Years in Operation: 1884-1889(Approximate) 1921-Invented hollow tappets for the Model T which became standard Models Built: The Thing and a second vehicle(no name given) Approximate number of vehicles built: 2 Factory Address: Memphis, MI Officers of the Company:
John Clegg(Shop Owner/Machinist-Father)
Thomas J. Clegg(Machinist-Son)
James Stephenson(Mechanic)
Washer LaForge(Molder)
what can i see today?
Although neither vehicle exists, there is a model of what the first vehicle is to have looked like which is currently not on display. There are also other artifacts from the Clegg shop including the original cash register and receipts. The museum is located inside the library in Memphis. Memphis Historical Society Address: 34830 Potter St, Memphis, MI 48041 Phone: (810) 392-2980(Library) Website: stclaircountylibrary.org/
The shop is no longer standing but does have a historical marker on the site. Henry Ford was going to purchase the building and relocate it to Greenfield Village but Clegg had already torn it down. Address: South Side of Bordman Just East of the Intersection with Cedar, Memphis, MI 48041
the story
The story of who made the first automobile has always up for debate. Inventor and engineer Oliver Evans believed that steam engines, which were used to power mills and steamboats, could be used to propel land vehicles. He was presented with an opportunity from the Philadelphia Board of Health to build a steam dredge. Evans was able to not only build the unit but also fit it with wheels to move it on land. In 1804-1805, the future of steam-powered carriages was born...
The Benz Patent Motor-Wagen was built by Carl Benz in 1885 and is widely regarded as the world's first production automobile. It was the first self-propelled vehicle for carrying people and debuted in public in July of 1886...
Photos Courtesy of the New York Public Library
R.E. Olds(Oldsmobile) didn't make his first vehicle until 1886-1887 and Henry Ford did not invent the Quadricycle until 1896...
In the winter of 1884-1885 John Clegg, Thomas J. Clegg, James Stephenson, and Washer Laforge built the "Thing" in the John Clegg & Son Machine Shop & Foundry in Memphis, MI.
The vehicle was described as being powered by a single cylinder with steam being produced in a tubular boiler carried in the rear of the car. It had seating for four people including the driver and stoker. Cannel coal was used as the fuel and leather belts were used to transfer power. Larry Wilson provided the information for this model of what the "Thing" is to believed to have looked like. Unfortunately, all of the original plans were lost in a fire of the Clegg home...
Except locally, the excitement of the vehicle never caught on outside of neighbors and their children that were given rides in and around town. The "Thing" was perhaps driven 500 miles in the summer of 1885 with the longest trip being to Emmett and back which covered a distance of 14 miles. After about six months the vehicle was disassembled and the engine was sold to George Granger of Port Huron for his creamery. The Sylvan City Creamery located at 326 Water St. in Port Huron was the only creamery listed at that time and is believed to be the recipient...
A few years later a second attempt was made at a vehicle but it was a failure. John Clegg unfortunately died around 1889. Thomas married and no longer had time to make another vehicle although he was the first to own one in Memphis. The Cleggs are pictured here with their Locomobile Steamer...
Clegg continued to tinker with things and worked on vehicles in his shop. Around 1921 he came up with the idea for hollow tappets for the Model "T" which became standard equipment. In 1936 the shop was torn down and today is replaced by an historical marker. Henry Ford saw the work of Clegg and his men as so significant that he offered to buy the building, move it to Greenfield Village, and place it among other buildings owned by Wilbur and Orville Wright, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and others. Perhaps if it had found a new home in time, the Cleggs and the men in their shop would be household names today...
Also in 1936 an article was written about Clegg and his friend Ransom E. Olds. Olds had great success in the automotive industry with both Oldsmobile and REO but at the time he and Clegg started tinkering with steam-powered vehicle ideas, they were considered "crazy". It turns out the two friends did indeed have the last laugh...
The article states the story this way...
