AIR CAR HALL OF FAME

Nationally syndicated newspaper article in 1937.

Inventor Biographical

None known.

mechanic, owner of Dearborn auto garage in Chicago, truck driver, inventor, collector for Acme stores

I climbed Pikes Peak--probably just the last 1/4 mile of it--when I was 4 years old. Obid Smith climbed it in his air car and later reported that the car "climbed Pikes Peak like it was flat". The road rises in elevation 7400 feet in 19 miles.

Obid Monroe Smith was born in Bell Buckle, Tennessee on 22 April 1895. His parents were Andrew Jackson Smith and Annie Butler, farmers. He was the oldest of his three brothers and three sisters. Obid always had more interest in engines than in farming. As a young man he owned a Dearborn tire store in Chicago.

As a very small child, Obid moved with his family to Moody, Texas. By 1910, they'd moved to Mangum, Oklahoma. In 1916 Obid married Florence May O'Neal in Ft. Smith, Arkansas where she was from. In 1917 they were living in Byars, Oklahoma (near Ada) where Obid worked as a mechanic.

In 1918, Obid and Florence lived in Sherman and/or Denison, Texas where they had a daughter and Obid worked as a mechanic and truck driver. In 1920 they had a daughter near there in Paris, Texas. This is the part of Texas just north of Dallas where famed air engine inventor Russell Asa "Bob" Neal was raised. By 1924, Obid owned property straight north of there in Ada, Oklahoma where one of Obid's daughters later lived with her family.

In 1929, Obid took off on a 9000-mile tour of the United States in an air car whose engine he had converted to run on compressed air. There was never a claim that the car could run continously without running out of fuel; just that it made its own air. No doubt if a gasoline car could extract petroleum from the atmosphere and refine it for its own use, it would do so. But air is different: it can do this. When the tank reaches a certain low point, the driver would have to stop and run the engine to re-fill the tank. Like an electric car, but the refill would be much faster and there would be no need for charging stations. The car has its own compressors.

The source of energy is not "perpetual motion"; there is no such thing. Ambient heat is solar energy. The atmosphere is a solar-energized tank of air containing air pressurized by heat and gravity to 10-15 psia. The free-range air car can go long distances because it just stops and fills its tank with its own compressors, gaining a certain advantage over what engineers have been trained to assume, due to the fact that the energy of compression can be conserved while the free energy of the atmosphere can add to what's already in the tank. In short, the air in the tank contains way more energy than what's needed to run the compressors--and the car, for that matter--for a few minutes. In those few minutes, extra energy comes in from the atmosphere. When the tank reaches a certain low pressure, the car is parked anywhere on earth and becomes its own filling station.

In spite of Obid's exciting progress on the air car--or maybe because of it--by 1930, Florence and their two daughters had moved to Kansas City where Florence worked as a live-in servant. She said she was a widow, because that's what divorced women often said in those days so they could find work. The divorce decree was finalized on 6 January 1936 in Sevier County, Arkansas. Obid had been living in Miami, Florida since at least 1935.

In November 1936, after 15 years of working on his air engine/compressor and car, Obid completed the engine which he tried to patent and planned to install into a car. In 1937 he was living in a boarding house in Miami when he and his landlord, who was also his financier, appeared in a newspaper article similar to one that was syndicated nationwide. The Miami article showed a photo of the two men and the engine.

By March 1940, an air car had been built. At this time, an associate or acquaintance of the famous actress Gloria Swanson's inventors' helper agency argued for taking on Obid's case after going over the invention's blueprints. He felt that the resemblance to something like perpetual motion should not overshadow the fact that the blueprints seemed to represent a working machine.

It's not known what came of the Swanson connection, or whether the blueprints are floating around in Miss Swanson's archives somewhere. Probably not.

But we do know that a month later, in April 1940, Obid was living alone a mile away from the boarding house and employed as an inventor of air motors. This seems to suggest that he had made some money off of his air car somehow, possibly selling it outright or ??? who knows.

By 1954, Obid was living in Biloxi, Mississippi with his second wife Genevieve, and working as a collector for Acme Stores. All we currently know about Genevieve is that she outlived Obid.

On 4 September 1962, Obid died at home near Lewisburg, Preble County, Ohio. He's buried there at the Fairlawn Cemetery.

Divorced and remarried. Timing of events suggests that his first wife might have played second fiddle to his air car inventor aspirations.

None known.

More information on the inventor and the invention, if available: