It runs on what now?

In the early days of the automobile, everyone had an idea of what an automobile should look like and what its power source should be—steam, gasoline or electricity. Or how about mercury?

In March of 1905, a Brookings company hatched that idea.

Really.

The local firm was incorporated by the Secretary of State in Pierre to manufacture an automobile powered by the stuff of thermometers, often referred to as quicksilver. The new company promised its mercury-powered car would revolutionize the automobile with what it claimed was a “self-operating motor.”

The car’s “motivation” system consisted of one wheel made with hollow wheel spokes, each containing an amount of mercury, which was one of the heaviest substances known at that time.

The theory was to use compressed air to the spokes to alternately move the heavy mercury to either the top or to the bottom of each spoke, something like a water wheel. Aside from the mechanical difficulties and serious health issues was the added problem of the element’s reaction to temperature changes. The idea was a mite iffy, to say the least.

The company never made or sold a single mercury-powered machine. (That Brookings 1905 mercury car had no relation to an actual gas-powered Mercury car introduced by Edsel Ford in 1938.)

The very first automobile to set its spindly, hard rubber wheels in South Dakota made its dusty debut in 1897. It was powered by 28 batteries and arrived in Yankton aboard a gaily festooned railroad box car. The vehicle was demonstrated at the South Dakota State Fair, then held in Yankton. Tiller-driven, it was also a mobile billboard promoting Montgomery Ward & Company’s catalogue.

The Yankton Daily Gazette called it the “Wonder of the Century.”

That first car in the state had a four-horsepower motor and a top speed of 15 miles an hour. Its leather seats provided comfort for three passengers and a driver. Incidentally, as auto ownership grew nationally in the first decade of the new 20th century, records reveal that automobile manufacturers used three cowhides for each automobile produced.

But cowhide seating for just three passengers plus the driver couldn’t compare with what two inventive men in Pierre envisioned in 1898 a year after the “Wonder of the Century” visited Yankton.

Louis Greenough and machinist Harry Adams invented a gasoline-powered automobile big enough to transport seven customers, seated on wooden planks, on the approximately 300-mile round trip from Fort Pierre to the Black Hills and back each week.

At that time, there were few actual roads, (only paths) and no bridges between Fort Pierre and the Black Hills. Stagecoaches filled the gap. Greenough and Adams hoped to offer something faster. But on test runs, they failed to coax their machine up a slight incline, let alone an actual hill. They went broke trying. South Dakota’s first state-made automobile fell by history’s wayside.

There’s much more about the early South Dakota days of the auto in my new book, Grandpa’s Tin Lizzies, including a rare photo of that state fair Montgomery Ward auto and 90 other pictures of early cars and how they work—including a chapter on a South Dakota favorite, the famous Ford Model T.

The book also has a chapter on a couple of gas-powered machines manufactured by a genius teenager in Sioux Falls.

Grandpa’s Tin Lizzies is the first book ever published on the history of those spindly contraptions that stirred up South Dakota dust in the 1890s and early 1900s. Place your order by sending $25 to Cars, PO Box 872, Brookings, or buy one in Brookings at Allegra, Brookings Book Company, Ugly Duckling, Pasque and the SDSU Agricultural Heritage Museum.