Flying cars might seem futuristic, but they are, in fact, an old idea that—unlike electric cars—didn’t make it into our current era. In this article, the Director of Collections of the Detroit Historical Society provides a historian’s perspective on automotive innovation and the significance of cars in our culture. You’ll also learn how to move non-drivable cars without involving your entire workforce (or breaking their backs).
For more than a century, the Detroit Historical Society has been dedicated to preserving local history and enabling current and future Detroiters to better understand the people, places, and events that helped shape their lives. With the automotive industry intimately connected to the ‘Motor City’, classic cars comprise a significant part of the museum’s artefacts.
That suits Director of Collections Jeremy Dimick perfectly since cars have been his passion from an early age. Below, he shares his thoughts on everything from flying cars to the best methods for moving the museum’s ‘historic paperweights’.
Jeremy Dimick from the Detroit Historical Society on…
…the mission of the DHS
Our mission is to tell Detroit stories and why they matter. So, everything in our collection should be directly related to Detroit in one way or another. When the curators started pulling the car collection together in the 1950s, they wanted to capture things made in the Detroit style of manufacturing. To have a collection specifically focusing on Detroit's role in car production seems like a no-brainer being the Motor City, but we're the only institution telling that story. I think the real strength of our collection is capturing things that used to be absolutely everywhere and are now nowhere. We love that stuff.
…the magic of automobiles
Cars bring back a lot of memories for people. It's like time travel. They look in the back seat and see where they sat as a kid and the exact ashtray they used to fiddle around with or something like that going down the road. They’re such an important part of our lives, in both an active way and a passive way. They just get in your brain. To be able to preserve something that someone might have completely forgotten is pretty special.
…how automotive innovation is cyclical
Everything old is new again. We're right on the cusp of a big electric car revolution. We're fortunate to have a 1914 Anderson Detroit Electric in our collection. These things are cyclical. As a historian, you pull your hair out and think, oh my gosh, had we just stuck with electric cars at the beginning, where would we be now?
…a fascinating figure from the past
The Stout Scarab is one of my favourite items in our collection. It was designed and engineered in the 1930s by a guy named William ‘Bill’ Bushnell Stout, who got his start in aircraft engineering and is actually the guy behind the Ford Trimotor plane. The Scarab is kind of a prototype minivan. It was one of the first rear-mounted engine vehicles produced in America on any scale.
There were 30 of these built in 1935, just designed from a real passenger standpoint. All the seats inside could be moved around into any different configuration. You could play cards, you could fold the table down, and play a board game if you wanted to. The advertising for the time showed a picture of a woman lying on the back seat reading a book while riding down the road.
Bill Stout was such a fascinating character because he was interested broadly in mobility, how we talk about it today. He designed what he thought would be the Model T of the skies, called the Stout Skycar. It was a personal aeroplane where you could fold the wings up and drive like a regular car. He also came up with a railbus, which was exactly what it sounds like. It was a bus that could drive on regular streets but then connect to a rail system, either electric or a traditional self-propelled rail system, and drive away on the rails.
…what drives him personally
I guess what drives me is that this collection is a public trust. The things don't belong to the Detroit Historical Society but to the people of Detroit. This is everybody's stuff that we're just keeping an eye on, making sure it's going to be around for the next generation to see, enjoy, and interact with. So, making this collection as relevant and accessible as possible, whether that means in person or online, and trying to make sure people see themselves in this collection. Because I think there's a little bit of something for everybody.
…a game-changing (and back-sparing) tool
We have seventy cars in the collection and only a handful run. And even those, we only drive if it's an emergency. We used to have to either tow or push the cars to move them, which would take four guys. Two people had to make sure they weren’t hitting anything on the way. We'd walk up and down past everybody's office and say, ‘All right, guys, it's time to push a car’. And then we’d spend up to forty-five minutes getting a car on a trailer or wherever it needed to go.
But with a Stringo vehicle mover, you move a car with one person. So it's a game-changer for us. These cars are like historic paperweights. They roll, but some need a little persuasion. The brakes hang up, and the transmissions lock. Moving them can be an art rather than a science. The Stringo just completely eliminates that X factor for us. We know exactly how long it will take to move the cars. It’s just simplified things extremely. I think all of our backs greatly appreciate the Stringo more than anything else.
As we’re about to embark on a big photo project with our car collection, we’ll move cars way more than we normally would. Without the Stringo, just the time involved in doing that would shut down anything else we needed to do over the next two years. We'd just be moving cars.
Want to learn more?
Want to see more examples of how Stringo helps museums and private car collectors move priceless vehicles safely and efficiently? Don’t miss our visits to Klassikloft in Germany or the Volvo Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden.
For more best practices, download our e-book on space efficiency, which explains how an electric vehicle mover benefits car dealers and storage facilities.
