In 1924, a car rolled out of a small factory in Emeryville, California, that could do something no other automobile on Earth could do. It started from stone cold in under thirty seconds. In freezing weather. Without a crank, a choke, or a prayer. You pressed a button and walked away. By the time you came back with your coat on, 1,500 pounds of steam pressure sat waiting behind a dashboard as clean and simple as a kitchen table. No clutch pedal. No gearshift. No distributor, no spark plugs, no transmission. You pressed the throttle and the thing just went. Quiet as fog, with a torque curve that made every gasoline car on the road feel like it was trying to clear its throat.

The Doble Model E. Twenty-four built. Maybe forty-three, depending on who you ask and how you count the ones Abner kept pulling apart and putting back together. Price tag: $18,000 in 1925 money. That comes to about $320,000 today. A Duesenberg Model J cost less.

This was, by any rational measure, the greatest steam car ever manufactured. It was also, by every commercial measure, a disaster. The disaster is the interesting part.

THE DOBLE BOYS

Abner Doble was born in San Francisco in 1890. His father made water wheels. Good ones. The family had engineering in its bones the way some families have bad teeth. Abner enrolled at MIT in 1909 and dropped out in less than a year. Not because he was failing. Because he already knew what he wanted to build and the professors were in his way.

By 1912, working with his brother John in a rented machine shop in Waltham, Massachusetts, he had a running steam car. Not a good one. A proof of concept. The Model A coughed and leaked and required the operator to be half mechanic. But the brothers learned. The Model B followed. Then the Model C, which Abner put on display at the 1916 New York Auto Show.

Fifty thousand inquiries. Eleven thousand firm orders. The car had solved the ancient curse of steam automobiles, the twenty-minute wait for the boiler to reach working pressure, by using a flash boiler that generated steam almost on contact. You could drive it like a regular car. People went wild.

Then reality set in. The factory could not build cars fast enough. Parts came wrong. Workers were scarce. About a hundred Model C cars made it to customers. Maybe. The investors grew nervous, then angry. Abner grew frustrated, then stubborn. The brothers sold the Massachusetts operation, moved back to San Francisco, and started over from nothing.

THE EMERYVILLE MIRACLE

Doble Steam Motors broke ground on a new factory in Emeryville in May 1923. The Model E that came out of it was the car Abner had been building toward his entire life.

Forget everything you think you know about steam cars. The Model E was not a hissing, clanking Victorian relic. It was a 4,000-pound luxury automobile that could hit 95 miles per hour, cruise at 75 without raising its voice, go from zero to 75 in ten seconds, and travel 1,500 miles before its 24-gallon water tank needed refilling. The water recirculated through a condenser. You did not need to stop at horse troughs.

The engine had eleven moving parts. A Model T Ford had hundreds. The Doble had no clutch, no gearbox, no differential, no distributor, no carburetor, no spark plugs, no timing chain, no fan belt. The two-cylinder compound engine bolted direct to the rear axle. Steam expanded through a high-pressure cylinder, then exhausted into a larger low-pressure cylinder, squeezing out every last calorie before the spent vapour condensed back into water and returned to the boiler. Closed loop. Nothing wasted.

The boiler was Abner's masterpiece. A monotube flash unit that hit working pressure in under thirty seconds from a cold start. An electric ignition system fired the kerosene burner on its own. No pilot light, no matches, no anxiety. Dashboard gauges showed you the water level, the steam pressure, the burner status. Everything else handled itself. Abner had spent a decade stripping away every point of friction between the driver and the act of driving.

DRIVING ONE

Jay Leno owns a Doble Model E. Engine number 20, a roadster that once belonged to Howard Hughes. Leno has called it the finest car in his collection. The man owns a McLaren F1, a tank, and about two hundred other vehicles. He has described driving a Doble as unlike anything else on wheels.

The silence hits first. A steam engine does not explode fuel. It expands it. There is no combustion rattle, no valve clatter, no exhaust bark. Put your ear to the car and you hear a faint hiss. From the driver's seat you hear the tires on the road and nothing else.

The torque hits second. A steam engine makes maximum torque at zero rpm. You press the pedal and the car surges. No gear hunting, no turbo lag, no lag of any kind. The power delivery is instant and linear in a way that even modern electric cars only approximate. This, in 1925.

THE PRICE OF GENIUS

So why are there only twenty-four of them?

Because Abner Doble the engineer ran headlong into Abner Doble the human being.

He was brilliant. Also arrogant. He told people he was a genius, often enough that it got written down. He had the kind of perfectionism that makes great prototypes and terrible production schedules. Each Model E was hand-built. Abner supervised the assembly himself. He would pull finished cars back into the shop to modify them. Engines that had been delivered to customers got recalled for improvements nobody asked for. The machinists in Emeryville worked to tolerances that belonged in a watch factory, not a car plant.

The cars cost a fortune to build. The $18,000 asking price covered materials and labour. Not much else. And then, in 1924, the State of California discovered that stock in Doble Steam Motors had been sold without proper registration. Abner was charged. The trial ground on until 1928. He was acquitted. But by then the company was a corpse. Production stopped. The factory closed in 1931.

Twenty-four cars. Maybe forty-three. The records are a mess because Abner kept tearing things apart.

WHAT SURVIVED

Abner spent the rest of his life consulting. Steam projects in New Zealand, Germany, Britain. He helped the Besler brothers fit a steam engine to a biplane that flew over Oakland in 1933. He advised companies building steam buses and steam trucks. He never stopped believing.

He died in 1961 at seventy-one. By then the internal combustion engine had won so completely that the Model E looked like a dispatch from some alternate universe. A car that proved, beyond argument, that steam could beat gasoline. And the world bought Chevrolets instead.

Of the two dozen or so built, maybe nine or ten survive. They show up at Pebble Beach. They sit in museums. Leno drives his on weekends. Each one stands as proof of what happens when an engineer builds the best possible version of something the market has already decided it doesn't want.

The Media Glen — Cumberland Bay, New Brunswick