Ransom E. Olds founded Oldsmobile in 1897. Roughly a decade later, William Durant purchased it to make it a part of the General Motors brand.
Oldsmobile produced several old-school car models, but getting the first Oldsmobile manufactured was no easy task. The journey traces back to 1864, when Ransom E. Olds was born in Geneva, Ohio. The Olds family moved to the city of Lansing, Michigan when he was a teenager, which was right around the time that Olds started working in the machine shop owned by his father. There, the two of them focused on constructing steam engines.
After becoming interested in vehicles, Olds developed a steam-powered car, which would have been the first car exported from the U.S. to a foreign buyer had the ship carrying it sank not sank on its way to India. Nevertheless, Olds continued on, and by 1896, he had received a patent for a gasoline-powered car and formed the Olds Motor Vehicle Co. the following year. In 1899, Olds moved his second company, Olds Motor Works, to Detroit, where the Oldsmobile name was first used on the company’s vehicles.
