William Bushnell Stout was born in 1880 in Quincy, Illinois, the son of a Methodist minister. He worked his way through the University of Minnesota, and married Alma Raymond of Kingston, Ont.
Stout would prove to be a man of many talents, among them engineer, writer, inventor and futurist. His designs included self-propelled railroad vehicles, motorcycles, trailers and airplanes, including the famous Ford Tri-Motor 鈥淭in Goose.鈥�
He combined his car and airplane interests by building several combination car/planes called Skycars. Although unorthodox, Stout was held in such high esteem by fellow professionals that he was elected president of the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1935.
After other auto-industry jobs, Stout joined Packard Motor Car Co. as chief engineer in 1916, where he worked with Packard president Jesse Vincent on the renowned First World War Liberty V-12 aircraft engine.
In the early 1920s, he established the Stout Metal Plane Co., which was bought by Henry Ford in 1924. Stout remained as vice-president until he and Ford disagreed over the Tri-Motor plane and Stout left the company.
Stout also formed Michigan-based Stout Air Services, said to be the first U.S. airline offering regularly scheduled passenger flights. Stout Air Services was sold to United Airlines in 1929.
Never satisfied, Stout invented our subject, an automobile named the Scarab that could be called the forerunner of the modern minivan.
It would achieve Stout鈥檚 dream of consolidating his ideas of an advanced automobile by creating his own car. He formed Stout Engineering Laboratory to apply aircraft design principles to automobiles, and completed the first Scarab prototype in 1932. It looked like no other car on the road.
The van-like Scarab lacked a conventional hood and fenders, and the wide body eliminated running boards. Aircraft heritage was evident in its molybdenum steel tubular space-frame and aluminum body. A Ford V-8 engine was mounted in the rear, driving the rear wheels through a Stout-design transaxle and swing axles.
A second prototype followed in 1935, an evolution of the first with some mechanical and styling changes. To produce it, he formed the Stout Motor Car Co. in Detroit.
The lack of a driveshaft allowed a low, flat floor, and the long wheelbase with the wheels at the corners of the car gave the Scarab a very space-efficient cabin.
The interior resembled a small room with the rear seat, for example, resembling a 1,829 mm (six-foot) wide sofa that could be converted to a bed. The driver鈥檚 seat was fixed, but the others were movable and a table could be set up.
There was no conventional hood, the headlamps were set behind fine, vertical-bar grilles and a small, moustache-like louvered grille was mounted between the lights. At the rear, narrow chromed bars tapered down from the back window to the bumper, imparting a very art deco appearance. For economic reasons, the body was now steel rather than aluminum.
An advanced feature was four-wheel independent suspension utilizing coil springs surrounding large oil-filled struts, an idea borrowed from aircraft use, where they were called 鈥渙leos.鈥� They were somewhat like Earle MacPherson鈥檚 MacPherson struts.
The tops of the struts were mounted just below the window line, and anchoring the suspension above the car鈥檚 centre of gravity meant the body was slung like a hammock. It 鈥渂anked鈥� inward in corners instead of leaning out like a conventional car.
While ingenious, the idea wasn鈥檛 entirely practical, and double transverse leaf springs were later used at the rear. Stout also experimented with air suspension using rubberized fabric bellows.
To demonstrate the Scarab鈥檚 superior riding qualities, Stout delighted in driving around with a glass of water on the table. In the ultimate demonstration, he claimed to have driven a Scarab from Detroit to San Francisco without losing a drop of water.
All in all, Stout reportedly drove his personal Scarab coast to coast six times, covering more than 140,000 kilometres.
Stout offered Scarabs for sale for $5,000 US, a large sum in those days. Several were bought, probably for their novelty value, by such well-known figures as tiremaker Harvey Firestone, chewing-gum magnate Philip Wrigley and Dow Chemical鈥檚 Willard Dow.
Stout built only nine Scarabs, of which, remarkably, five still exist in several museums. Typical of an inventive genius, no two were identical.
Immediately following the Second World War, Stout built one more fibreglass-bodied prototype. It was shown in 1946, and was more conventional in appearance and equipped with a rear-mounted Mercury V-8. It never went into production, although Stout drove his as a personal car for five years before donating it to a museum.
William Stout retired to Arizona shortly thereafter.
Characteristically, when he died in 1956, he was working on an ornithopter, a machine that flies by flapping its wings.
