David Dunbar Buick was a canny Scottish industrialist but an unlikely auto builder. After making his mark with a process for annealing porcelain to steel for bathtubs, he turned to the profit opportunities of the horseless-carriage phenomenon. His first car, appearing in 1903, was a simple little chain-drive runabout with flat-twin power. One engine feature, overhead valves, Click here was a rarity then, but has been a hallmark of almost all Buicks since. In 1904, Buick moved from Detroit to Flint, Michigan, where it soon came under the control of William C. Durant. Buick prospered, and in 1908 Durant formed General Motors with Buick as its foundation and chief source of revenue. Six-cylinder engines arrived in 1914, and were the only type Buick offered from 1925 to '30. By that point, Buick buyers were mostly upper middle-class professional types who'd moved up from a Chevrolet, Oakland, or Oldsmobile -- hence the "doctor's car" sobriquet of the make's early years. The decision to offer costlier eight-cylinder cars came before the Wall Street crash, so Buick's sales problems in the early '30s, stemmed mainly from bad timing.
Buicks were conventional cars, arrayed in three series: the low-priced "40" on a 118-inch wheelbase, the midrange "50" on a 124-inch span, and the deluxe "60" on a 132-inch chassis. All carried "valve-in-head" sixes, the last six-cylinder engines at Buick until the 1960s. The 40 used a 257.5-cubic-incher with 81 horsepower, the 50 and 60 a 331.3-cid engine with 99 bhp. The 50 offered just four-door sedan and four-place sport coupe