Classics, Motoring Memories

Motoring Memories: Brooks Steamer, 1924 – 1926

June 27, 2008

1925 Brooks Steamer. Click image to enlarge

Story and photo by Bill Vance

By the 1920s the era of the steam-powered automobile, which was never very popular at the best of times, was drawing to a close. The White firm had long since given up on steam and switched to gasoline engines. Doble was floundering, and Stanley, the largest steam car maker in the United States, would be pretty well finished by 1925.

This reality, however, didn’t deter a smooth talking, personable Buffalo, New York promoter by the name of Oland J. Brooks. He plunged into the steam car business in 1923, although subsequent events would suggest that he was more interested in building his personal fortune that he was in building cars.

Brooks set up a finance company in Toronto in 1920 to deal in second mortgages, then established Brooks Steam Motors Ltd., in 1923. He obtained a plant in Stratford, Ontario, on very favourable terms with the town assuming a $50,000 mortgage on a $55,000 building.

Stratford was a wise choice. Because it was located at the intersection of three railways, which would merge into Canadian National Railways, it was a major steam engine maintenance centre. It thus had an excellent reservoir of workers skilled in steam locomotion.

The Brooks plant was refitted for car production. The Brooks car would turn out to be strongly influenced by the Stanley steam car that was being produced in Newton, Massachusetts, although by this time Stanley was on the financial ropes.

The vertical, cylindrical, wire-wound boiler was under the hood at the front of the Brooks, with the condenser located where the radiator of a conventional gasoline car would be.

The two-cylinder steam engine was mounted horizontally under the floor just ahead of the rear axle. With each piston producing two power strokes per crankshaft revolution, it provided power impulses equivalent to a four-stroke, eight-cylinder internal combustion engine.

Only sedans would be built, and an unusual feature of the body was its skin. Rather than the normal steel cladding, the wood-framed structure was covered with a heavy, leather-like material called Meritas. In appearance and fittings, however, the Brooks was hardly distinguishable for a regular gasoline car.

The difference was in the operation. The Brooks steamer, with valves to operate, gauges to watch, and pilot light to pamper, was complicated and slow to fire up. But once under way driving was an easy, one-lever process, and there was no transmission to shift. It could, however, maintain only a 56 km/h (35 mph) cruising speed, although it could go faster for short periods. All in all, it had more handicaps than most motorists were prepared to tolerate.

Competing gasoline-powered luxury cars – the Brooks was in the Cadillac price range – were much less involved to start, and could easily run continuously at 80 km/h (50 mph) or more.

Production started in late 1924. The “Gentle Giant of Motion,” as the company called the Brooks, was heavily promoted across Canada to familiarize the public with the car, and more particularly, to sell company stock. These shares, not surprisingly, were sold by Brooks Securities Ltd., in Toronto, owned by Oland Brooks.

To showcase his cars, Brooks even established taxi companies in Stratford and Toronto using Brooks steamers.

Things soon started to go wrong. According to a research paper prepared on Brooks by Brian Reynolds of Carleton University in Ottawa, “The company lied to the shareholders about sales figures. In a letter it mailed to them in 1925, it claimed that the factory was working day and night in an endeavour to catch up with orders received.”

“By 1926,” Reynolds wrote “the commercial failure of the cars was painfully obvious. The financial statement for 1926 revealed that the company sold no more than 18 cars in the entire year.”

Negative press reports, plus the lack of dividends, quickly led to investor unrest. Shareholders were alarmed to learn in the spring of 1927 that $50,000 of their money was in a Buffalo bank, purportedly for the development of a Buffalo company called Brooks Steam Motors, Inc.

Apprehension intensified when Oland Brooks refused to allow a shareholder-appointed auditor to look at the books; he said he would use an auditor of his choice.

In an attempt to control the promoter, a shareholders’ committee was formed. It was too late, however. A last-ditch effort was made to save the company by developing a steam-powered bus, but this too failed.

Receivership came for Brooks Steam Motors Ltd., in 1929, but it would take several years to unravel the legal convolutions. Although briefly second to the Stanley in steam car popularity, there were, according to Hugh Durnford and Glenn Baechler in their book, Cars of Canada, only some 180 Brooks steamers produced.

Oland Brooks had fled back to Buffalo, the only apparent financial beneficiary of the star-crossed venture. The approximately 8,000 shareholders lost virtually all of their estimated $4 million investment. Thus closed the last chapter in steam car history in Canada.