Ransom E. Olds (1864-1950) was an automotive industry pioneer whose company developed, manufactured, and sold one of the first affordable cars in mass production in the United States. His $650 "runabout," popular in the early 1900s, came about partly as a result of his experiments with perfecting a gasoline-burning engine at his family's machine shop. Though Olds was only active during the automobile industry's formative years, the influence he exerted on others--both colleagues and competitors--as well as the numerous patents granted to this gifted inventor marked him as one of the field's most important founders.

Ransom Eli Olds, whose ancestry stretched back to Puritan-era New England, was born in Geneva, Ohio, on June 3, 1864. His father, Pliny Fisk Olds, was at various times a blacksmith, manager of an ironworks facility, farmer, and pattern maker before moving to Lansing, Michigan, and opening a machine shop when "Ranny," the fourth of his...