Last week I attended the Gooding and Company auction at Pebble Beach California. 133 antique and classic cars were sold at this auction for a total of 60 million dollars.
One of the cars was a very very old steam car, a 1884 De Dion, Bouton Et Trepardoux Dos-A-Dos. It was made in Paris. It is claimed to be the oldest operating automobile in the world. It sold for 3.2 million plus the 10% premium that goes to the auction company. I heard the auctioneer say it went to a museum in Texas.
I was able to spend a few hours looking over the car during the auction preview time earlier in the day. I had a lot of fun tracing out the various systems trying to figure out how the car worked. I took many pictures. I may have lost my pictures as I am getting an error message from the memory card in my digital camera.
Gooding and Company has a video clip of this car running on their website: [
goodingco.com].
Beamersteamer