So how bad were roads at the turn of the century? Not that bad, if you traveled around by carriage. The slow speeds of a horse-drawn conveyance meant you might have felt the bumps, but they didn't shock your tailbone. By automobile, however, at speeds much faster than ol' Bess could trot, you suffered.

To handle the roads, some automotive pioneers like Henry Ford built a degree of flexibility into the chassis of their automobiles, and many experimented with different configurations of the basic buggy spring. But no less than three independent thinker-tinkerers thought of a different way – the six-wheeled automobile.

Surely the most well-known of them was the Reeves Sextoauto, pictured above. Milton O. Reeves had a pretty good thing going with his Reeves Pulley Company, which manufactured overhead pulleys for factories. But he constantly tinkered with automobiles, fitting them with his own inventions, including a variable speed transmission.

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