Next time you get in the bath, think of Buick. You might even be reading this in the bath, and if you have an old house or a taste for old things (look which mag you’re reading, it’s a fair bet!) then your bathtub might be the old, enamelled iron kind. Any idea who figured out how to get the enamel to stick to the iron? Who, in other words, has kept your bath from going rusty all these years? The answer is David Dunbar Buick.
Dave Buick got rich from his plumbing company after he perfected this enamelling technique, but this was at least half to the credit of his partner’s good business sense. Buick was more inventor than businessman, something that he would demonstrate time and again in years to come.
He’d started with very little, though he clearly got a bit of pioneering spirit from his parents who moved him, aged two, from his birthplace in Arbroath, Scotland to America. After the plumbing business he joined began to struggle, he and a friend took over as partners. But Buick, like all good inventors, was already into his next obsession, spending so much time in the 1890s on his new craze for internal combustion engines that his business partner lost patience and the plumbing company had to be sold.
This left Buick with a lot of time and money on
