, he resigned the chairmanship of the committee in December 1934 and, two years later, his position as chairman of the board. In his business philosophy and career, Olds typified both the early automobile manufacturer and the traditional entrepreneur. His talents were mechanical rather than administrative, and he concerned himself primarily with technological improvements. He applied his imaginative genius to promotional schemes as well, like automobile races and cross-country trips, though not all were successful. As an employer he was benevolent and paternalistic. He provided his workers with insurance programs, medical services, recreation facilities, job training, and citizenship education; but he consistently opposed organized labor and the union shop, which he thought were detrimental to individual initiative and competitive capitalism.
His philanthropies, which were modest in scale, were chiefly religious or educational. He gave an engineering building to Michigan State University in East Lansing and a science hall to Kalamazoo College. In 1942 he bought the Daytona Terrace Hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida, and converted it into an interdenominational home for retired ministers and missionaries. Robust and active to the end of his life, Olds died of cancer in Lansing at the age of eighty-six and was buried in the family mausoleum at Lansing's Mount Hope Cemetery.
Achievements
Ransom Olds invented and produced the first mass-produced automobile, the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, in 1901, using the modern assembly line.
Ransom Olds was founder of the Reo Motor Car Company in Lansing, himself taking the position of president (1904-1923). Later the company expanded, adding the Reo Motor Car Company in Canada and the Reo Motor Truck Company.
Olds also founded the National Coil Company, Michigan Screw Company, Atlas Drop Forge Company, Ideal Power Lawn Mower Company, the Capital National Bank, and R. E. Olds Company.
He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1946.
Membership
Ransom Olds was a member of the Republican party.
Personality
A Baptist, Olds neither smoked nor drank.
Connections
Olds married Metta Ursula Woodward on June 5, 1889. They had four children, only two of whom - Gladys Marguerite and Bernice Estelle - survived infancy.
