AIR CAR HALL OF FAME

Nationally syndicated newspaper articles, article in Popular Science magazine, famous financier, well-known engineer as partner on his first patent.

Inventor Biographical

US Patent 248218 Air Compressor (1881--with Stillman W. Robinson), US Patent 745729 Piston-Cylinder (1903), US Patent 954033 Grain Drier (1910)

carpenter (1870), manufacturing air motors (1880), carpenter (1882), carpenter for the railroad (1888-1889), fence foreman for the railroad (1890), house carpenter (1891), house carpenter (1900), carpentry contractor & air motor manufacturer (1903), promoter of the air compressor company (1905), contracting carpenter & air compressor manufacturer (1909 & 1910), contractor & carpenter (1920), grocer (1921)

People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.
--Lewis Cass, famous politician

Lewis Kiser's grandfather, Philip Kiser, was a big landowner in Virginia. He'd been born in Pennsylvania a decade before the start of the Revolutionary War that created the United States. Here's an interesting passage from his will:

"Sixthly, I give and bequeath unto my Negroe boy Tom eighty acres of land lying in section 30 T4 R10 on certain conditions that is to say if he stay with the widoe and Family obey all their lawful commands until he is twenty six years of age, then in that case the said land is to be his for ever and if he does not stay the fore mentioned time he is to have none of it or no part thereof."

Lewis' father John Kiser lived in Champaign County, Ohio his whole life where Lewis also grew up. John and his brother George had big farms next to each other. John had nine siblings and eight children of his own. Lewis was the sixth child of John Kiser and Elizabeth Mary Yarnell. He had five sisters and two brothers.

Lewis Cass Kiser was born in Circleville, Ohio on September 23, 1848. He would have been 16 years old when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the Civil War. By the time he was 21, he was working as a carpenter, unlike most rural people who worked as farmers. Even when he worked for the railroad, he sometimes did carpentry.

Early in life, Lewis was an air brakes technician--that is, a hands-on compressed air expert. He claimed to be the inventor of the New York Air Brake, and that the invention had been stolen from him. He insisted that this could be proven by files held at the patent office.

Most of his life later on, he was a carpenter, house builder, and contractor. He had a large family, and he taught his sons the carpentry trade. During his life at various times we find him listing his occupation as manufacturer of air compressors and/or air motors.

When he was 18 years old, Lewis got a marriage license with Mary Ashen, but the wedding never took place as far as I know.

In 1870, Lewis and his future wife Sarah E. Valentine were living a few miles apart in Shelby County, Illinois, when they met and very quickly decided to get married. Lewis and his brother were boarding together at a farm and working as carpenters. Lewis and Sarah were married that year. By 1880 they were raising a large family in Urbana, Ohio.

In 1881, Lewis moved to Columbus, Ohio, where his son Daniel was born. A local university professor, Stillman Williams Robinson, had been a Professor of Mechanical Engineering as well as chair of mathematics in Urbana at the University of Illinois, also known as Illinois Industrial University, from 1870 to 1878. In 1878 he accepted a position at nearby Columbus, Ohio at the University of Ohio. The University of Ohio's mechanical engineering building is still named after him in 2024. He was the author of a book, Principles of Mechanism, which you can still buy from Amazon.com. Two years after his death, the University of Ohio published a 90-page memorial about Prof. Robinson and his work, which includes the list of credentials linked below.

On October 23, 1881, Lewis Cass Kiser and Stillman W. Robinson obtained a patent for an air compressor. The newspaper called the invention "perpetual motion". Of course the patent made no such claim. Stillman Robinson had dozens of patents. He was a professor of engineering. He had no interest in perpetual motion claims and no use for any such nonsense.

On June 4, 1881, Scientific American had published a righteous dismissal of perpetual motion. The very next article on the same page was a review of Stillman Robinson's treatise on "Vibrations in Extended Media and the Polarization Of Sound". Back in 1866, three years after his graduation, he had published one of the first of his many papers, "Jets of Water". Among his more than 40 patents were patents on air brakes, a fluid velocity gauge, steam engine valve gear, a steam-powered rock drill, and early telephone equipment. At one time he'd designed and built an air compressor to study the flow of air through orifices.

Three weeks after the Kiser & Robinson compressor patent was published, a Columbus newspaper mentioned that some stolen carpentry tools, which had been taken from Lewis Kiser, had been recovered from a local career criminal. In 1891, when Lewis served on a jury in a murder trial, he was criticized in the press for discussing the case outside the courtroom during the trial, because he had stated that the accused murderer deserved to hang.

Lewis made at least three major attempts to go somewhere big with his invention: 1880 when he got a patent with Stillman W. Robinson; 1904 when his backer was the "corn king" of Chicago; and 1926-1927 when he must have known he wouldn't live forever, and his 1925 press photo (which I own; see below) appeared in Popular Science magazine and was syndicated in newspapers all over the U.S.

In 1904, Lewis Kiser's financial backer, for a time, had been the famed "corn king" George Harshaw Phillips. Phillips had become wealthy speculating on the corn market when he was only 31, but his success turned out to be a flash in the pan.

