Fossmobile: canada’s best kept car secret
The early history of the auto industry was written one car at a time, cobbled together in sheds and shops across the continent. And now, one man is determined that one of the earliest Canadian stories isn’t forgotten.
Ron Foss of Burlington, Ont., is working to recreate the Fossmobile, built by his grandfather and, apparently, the country’s first gasoline-powered car.
It was built in Sherbrooke, Que., beginning in the winter of 1896 and completed the following spring.
“I have three goals,” said Foss, 65. “I want to get the story retold, which it hasn’t been since the early 1960s. Secondly, I want to build this tribute car. Having it run is goal three.”
His grandfather, George Foote Foss, was born in Sherbrooke in 1876. As a teenager, he apprenticed at a local shop that made electric motors, and later at one in Massachusetts. Returning to Quebec at the age of 19, he opened a shop that did blacksmithing and machining, and repaired bicycles.
In his spare time, he built model steam engines, and made an electric motor to power his boat. From there, he began construction of his car.
He wasn’t working in an automotive vacuum. In 1867, Henry Seth Taylor, a watchmaker in Stanstead, Que., built a steam-powered vehicle that historians credit as Canada’s first car. In 1886, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, working independently of each other in Germany, produced what were considered the first practical gasoline cars.
Henry Ford test-drove his first rudimentary car some six months before George Foss started working on his. And three years before the Fossmobile, a Toronto company made Canada’s first electric car.
But the Fossmobile stands out as our country’s first homegrown effort to run on petroleum.
“There’s no other evidence to suggest otherwise,” Foss said. “I’ve relied on historians that came before me who labelled it as such, and my grandfather’s writing said he had seen nothing prior to this.”
Gas was chosen, Foss said, because his grandfather had ridden in electric cars in Boston and had the electric motor on his boat, and the batteries didn’t last long. But unlike many early tinkerers who bought engines from parts suppliers, George Foss made his own.
“He had a blast furnace in his machine shop so he could cast it, and we know he used Scientific American (magazine) to get ideas of how combustion engines were made.”
He’s not sure what the chassis was, and thinks it could have been from a horse buggy. A chain transferred power from the engine to the wheels, and like virtually all cars of the day, it was steered with a tiller.
If the original car still exists, no one knows where it is. As a child, he frequently visited his grandfather and heard stories about the car, and has his letters and papers. Unfortunately, there are no blueprints or drawings. But there are photographs, and they are key to building the new Fossmobile, which is being done by restoration shop Legendary Motorcar Company in Halton Hills, Ont.
Foss estimates the project will cost $30,000, which he’s fundraising. It’s being built through a painstaking process called reverse re-engineering.
“You take what you know,” Foss said. “If there’s a particular measurement you can determine (from the photograph), you start with it, and scale with it to the next connecting part.”
The restorers aren’t starting entirely from scratch. During an internet search, Foss found someone in Florida who had an old engine and was trying to identify it. After Foss bought the engine last January, he sent the man photos of the Fossmobile.
“He sent me a note saying, ‘By the way, I have this period chassis if you want it,’ and two weeks later said he had a body,” Foss said. Both were donated to the project.
The buggy-style chassis, damaged by fire sometime in the past, appears to be from a Locomobile, an early American car. No one knows what the wooden body is from, but from Foss’s research, it appears to predate 1900. All the parts are being restored and modified to match the Fossmobile drawings.
George Foss only built one car. “He was 20 years old, and I don’t think he had the foresight and vision to see the automobile would become the future,” Foss said.
He also refused an opportunity to buy into the new car company Henry Ford was putting together. “He didn’t like Ford’s (first car) and he didn’t like Henry Ford as a person.”
George Foss moved to Montreal in 1902 and became a distributor for the Massachusetts-built Crestmobile. Foss has seen two in museums and they’re surprisingly close to his grandfather’s vehicle; the suspicion is that George Foss helped the company design its car.
The Crestmobile lasted only five years. That wasn’t unusual; there were hundreds of small automakers in the early days, and most had similar lifespans.
After the Crestmobile, George Foss opened another machine shop. He died in 1968 at the age of 92 and is buried in Sherbrooke. In 1993, the city erected a monument to the Fossmobile, near the site of the original bicycle shop.