Front-wheel drive is hardly a recent development. Here’s a fascinating and unorthodox example from 1917, the Frontmobile.

The idea of front-wheel drive is as old as the automobile. George Selden’s 1877 Motor Wagon was driven by the front wheels, although a barely functional prototype wasn’t built until many years later. J. Walter Christie produced a number of noteworthy front-drivers, including the memorable 20-liter 1909 racer later wheeled by Barney Oldfield. But there were early attempts to perfect a front-wheel drive road car too, like this one: the 1917 Frontmobile.

The engineer of the Frontmobile was Charles.H. Blomstrom, already a Motor City veteran with his Queen, Blomstrom, and Gyroscope automobiles. One perceived advantage of front drive at the time was that by eliminating the driveshaft, the entire chassis could be lowered. To exploit it, Blomstrom’s design (above) featured  a full nine-inch drop in the frame rails on a 112-inch wheelbase. A tubular beam axle with a transverse, full-elliptic spring carried the rear, while up front, a four-cylinder Le Roi Model C engine (138 cubic inches, 26 hp) was turned around backward from its normal orientation to drive the front wheels.

Here’s a closer view of the surprisingly compact powertrain. The L-head Le Roi engine featured a Connecticut distributor-coil ignition and an Allis-Chalmers motor-generator for self-starting. Meanwhile, a multiple-disc dry clutch transferred the power and spun the belt-drive fan to cool the radiator. The long rod on top is the shift lever, which passed through the instrument panel. .

As we might expect, the front-drive system bears little resemblance to modern practice.  While the available illustrations aren’t very clear, the driving/steering articulating mechanism was described in the trade journals of the day as “a ball and socket knuckle joint pivoted in the center of the wheel”  with “a special design universal located within the ball and socket joint.”  We’d love to have a better look at that arrangement.

The equally novel transaxle employed a worm-type ring gear and a three-speed transmission outboard of the ring gear and driven at axle speed. That is, the transmission gears had to handle the torque multiplied by the final drive rather than simple engine torque. This was the same basic setup used in the late ’20s on the Miller front-drive Indy racers. The Miller front-drive was known for its difficult gear changes at speed, and one has to wonder if the design worked any better here.

Production was to be taken up by the Safety Auto Company, a division of the Bateman Manufacturing Co. of Glenloch, New Jersey, a successful farm implement maker. But then a second company was formed with much the same management, the Camden Motors Corporation, which produced two vehicles, a roadster and a five-passenger touring, for the 1917 New York Auto Show. Apparently, these seem to be the only two Frontmobiles ever produced. But one of them, the touring, somehow survived and resides today in the former Bill Harrah collection at the National Auto Museum in Reno, Nevada.