The Tragic Story of David Buick: He Built General Motors and Died as a Broke Teacher

In 1926, a Detroit vocational school called the Detroit School of Trades placed an advertisement in Popular Mechanics magazine listing the names of its instructors. One of those names was David Dunbar Buick. He was 72 years old, in declining health, and earning approximately $50 a week to teach young men what he had spent his life learning on his own. The company that carried his surname, 22 years after he had been forced out of it, was on its way to becoming the second-largest division of General Motors. General Motors itself, by 1926, was the largest industrial company in the history of the world. Buicks were rolling off assembly lines in Flint, Michigan, at a rate the man who had invented them could not have imagined when he was paying suppliers out of his own pocket in 1903. The inventor whose surname was painted on every hood could not afford to buy one of those cars, and he could not afford the rent on his apartment, having been evicted from 13 apartments in succession for nonpayment. In this in-depth episode of Old Money Luxury, we trace the life of David Dunbar Buick — the Arbroath-born plumbing engineer who invented the process for permanently bonding porcelain to cast iron and gave the American bathroom its modern look, who then bet everything he had on the internal combustion engine, engineered the valve-in-head layout that would define automotive performance for the next 100 years, founded the company that became the flagship division of General Motors, and died in a two-room Detroit apartment in 1929 at the information desk of the Detroit School of Trades. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- We open in Arbroath, Scotland, in 1854 — the North Sea fishing town, the small stone tenement, the widowed mother emigrating with two young sons in 1856, and the Detroit into which a five-year-old boy was set down 60 years before it became the automotive capital of the world. We follow the boy through the Alexander & McAndrew factory apprenticeship at 15 — the machine shop, the pipe fittings, the flush valves, and the plumbing supply industry that placed the young David Buick at the exact intersection of a booming American city and the emerging science of pressurized water. We trace the process that made David Buick's first fortune — the enamelling of white porcelain to cast iron, the eight-year experiment with kilns and metallurgy, the U.S. patent that gave the American middle class the affordable white bathtub, and the plumbing supply company that ranked among the largest in Michigan by the late 1890s. We watch him abandon it in 1899 for gasoline — the fascination that emptied his savings and the workshop that became the Buick Auto-Vim and Power Company at the corner of Meldrum and Champlain Streets, where a plumbing engineer began paying suppliers out of his own pocket to build engines nobody yet knew how to sell. We follow him to the valve-in-head layout in 1902 — the fundamental engineering breakthrough placing intake and exhaust valves directly above the combustion chamber, the horsepower and efficiency advantage that within decades became universal, and the moment David Buick handed the American automotive industry the architecture that would define performance engines for a century. We reconstruct the loss of the plumbing patent — the $299 unpaid invoice, the assignment of 97 percent of the enamelling company to Benjamin and Frank Briscoe, and the 3 percent David Buick retained in the industry he had personally invented, the first of the fortunes he would lose without ever quite understanding how. We trace the move to Flint in 1903 — the Flint Wagon Works acquisition, the industrial capacity Buick had never possessed in Detroit, and the arrival of the Chapin family and James H. Whiting into the ownership structure of a company David Buick was already losing his grip on. We watch William C. Durant walk in on September 11, 1904 — the Flint carriage baron, the two-cylinder prototype, the 1,108 Model B orders taken at the January 1905 New York Automobile Show at Madison Square Garden, and the Buick production numbers Durant tripled in his first six months in control. We follow the founding of General Motors on September 16, 1908 — Durant folding Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Pontiac into a single Delaware holding company, the plumbing engineer from Arbroath still nominally attached to the operation, and the single share of General Motors stock David Buick was left holding when the entire arrangement was consolidated.