Today marks 111 years since David Dunbar Buick changed the name of his fledgling automobile company from Buick Auto-Vim and Power Company to simply Buick. At its inception, Buick battled its way to relevance in a crowded market by riding the merit of one of auto engineering's greatest performance innovations: the overhead valve. The only problem was that it almost killed the company in the process.
Appropriately, David Dunbar Buick got his start in another industry where valve design and fluid dynamics are of paramount importance: plumbing. The Scottish-born and Detroit-raised Buick left school in 1869 to work in the industry. He was a born tinkerer that found some success with clever inventions, but his obsession with the internal combustion engine wrecked a business partnership. With the extra time, he tinkered with engines, mostly for agricultural uses. The car was on his mind, though—as was performance.
One of Buick's employees had developed a prototype for a cylinder head with integrated overhead valves, which they called "valve-in-head." Significantly more complex than the then ubiquitous flat head and sleeve-valve designs, the OHV traded simplicity for serious power gains in the high end. Push-rod engines are considered lazy by today's screaming DOHC standards, but in 1903, moving the needle to 4000 rpm was uncharted territory on a tachometer. Unfortunately, the technological innovation broke him—developing the engine cost Buick everything.
What Buick did have was a super-compact-for-the-era 159-cubic-inch (roughly 2.5 liters) inline two-cylinder engine with a revolutionary valve design. The importance of the innovation was not lost on future General Motors cofounder William C. Durant, who purchased the company (and all its innovations) from Buick. Durant put the engine to use immediately in the Buick Model B, where it made roughly 21 hp; by comparison, contemporary Studebakers were making about 15 hp with a full liter more of displacement. Less displacement means lower weight, lower weight means more fun. Buick would come to dominate the pre-assembly-line era, producing their millionth unit just 20 years later.
Over time, the competing side- and sleeve-valve arrangements went extinct in automobile production engines, causing the high-revving performance OHV engines you know and love to become ubiquitous in the process.
Buick and cutting-edge design aren't exactly synonymous, but a look at their product history yields a shocking amount of foresight for a company known mostly for "affordable luxury." Aside from the overhead valve, Buick's performance creds were burnished by the nailhead, the all-alloy 215 (which later became Britain's power-dense small-block in the hands of Rover), and later the turbocharged T-Type and its Grand National and GNX successors. Maybe on their 111th birthday, it's time we rethink Buick's legacy.