Automobiles had evolved since Nicolaus Otto invented the gas motor engine (in 1876), Gottlieb Daimler (formerly Otto’s assistant) and Wilhelm Maybach improved that engine (in a shed, outside Daimler’s home, in 1885), and Daimler adapted a Wilhelm Wimpff & Sohn stagecoach to create the world’s first four-wheeled car (in 1886). And even though Daimler (since 1889) and others (like the Duryea brothers, beginning in 1893, and Henry Ford, beginning in 1896) were building new cars (not adapting previously existing vehicles), automobiles (pictured here is the Duryea’s 1896 version - one of America’s first) were the laughing stock of San Francisco’s residents. The “newfangled” vehicles couldn’t even make it up the city’s steep hills.

But Charles Howard viewed the best mode of transportation differently from most of the residents in his adopted town. The man who soon had exclusive rights to distribute the cars of a new company (named General Motors) in the western United States, had only positive thoughts about the future of automobiles. He could not have imagined that, one hundred years later, he would be remembered more for a horse than for cars when he said: