Frustrated Automotive Tinkerer Hall of Fame candidate No. 347: Alfred Raymond "Ray" Russell of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.

In 1942, while the rest of the automotive world geared up for the production of war machines, and while every other backyard tinkerer spent his time dreaming up novel ways of defeating the Axis, Ray Russell set out to radically alter the fundamental design and makeup of the automobile.

"The new car is not a hundred-mile-an-hour, chrome-plated, gadget covered hearse," he said in December 1942. "It's a safe, practical car to take us to work at 35 miles an hour, using only a gallon of gas every 40 miles." Of course, with a war on and with chrome-plated, gadget-covered hearse production suspended, nobody seemed to really care.

Still, Ford apparently hired Russell – perhaps on a consultancy basis – to oversee the company's own efforts toward hydraulic powertrains, and this acceptance must have emboldened Russell to dream of adapting the hydraulic drive concept to amphibious cars and even to flying cars.

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