“Crazy” Once, Enjoy the Last Laugh Inventor of “The Thing” Chats With Fellow Genius Detroit Free Press Article - Sunday, November 16th, 1936 Memphis, Mich., Nov. 14 Two men, no longer young, stood at a window in a richly furnished office on the tenth floor of the Olds Tower Building this week and surveyed Lansing as it sprawled beneath them. Their glances ranged over the vast plants of the Olds Motor Company and the REO Motor Company. Then they chuckled softly. They were having the last laugh, and, as the old saying promised, they found it best. One of the men was Ransom E. Olds, pioneer in the automobile industry who fathered mass production of automobiles, built the first commercially successful gasoline-propelled automobile and built the first automobile ever sold. The plants he surveyed from the tenth floor bore his name and initials. The other man was Thomas J. Clegg, of Memphis, a machinist. On a June night in 1885, Clegg, James Stephenson, a mechanic in his father’s machine shop, and Washer LaForge, a molder, pushed a weird-appearing contrivance from the Clegg shop. They built a fire in its boiler and started it down a dusty road. According to Arthur Pound, historian of the automobile industry, that was the first self-propelled vehicle built in Michigan. These two men, who built in Michigan the first two horseless vehicles of the millions that have since made the state known throughout the world, have much in common. Both had been thought “cracked” by persons none too tactful in expressing their opinions. Olds had pushed his first three-wheeled steam-propelled tricycle from his 18 by 36 foot River St. Shop in Lansing at 4 a.m. to avoid the jeers and cries of “smoke wagon”, “ice wagon”, and more uncomplimentary expressions with which drivers of buggies and carts greeted the appearance of his noisy car. Clegg had expected to feel the lash of a buggy whip as his fire-belching vehicle roared over country roads about Memphis at the tremendous speed of 12 miles an hour to the panic-stricken amazement of horses and the profanity-inspiring anger of their drivers. Both knew their friends commonly tapped their heads significantly when discussing the “crazy fool” ideas of the two men about the practicability of horseless carriages. The history of Olds is known wherever men know automobiles. How he and his father, Pliny, built their three-wheeled steamer in 1886-1887. How it was later sold in the first commercial automobile transaction in history. His development of the internal combustion gasoline motor. How he wore one suit for five years and lived with the greatest frugality so that all of his earnings could be put into his experiments. Then came Olds’ trip to New York to interest capital in his work. He was told to go to Newark and pick out a site for his factory. After waiting a week without word from his expected backers, he returned to Detroit and there met a man who financed him. A plant was built on Jefferson Ave. The curved-dash “Merry Oldsmobile” to sell at $650 was developed. Production jumped from 400 to 4,000 cars in one year. Maxwell, Chapin, and others went out from his company and formed companies of their own. A young engineer named Henry Ford displayed interest. “Get into this business. It’s the coming thing”, Olds advised. Ford acted on that advice with results which played a mighty part in changing the world. All of this is something of an old story but the story of Clegg is practically untold. It goes back to the late 1870’s when a boy sat restlessly in the Memphis public school and looked wistfully out the window toward the unpainted shed which housed the machine shop and foundry of John Clegg, his father. His interest was in the forge, boilers, wheels, and tools. To him, books were dry, dead things. His father argued. His Father’s Counsel “You’ve got to have an education, Tommy” the elder Clegg expostulated as Tommy begged to be allowed to turn his back on school and books and enter the shop with him. “But I don’t like books. I want to make a cart that will run without a horse. I think I can do it, too!”, Tommy Implored. Father Clegg smiled indulgently at his son, more than a bit proud that his boy had inherited the Clegg love of working and creating machinery with skilled hands. To the father, the revolutionary idea that a cart might run without horses was not new - Tommy had talked of little else since he had been old enough to know of the power of steam. “All right, Tommy. I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” the father replied. “You go back to school and study hard and we’ll get to work on that cart.” That was in the fall of 1884. Tommy went at his books and both father and son and their mechanics, Stephenson and LaForge, joined with him in building the cart. Boiler, wheels, frame, seats all had to be designed. The drive was a problem. Steering was another. But finally when roads were dry and hard in June of the following year