Lewis' wife Sarah Valentine was the daughter of William Valentine and Elizabeth Igo. Sarah and L. C. Kiser moved to Mad River, Ohio after being married. They lived in Columbus, Ohio around 1880+; St. Louis, Missouri in 1889; and moved to Decatur, Illinois by 1903. They ended up making Decatur their permanent home. Sarah died there in 1908 at the age of 56, after a long illness of the stomach.

Lewis was known for his ability to build fancy houses with curved roofs and dormer windows. In 1891, he built at least five houses.

By 1900, Lewis' wife Sarah had born eleven children but only six had survived. John was born in Ohio in 1875 and Florence was born in Champaign County, Ohio on March 20, 1880. John, Florence and four others died before 1900.

Shortly before Sarah died in 1908, her and Lewis' oldest child, William Oscar Kiser, made a splash in the local press. William had been a carpenter like his father, but had gone blind in his mid-30s. A month before his mother died, William and his 16-year old son built a wooden push-cart and started traveling the streets of Decatur selling ice cream, peanuts, chewing gum, and cigars. William also received an annual pension of $150 from local government since he was blind. Somehow he managed to save enough money to build a tiny grocery store. He was in the grocery store business the rest of his life, and also ran for the office of city commissioner.

Apparently, William and his wife, who had gotten married only a few days after they first met, were on the outs. By the time their son Lewis was seven years old, they'd lost three other children. Two more were born after Lewis: Harry Kiser and Opal Frantz. In the months following his mother's death, it seems that William had accused his wife of adultery, which was a crime in those days. She was aquitted and in turn accused him of adultery and divorced him. Not long after this, she married a man would would shoot her to death when she tried to divorce him. The man was given a life sentence.

In July of 1913, when he was about 65 years old, Lewis Kiser married a widow, Mrs. Emma Gahagan (nee Helm). She owned a farm in Flora, Illinois and had $3000 in savings. The couple lived near Chicago for a year, trying to get something going with the compressed air engine/compressor, then returned to Decatur. In 1917, the couple split up. Lewis and Emma each ended up eventually being buried with their first spouses, and Emma took back her first married name.

In 1920, a newspaper mentioned that Emma was divorcing Lewis Kiser for non-support, and she was accusing him of refusing to work. Having worked hard his whole life, maybe Lewis was desperate to see something come of his years burning the midnight oil on his invention, always optimistic that someone would take a chance on a working engine and build him that factory he'd always dreamed of. I'd have to agree with her that he should not have frittered away her savings on a dream of revolutionizing the way the world uses energy. However, when she married a retired fella with an expensive hobby and an unrequited big dream, she might have known what was going to happen to her savings. In a newspaper interview, Lewis mentioned that he liked to work on his invention at night.

In 1921, Lewis and his blind son William Oscar Kiser, along with one or more of William's three children, returned to Jonesboro, Arkansas and opened a grocery store there. Several months before Emma Gahagan died in 1922, they closed up shop and moved to Peoria, Illinois, where Daisy lived, William's youngest sibling. After the death of Mrs. Gahagan, they moved back to Decatur, where William and then his sons continued in the grocery business. Lewis went back to work as a contractor, while continuing to work on and promote his engine/compressor unit.

In 1951 a young inventor named Paul Franck traveled to Decatur, Illnois to interview Lewis' heirs. He was seeking the plans for their late father's air car power plant. A big article about his search was published locally and syndicated all over the US. The article states that Kiser had run out of money trying to build an air engine factory, sold everything for scrap, and gone to Arkansas to die.

This sounds like a confabulation of the reporter or a patchwork of half-memories on the part of his son. What we know for sure is that his 2nd wife abandoned him (or vice-versa) and eventually divorced him, publicly accusing him of using up her savings. This is when he went to Arkansas--in 1921. He took his blind son William and his grandson(s) with him, and they ran a grocery store in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where Lewis' two youngest daughters had been born. Then they moved to Peoria, Illinois where the youngest daughter had settled with her husband. Eventually they returned to Decatur, where he died at his son Frank's home in 1927, according to the 1927 newspaper reports.

I see two possibilities, and the truth is probably somewhere between these extremes:

1) Lewis was embarrassed by the divorce and the public accusations--or he was avoiding alimony--or trying to earn alimony--when he left Decatur to start a grocery store in Arkansas in 1921.

2) Lewis went back to Arkansas when the flurry of publicity in 1926-1927 produced no financial backers. He took his working model and showed it to several inventors who then went into competition with each other. Maybe then he sold it for scrap, or he could have sold it to Bob Neal, Obid Smith, F. T. Adams, or a few others who lived in Arkansas or southern Missouri. Joplin, Missouri and NW Arkansas have been a hotbed for air car activity ever since.

I call this the Rural Legend theory: inventors heard from someone they knew-and-trusted that this free-range air car rumor was true, the dang thing actually worked. So they proceeded to spend their wives' grocery money over the course of several years trying to prove some theory based on some rural legend, with the result being that their relatives never wanted to hear the word "aircar" again. When the inventor or wanna-be inventor died, it was good riddance to that pile of papers he'd accumulated over the course of his search for the elusive free-range air car.

