Fifty years before it actually happened, front-wheel drive was supposed to revolutionize the American automobile industry by promising the realization of those longer, lower and sleeker cars that many futurists and catalog-cover artists dreamed up. Miller might have demonstrated front-wheel drive's feasibility and Cord might have shown how it'd perform in a production car, but another innovator, Paul-Albert Bucciali, took it upon himself to try to convert the rest of the industry with one car in particular that will head to auction next month.

He got tantalizingly close. Bucciali, who took to carmaking after flying in World War I and after careers as a stunt flyer and orchestra director before that, had no shortage of confidence in his abilities. With his brother Angelo, Bucciali went racing in the early 1920s and leveraged that experience into a small series of production cars, all of rather conventional design for the time. But by the middle part of the decade, after one particularly stinging loss in the Montlhery Grand Prix, he decided front-wheel drive was the way to go. According to Griffith Borgeson's profile of Bucciali in Automobile Quarterly, the inventor had the company's first front-wheel-drive automobile complete and on display as early as October 1926 at the Paris Auto Salon.

"I thought of front-wheel drive, of a car into which one would descend instead of mounting," Bucciali told Borgeson. Bucciali called it the TAV - short for Traction AVant - and proceeded to file dozens of patents for the front-wheel-drive system and its supporting mechanisms.

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