Tommy sat at the wheel and the mechanics went along as crew as the vehicle was pulled out for its test drive at night - to escape the derision of the neighbors. The car ran. A mile and a half down the road the inventors decided to turn around. This was a problem. The belts slid off and there was no differential. But the combined efforts of the three men pushing and hauling finally brought it around and back to the Clegg shop. In his book “The Turning Wheel” Arthur Pound tells of the significance of this first journey. “A direct result of English influence,” he writes, “would seem to be the four-wheeled steam car produced by John Clegg, an excellent English mechanic. English born and trained, and his son, Thomas J., in the village machine shop at Memphis, Mich. which the younger Clegg still operates. “Thomas Clegg describes this vehicle as driven by a single cylinder, steam being produced in a tubular boiler carried in the rear of the car. It had seating capacity for four persons including driver and stoker. Cannel coal was the fuel. Leather belts were used to transmit power and spring adjustments on them provided enough play to let the car negotiate corners. This machine is significant as the first self-propelled vehicle on record as being built in Michigan, now and for many years the leading state in the Union in the manufacture of automobiles. The Clegg steamer, nevertheless, created hardly a ripple of excitement beyond a twenty-mile circle of rural countryside which it disturbed with its journey during its short life of six months. Built in the winter of 1884-1885, it ran perhaps 500 miles in some 30 tests during the succeeding summer, its longest trip being to Emmett and return, a distance of 14 miles. At the time of Pound’s writing, Clegg was still operating the machine shop, but during the last year he has retired and torn down the birthplace of what was probably the first horseless highway vehicle in the state. The Clegg car had rear wheels five feet, eight inches in diameter, the smokestack protruding two and one-half feet above the wheels. One seat was over the boiler, another over the fuel supply. To keep up steam it was necessary to refuel after slightly less than a mile. The water supply had to be replenished every three miles. On the trip to Emmett, Clegg stopped at the home of the late Rev. Patrick Dunnigan for water. The Irish priest was much interested in the contraption and insisted on taking a ride. Interested persons drove to Memphis from the countryside but apparently word of the strange new vehicle never penetrated to Detroit. Newspapers carried no mention of it. The vehicle was about 12 feet in length. Cannel coal was burned because it gave a quick hot fire and the ash was carried out the smokestack. The vehicle had no name. “We just called it ‘the thing’”, Clegg recalls. Clegg’s cart didn’t help his popularity with his adult neighbors but with the children he ranked right behind Santa Claus. Children Given Rides Whenever his contrivance appeared on the streets, children flocked around it and all that could be carried were given rides. One of these, a six-year-old tyke, came nearest to naming the Clegg car. All excited after a ride, the child ran home and cried delightedly, “Oh, mamma, I had a ride in the no-horse.” Once Clegg started down the grade beside his shop and found the screw had been left out of the throttle, leaving him without control. He threw the car into reverse and it backed into a ditch with smoke and fire belching from the smokestack. A horse drawing a buggy happened by and after one look at the fire-breathing machine made for a fence. The driver said things to Clegg but that was part of being a pioneer. After about six months we sold the engine to a creamery for use in its separator.” Clegg says. “Then a couple of years later we tried another. It was a failure. Four years after we put the first machine on the road my father died. I was married then and didn’t have the money or time to continue the experiments.” But Clegg never lost his interest in automobiles. He bought a Locomobile steamer, the first car in Memphis. All his life he has loved to work with automobiles in his machine shop. Fifteen years ago he made hollow tappets for his Model T Ford. The tappets are now in general use. Before his trip to Lansing Monday, Clegg hasn’t seen Olds for more than 30 years. Clegg would like to see a model of his early car built but has little hope of that now. However, he has enlisted Clare Holmes, of Memphis, to aid him in making a drawing of the old machine from specifications he still recalls. “A lot can happen in one life-time.” Clegg mused, rolling back from Lansing over a smooth concrete highway at 60 miles an hour.
Was the "Thing" the first vehicle? If not, it was most certainly one of the first. Nevertheless Clegg, Benz, Olds, Ford, the Dodge Brothers, and many more automotive geniuses all contributed to what the industry is today.
