The first collector
Nobody really had the foresight to actively collect the early machines, except a press baron of the time, Edmund Dangerfield who was owner of several magazines, including of one of the pioneering motor magazines in the world, The Motor.

He set up a motor museum in May 1912 on Oxford Street in London. He borrowed and was given 40 odd, even bizarre, early vehicles to show. Unusual and archaic relics they were — even at this time — but by collecting them Dangerfield acknowledged they had some sort on intrinsic value.

After moving the collection to Crystal Palace, World War I began and the British government commandeered the building as a military training center. He returned some of the cars to their owners, some were given to government museums and some just dumped on waste ground near Charing Cross Station.

Some of the others cars remained until 1931. Unwanted and unloved, they were sent to scrap. Incidentally, only about five cars are still on exhibition from these first 40 museum cars. That's a 1-in-8 survival rate.

Ironically, during the previous November, the Veteran Car Club of Great Britain was formed at a bar in Brighton after the car run from London to celebrate the abandoning of the red flag act in the United Kingdom.

A new world
By 1931, the motor world had changed. Henry Ford put the world on wheels. Between 1909 and 1927, Ford Motor Company built 15.5 million cars.

Just about every motoring segment we know today — from economical cars to luxury cars to sports cars and racing cars — had been covered.

The English, with their love of mechanical contraptions and nostalgia, still had an interest in the early cars, but it was a minor hobby during the midst of the Great Depression. Mostly these people were considered mad or just eccentric to want to drive around in cars that were vastly inferior to the ones running on the roads at the time.

The Antique Automobile Club of America was formed in 1935 when a bunch of enthusiastic but unappreciated old car owners who drove their cars at the Antique Automobile Derby at the Philadelphia Automobile Show for five years thought they were getting a bad deal and decided to get themselves organized as a group.

A hobby is born
Another World War came and went, and in 1953 a South African film producer decided he'd make a romantic film about an eccentric young English car owner and his girlfriend against a backdrop of the annual London to Brighton rally.

The car he used for the central character in the movie "Genevieve" was a French Darracq from 1905 (now accepted as 1904), which of course was less than 50 years old at the time, and a Dutch Spyker.

The movie was a great success, and the hobby of car collecting became accepted. The movie's influence spread around the world. The Veteran and Edwardian Car Owners' Club of Australia was formed in April 1954, and a rally was arranged to celebrate the film's opening in Sydney in July 1954.

In these days, old cars were being pulled out of sheds and put on the road again. Restoration was easy as there were a lot of old cars laying around unwanted.

In tandem with the old car movement was the organization of the hot rod movement. Started in California in the 1930s as "souped up" old cars raced by young men, the National Hot Road Association was formed in the early 1950s as well. In the 1960s, car collecting became a popular and fun hobby. The cars were cheap, like collecting a 20 year old Ford or Chevrolet today.