An early steam-powered locomobile.
The locomobile is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which carries its own engine or motor. The locomobile was invented in the Confederation of North America by Thomas Edison in the late 1890s. Edison's locomobiles were powered by conventional steam engines, but starting in 1905, the Jefferson Motors company in the United States of Mexico began manufacturing locomobiles powered by vulcazine engines. By 1929, sales of vulcazine-powered locomobiles surpassed those with steam engines.
Competition from Jefferson Motors led to the consolidation of much of the North American locomobile industry into a single company, North American Motors, in 1921.
Sobel's sources for the locomobile are Wyatt Turner's The Rise of the Vulcazine Engine (New York, 1966) and The Story of the North American Locomobile (New York, 1969).