I don’t generally do follow-ups to Cold Starts; they tend to be sort of stream-of-consciousness posts I do either first thing in the morning or way too late at night to just share some interesting automotive something with you. But, yesterday’s Cold Start, about a delightfully steampunk-looking speedometer I happened to see on an old National race car at the Monterey Historics, spurred a really bonkers follow-up I need to show you. I think why it’s bonkers is pretty clear from the picture up there.
This was shown to me via the wonderful Horseless Age Twitter account, via this tweet:
*crocodile Dundee voice* you call that a Warner auto-meter speedometer?
THIS is a Warner auto-meter speedometer https://t.co/sTYZSXww6C pic.twitter.com/3gEFfmVROc
— Horseless Age (official) (@HorselessAge) August 30, 2023
Look at that! It seems that speedometer, a Warner Auto-Meter, was one of the big names in aftermarket speedometers in the early 1900s. Speedometers were not necessarily included on many cars of the era, and it’s not easy to figure out your speed by counting trees or telegraph poles at speeds over, say, 6 mph, so these were becoming popular.
Warner’s speedometers were based on a magnetic drum setup, like most speedometers of the 20th century before the digital era, and were more reliable than the older centrifugal force-based ones that were common at the time. These early Auto-Meters weren’t cheap; a Wisconsin History website notes that Warner sold his first few to people around 1903 for $75, and at that time the most expensive piano you could get from Sears & Roebuck was $70! A quick and dirty Google search shows me that today, you can get a decent speedometer for about 3.2% the cost of what I assume is a decent piano. So that’s one thing that has improved significantly in the past century.
Anyway, that picture. Around 1906 Warner had at least one car built with a giant working model of their Auto-Meter, which they took on tour to various cities, and I think the speedometer part worked. I don’t think the odometers worked, because the numbers for those are the same in every pic: 423 for the trip odometer, and 9,437.2 for the odometer, as you can see in this third pic I ran across:
You can see the drive cable snaking up from the rear wheel there to the oversized speedometer. I think I see a pair of Warner Auto-Meters on the dash, though it’d be funnier if the driver just had to crane their neck around to look at the giant one.
The big one also appears to be double-sided; there’s duplicate odometer units, and a speed reading window on both sides. I wonder if they changed the printing on the drum somehow to get that to work? Or would one side be inaccurate? Now I’m curious.
The whole concept is amazing. Can you imagine, say, VDO building a giant tachometer or something and touring it all over the place? I mean, I can and currently am imagining it, and am delighted, but it all feels so peculiar now.
Anyway, thank you, Horseless Age! This is incredible!
I imagine him getting pulled over for speeding. How would the cop know?
The two-sided speedometer ought to “just work”. Both sides have zero in the center and 5 to the right of the zero.
That last pic says “DAY OR NIGHT”. I am assuming they were liberally coated in radioluminescent paint
Warner clearly understood the need for speed…. ometers.
Things were SO much bigger in the olden days…
Dinosaurs, prehistoric fish, mammoths, speedometers, Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and so forth.
* Frankmobile
Since modern gauges are simply displays, you could easily make a modern version with one of these…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gkSvZPJZ1U
Scale should be just about right;
https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-reportedly-largest-pickup-truck-has-4-bedrooms-weighs-50-tons
Dumb Q: is this auto-meter company the direct ancestor of our current beloved by those who feel their car isn’t complete without a giant tach bolted to the dash company?
Well, looks like they still exist, sort of, as https://www.stewartwarner.com/.
Cool – thanks for sharing that!
The whole thing seems like the Ford Autolite saga: Auto-Lite to Autolite to Motorcraft with a forked road back to Autolite.
Red Bull: We put a giant Red Bull can on some MINI’s!
Warner Auto-Meter: Look lively, you scoundrel! Please firmly grasp my sarsaparilla!
I read that in a Conan O’Brien old timey voice and it was wonderful.
Fan-Friggin-Tastic, now I want one. That’s good advertising.
It looks like some kind of meat grinder. But for a whole cow. And it counts them as they go through.
I used to visit agricultural machinery shows regularly. On one occasion, I told one of my colleagues that this type of rotary harvester harvests lambs and dispenses frozen lamb chops. For a few seconds, they believed me.
https://dealernet.s3.amazonaws.com/webres/johndeere-equipment/agriculture/hay-forage/forage-harvesters/spfh-corn-header-series/678-rotary-harvesting-unit.png
Automotive gauges and instrumentation, be careful.
Danger! Danger! Idiot lite.
An interesting subject, when did Stewart meet Warner?
I remember the Halda Twinmaster for cars that needed more odometers.
I welcomed segmented digital magic after that experience, it was the edge of the future.
That is really cool!
I wonder if Linda Vaugn could do anything with the Hurst Golden Shifter?
I don’t know what is worse, a gigantic speedometer that lets your nagging spouse know how fast you are going or your mother-in-law in the backseat doing the exact same thing.
Or the cop you blow by at 10 over.. “Sir, do you know how fast you were going? Because the whole street could see it as you went by.”
In my day we tossed a burlap sack over the speedo meter prior to such motoring merriment.
We called it the fuzzbuster ya see.
Hold fast your bonnets ladies!
When I saw the headline picture I thought it was photoshopped. So amazing that it was actually built and worked.
Cop: “Do you know how fast you were going?”
Warner driver: “No, but I bet everyone else does”
COTD for me. Whatever that’s worth.