Oldsmobile’s Rocket V8 engine was the talk of the town in 1949.

Installed in the new ‘A body’ 88 series, it became one of the early ‘muscle cars,’ a powerful engine in a lightweight body and chassis.

Largely forgotten is the fact that it was not Olds’s first V8.

That feat was achieved in 1916.

Ransom Oldsmobile’s jaunty little curved-dash model easily became America’s best-selling car in 1904, but Olds’s investors wanted to make larger automobiles.

Olds did not, and promptly left to found Reo.

Concentration on big cars, however, proved not to be a good idea.

By 1908, sales were mired around 1,000 annually, and the owners of Olds Motor Works gladly sold out to Billy Durant and General Motors.

After production of a huge ‘Limited’ model from 1910 to 1912, Oldsmobile finally settled into the groove with medium-priced fours and sixes in 1913.

Within three years, Oldsmobile was selling at a rate of 10,000 cars annually.

With that as background, the introduction of an eight-cylinder...