1925 Brooks Steamer

Canadian Automotive Museum Audio Content

Our bilingual audio tour explores less well-known stories from the collection, in the voices of the Museum’s volunteers, historians, vehicle experts and more.
Transcript:
If you don’t like fire, you would not have liked driving a Brooks Steam Car. The advertising bragged about how safe they were, burning kerosene like in a gas stove. By the 1920s, steam cars were dying out, but a few die-hards still built and drove them; they had a lot of power, and on paper at least were simpler than a gas car.
If you drove the Brooks Steamer at the dealership, you would have found it easy to use- just make sure the car is up to steam, open the throttle, step on the pedal, and off you go, no shifting needed. The driving experience might have been smooth enough for you to put down enough money to buy 10 Ford Model Ts. Brooks Steamers were luxurious, and they cost top dollar.
At home, you would have to look at the manual, and the dozens of pages it spent on getting a Brooks Steamer moving. The car was tricky to run. Like any steam engine, it had to be “brought up to steam”, pressurizing the engine with hot steam. To do that, you had to fill two water tanks, an oil tank, an air tank, and a kerosene tank, and pressurize some of them with hand pumps. Getting to the tanks was not easy. You had to pull one of the seats off to do it. Once your five tanks were filled, then you had to light the pilot lights, check that the oil was flowing properly, and complete more than 30 other steps all before you even sat in the driver’s seat and pressed the starter.
After all that was done, if you were chugging along in comfort and style, then all you had to worry about was running out of steam. The boiler could run itself empty, and you would have to go through the whole startup all over again! It’s no wonder only 174 Brooks Steamers were ever built.