Whatever Happened To: Inventor Thomas Fawick

Dorene Weinstein
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Thomas Fawick was an inventor, a musician, a composer and ultimately a wealthy entrepreneur — yet he never went beyond the seventh grade.

Fawick was born in Sioux Falls in 1889. When he was 19 years old, he designed and built the first four-door automobile — the Fawick Flyer — in his auto shop on West 13th Street.

The automobile was hand-built out of aluminum instead of steel and had the steering wheel on the right side. When autos were first being built, “designers could put the steering wheel where they wanted,” says Paavo Rasmussen, an education assistant at the Old Courthouse Museum.

It wasn’t until Henry Ford started building automobiles en masse that the practice of a left-side steering wheel became standardized.

40 HP engine

The car could carry five passengers and had a four-cylinder, 40 horsepower engine with the gas tank under the passenger seat and headlights controlled by both electricity and gas. The Flyer could go 70 mph, but the speed limit in Sioux Falls was only 7 mph, or 4 mph turning corners, Rasmussen says.

The slow speed limit was designated because of the large amount of foot and animal traffic on city streets.

At the time, many people disliked the machines and thought they were a nuisance. Cars were noisy, dangerous and unnecessary, Rasmussen says. “They thought that autos should be banned and that they were a fad.”

A Fawick Flyer carried former president Theodore Roosevelt in a 1910 Sioux Falls parade alongside Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs.

However, the Flyer was cumbersome to build by hand, and Fawick became interested in other inventions. He built only 11 Flyers, but he kept his personal automobile the rest of his life, according to a research paper by Cynthia Honeycutt. The first Fawick Flyer is in the lobby of the Old Courthouse Museum.

Fawick moved to Waterloo, Iowa, shortly after he built the cars and concentrated on building tractors and clutches and designing mechanical devices.

Other inventions

A tractor design was particularly successful. During World War I, England bought 900 tractors Fawick had designed and built, intending to increase homegrown produce and relieve hunger through the use of the machine.

In 1928, Fawick moved to Cleveland and lived there the rest of his life.

Fawick’s inventions also helped the U.S. military during World War II. Fawick designed a heavy-duty clutch for amphibious landing craft that allowed soldiers to land on the beaches of Europe. He designed another clutch to allow ships to change from full forward to reverse in 10 minutes. His designs earned him and his employees a special citation for contributions to the war effort.

Fawick also made rubber mounts for engines and developed rubber grips for golf clubs. His inventions still are in use today.

In addition to being a mechanical genius and holding more than 300 patents, Fawick was a prodigy who taught himself how to play the violin at age 11. He composed a few thousand pieces of music and eventually owned two Stradivarius violins.

Musical talent

Fawick’s mechanical acumen, mingled with his musical prowess, inspired him to develop a process for making violins and bows that gained international acceptance, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Fawick, an admirer of Michelangelo’s work, donated the Statue of David to the city of Sioux Falls in the early 1970s and the statue of Moses to Augustana College a few years later to acknowledge the support of Sioux Falls when he was a young inventor. Fawick commissioned artist W. deWeldon to make the reproductions.

The statue of David’s nudity has caused turmoil since it was donated. Residents, uncomfortable with the revealing nature of the statue, strategically positioned the statue away from traffic to shield his nakedness.

The sculpture, one of only a few full-size copies cast from the original by Michelangelo, was removed from Fawick Park for a time while the city cleaned up the land. It reclined on a flatbed in a city garage for a few years, then was reinstalled in the renewed park.

Fawick and his wife, Marie, had two daughters, Dorothy and Florence. He died in 1978 at the age of 89.

Reach reporter Dorene Weinstein at 331-2315.

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