Genius inaction: the six-wheeled automobile
How bad did the roads at the turn of the century suck? Not that bad, if you traveled around by carriage. The slow speeds of a horse-drawn conveyance meant you might have felt the bumps, but they didn’t shock your tailbone. By automobile, however, at speeds much faster than ol’ Bess could trot, you suffered. To handle the roads, some automotive pioneers like Henry Ford built a degree of flexibility into the chassis of their automobiles, and many experimented with different configurations of the basic buggy spring. But no less than three independent thinker-tinkerers thought of a different way – the six-wheeled automobile.
Of course, adding a third axle is rather commonplace among latter-day customizers, especially those in the vannin’ and sport-truck scenes. It’s also been a recurring theme on race cars over the years. But where the latter group did so for traction and the former group did so for attention (and some did so simply for load bearing), these early six-wheeled machines came about only from their creators’ efforts to provide a smoother ride on the rutted roads of the day, and thus were made obsolete by modern and widespread paving and advances in suspension technology.
Surely the most well-known of them was the Reeves Sextoauto, pictured above. Milton O. Reeves had a pretty good thing going with his Reeves Pulley Company, which manufactured overhead pulleys for factories. But he constantly tinkered with automobiles, fitting them with his own inventions, including a variable speed transmission. He actually made a go as an automobile manufacturer in 1898 and from 1905 to 1910, but it’s his last three cars that he’s best known for today. The first, what he called the Octoauto, actually used eight wheels – four steering up front, four out back – and was based on a 1910 Overland. Reeves exhibited it at the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, but couldn’t find any buyers (maybe the $3,200 price tag – about $75,000 today – scared them away), so the next year, he removed one of the steering axles from the Overland to create the Sextoauto, and followed that with another six-wheeled automobile based on a Stutz chassis. The Sextoauto, with a $5,000 price tag (about $115,000 today), saw no more success than the Octoauto.
Five years prior, Charles T. Pratt of Frankfort, New York, also endeavored to smooth the roads with a six-wheeled car. Like Reeves, he was also an industrialist, the owner of the Pratt Chuck Works. However, unlike the Sextoauto, his six-wheeler was set up to use both the forward and center axles for steering and the aft axle for propulsion, powered by an unidentified 75hp engine. Its wheelbase – presumably measured between front and rear axles – was 168 inches. The Horseless Age wrote of it:
The wheels are mounted on lengthwise members, which are pivoted to the rear springs in each side. By this mode of support much less shock is transmitted to the body of the car than is ordinarily the case, since inequalities in the road, causing a rise or depression of one of the four wheels, will raise or depress the body spring by only half that amount, provided the other wheel on the same side remains on the level.
Pratt told the press of the day that he only built it for his own use, but he did patent his invention (842,245 – Running Gear for Automobiles) in January 1907 and followed up with a second patent (888,737 – Automobile Running-Gear) in May 1908.
The earliest six-wheeler we’ve found, and the most unusual, dates to 1903 when Albert P. Broomell of York, Pennsylvania, a manufacturer of steam heating equipment, first designed his Pullman, named to glom off the prestige established by the train cars. Broomell figured a two-cylinder engine would be enough to push his car around through the center axle, freeing both the front and rear axles for steering duties. While it probably had an incredibly tight steering radius, the fact that it was underpowered and overweight was apparent from Broomell’s subsequent reconfiguration of the car with a four-cylinder engine and sans one axle. Broomell later found success with his more conventional four-wheeled Pullman, built from 1905-1917.
While all three may have succeeded in their goals of enhancing comfort, it’s difficult to say today whether it was their third axles or simply their extended wheelbases that provided more comfort.
Related – lose one wheel, or gain two?