There are any number of alternative versions of this myth. What's probably not a myth is that Lewis Kiser was the grand-daddy of the free-range air car.

I prefer the second grandiose myth over the alimony story, so because I'll never be able to prove it, I wrote it into a fictional screenplay which is available somewhere on this website.

Speaking of fictional air car stories, in 1926 and 1927, a popular daily cartoon strip--Gas Buggies (Hem & Amy) by Frank Beck--placed the free-range air car on center stage for all to see. I have no doubt that Lewis Kiser read this comic strip every day. It might have goaded him into his last hurrah, which landed him in Popular Science magazine; not in an air car factory. But back in 1881, when a history book was published about his home county, the article about his well-to-do father mentioned Lewis' amazing air compressor. A newspaper item from 1881 said he'd been working on his idea for 12 years; that would be since 1869. Lewis Kiser was about 21 years old in 1869.

Also in 1926, Lewis' oldest son William Oscar Kiser married a widow, Maude Hoots, but they were divorced a few years later. We find him living alone in 1940, still the blind grocer. He died in 1949. His son carried on the Kiser & Sons grocery business.

William's brother Franklin C. Kiser married a German woman named Magdalena Ziegler. They had two daughters and a son. They lived in Decatur, Illinois their whole lives. He'd learned the carpentry trade from his father but lost an arm early in life, and worked at the Woolworths store for many years. Frank's father, the inventor, was living with him in 1927 when Lewis died of old age, in the house where Frank and Maggie had lived for at least 33 years.

Lewis Kiser's youngest son Daniel was born in Columbus, Ohio shortly after Lewis received his first air compressor patent. In 1942, when he had to register for the draft at the age of 60, in the space that asked for his age in years, Daniel filled out his age in years, months, and days. He was still working as a carpenter at this time, and still living in Decatur, Illinois. He had married Percilla Fletcher in 1905 but she died of tuberculosis at age 29. Their son, Dean Francis McCann, was raised by Percella's cousin Mary McCann. Dean had a long career as an administrative assistant for the Department of Agriculture. Between 1911 and 1918, Daniel married Emma Louise Kopmeyer. She worked as a stenographer for the public works for many years. Daniel died in 1955 while he was giving his house another coat of paint.

Lewis Kiser's youngest child Daisy married Guy W. Hipes in 1905. He had been a popular baseball player in high school. After a few years she began a long campaign to divorce him for drunkenness, infidelity, and child abandonment. It took at least five years and many accusations in court to accomplish the divorce. By 1918 she had married Ralph McClure and they lived out their lives in Peoria, Illinois.

Elizabeth A. Kiser, Lewis' oldest child, first married Alexander Grindol. Like her parents and brother before her, Lizzie married someone she barely knew. Alex had come to town and placed an ad seeking a wife, which Lizzie and others had responded to. He had one blind eye, and she had a birthmark on her right temple. They were married on Valentine's Day 1892. Alex later spent more than a decade in an insane asylum, where he died. After the couple's divorce, Lizzie married John C. Ranbow, a watchmaker. They are buried together in Aurora, Illinois.

Victoria Kiser married Oliver Leroy Burlingame in Missouri when she was 16. They settled in Detroit, Michigan after moving from city to city for several years. After four children and 20 years of marriage, Victoria divorced Oliver for "non-support, extreme cruelty, and desertion".

Two years later, just before Valentine's day, Victoria proposed to the clerk at the place where you can get a marriage license, a man she had never met. He was thinking about it, but instead she married Pasquale Janot, a Frenchman who was several years her junior. Pasquale disappears from the public record, and we find her ex-husband Oliver Burlingame in Victoria Janot's household as a boarder in 1930.

Two years later, Oliver is gone and Victoria's youngest child is all she has to take care of her while she slides into a health crisis due to narcotic use. The little girl, also named Victoria, was placed in a foster home and then an orphanage. The company that owned the orphanage was practicing forced sterilization at this time, but Victoria Jr. got lucky and had three marriages and at least seven children. She was buried as Victoria Parker in Pahrump, Nevada in 1999, where the famed Art Bell was living at that time.

Victoria Sr. died of a heart attack in the Eloise Asylum less than a year after the little girl was taken away from her by social services. This place is now a haunted house attraction north of the Detroit Airport.

But what we have to remember is that Lewis C. Kiser, born 170 years ago, knew a lot more about compressed air than the engineers of today. Somewhere a set of plans and a pile of notes existed. Maybe they still do.

A hard-working family man with a lot on his mind, I think we can safely assume that Lewis Kiser didn't spend a lot of time in a rocking chair. Due to the number of divorces in his family, it seems unlikely that he was an easy-going, happy-go-lucky hangout artist. I'm guessing that Lewis was a self-driven person with one thing on his mind: making something great, no matter the cost, so that the world would be a better place.

None known.

More information on the inventor and the invention, if available: