Original story.- By James J. Bradley. Transcribed to the site:By Frank Nathanson, in 4 parts. |
| WOULDN’T YOU REALLY RATHER HAVE A KLINK? OR, HOW ABOUT A DODO? |
| Owners who boast about their cars’ performances should have stood at the side of a gravel road about 1912 and clocked one of the American Underslung roadsters doing 70 miles per hour over it’s rough surface, riding so smoothly that the driver did not even spill cigarette ashes on his vest. The low-hung American Underslung, with flat fenders coming as high as the top of its radiator, was just one of the more than 3,000 different makes of separate, distinctly different cars produced in the United States. They came in all colors of the rainbow and had dozens of kinds of transmissions, controlling devices, body shapes and engines. Some were huge high-wheeled juggernauts, others were small enough to park under an old-fashioned front porch with their tops up. All but a handful are now ghost cars that gave chugged away to join the book of legends about the automobile industry, a book more packed with tragedy, comedy, pure melodrama and excitement that any other industry in America. A tiny niche in the history of this phantom parade should be reserved for the colorful and sometimes bizarre names their builders selected for them . . . names like Monarch, Paragon, O-We-Go, Alpena Flyer, Bugmobile, Black Hawk, Dixie, Silent Sioux, Cyclone, Coey Bear, Skimabout, Sphinx and Seven Little Buffalos. Manufacturers must have figured that half the battle was starting their infant products out with illustrious names. As a result, the motorcar terminology which developed is not quite as prosaic as it may seem at first glance. It is often honeycombed with interest and sentiment, sometimes reflecting romance in everyday life. True, the christening ceremony itself was usually unimpressive. Bottles of champagne were seldom broken over the hoods of cars. (Though corks may have popped in the directors’ board rooms and silent prayers for dividends offered). In spite of formal rites, we can be sure that the name for the gasoline infant had been chosen with care. Tomes on geography, mythology, history and botany, Latin dictionaries and other source books were searched; in recent years individual judgement has been supplemented by sophisticated computer methods, market surveys and consumer polls. The Argo Electric, for instance, was saved from the humiliation of a more pedestrian name because Benton Hanchett knew mythology. In 1909 when a Saginaw, Mich. firm was seeking a name for its new auto, Hanchett, a leaned and well-read man, as well as a director of the company, recalled the exploits of Jason and his band of Grecian heroes. Their perilous but successful voyage in the good ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece suggested to Hanchett hat his company’s quest for sales and profits in a car similarily named, might be blessed by the gods. Unfortunately, the Argo foundered on the shoals of bankruptcy a few years after its launching. Another venture into mythology proved more auspicious when the Ford Motor Co. brought out a new model in 1938. The company called its car the Mercury after the swift messenger of the gods and a god of commerce and travel in is own right. The selection of Mercury’s winged cap signifying speed was a prophetic choice of a trademark. Earlier attempts to build Mercury cars in Philadelphia, Pa., Hollis, N.Y., and Cleveland Ohio, had all failed. The most successful of the lot was the two-passenger, belt-driven Mercury cycle-car mad in 1913-1914 in Detroit, Mich. (The cycl-ecar fad which swept the automotive world in 1913 and 1914 represented an attempt to combine the best features of the light car and the motorcycle. More than 100 different makes of cyclecars were announced in those two years. All were doomed to the same inglorious end as a 1912 cyclecar which had carried the name of an extinct bird, the DODO). From 1906 to 1931 a firm in the small town of Hartford, Wis. turned out one of America’s great automobiles, the Kissel Kar. A dream, strangely enough, was partly responsible for its name. When the first Kissel was built, a conference of the company’s directors was arranged in Chicago with officials of the McDuffee Automobile Co., which had applied for exclusive distribution rights for Illinois. After terms were settled, a discussion arose as to what the car should be called. The name “Wisconsin” was an early favorite. But it was finally conceded that the name of the 23-year-old builder, George A. Kissel, might be a better choice. Formal arrangements were postponed indefinitely, and a week or so after the conference, Mr. Harvey, an officer of the McDuffee company, wrote to Kissel that his wife, in a dream had come upon an inspired idea — that of spelling “car” with a “K” and including it in the title. (Kissel dropped Kar from its name in 1919). The Kissel Car was followed by the Browniekar in 1909 (Newark, N.Y.), the Kline Kar (York, Pa.) in 1911, the Keller Kar, Chicago, 1914, and the Little Kar from Dallas, Tex. in 1920 END OF PART I. |
| PART II. . . . . . . A LINK?. . . . . . |
| It would be impossible to fathom all the reasons which impelled inventors to name cars after themselves. In some instance, the decision stemmed from a domineering personality or egoism; in others, it was an expression of personal faith or even a search for immortality. It did declare to the world that the builder was proud of his name and his product and would not hide either behind some terminological mask. This penchant for self-naming added to the roster of American automobiles such unlikely-sounding names as: the Klink, a Danville, N.Y. car of 1910, (it is believed that only 20 Klinks were sold, mainly to the stockholders); the Twombly of New York City whose 1911 model featured a 206-pound engine that could be removed for rapid repair in a matter of three minutes; the Pungs-Finch (Detroit, 1904-1910), guaranteed to do better than 50 miles per hour; the Ricketts, made first in White Pigeon, Mich. and then South Bend, Ind., 1905-1910: the Neskov-Mumperow, St. Louis, Mo., 1921-1922: the McQuestion Streamer, Boston, 1901-1902, and the Prigg, a cyclecar made in Anderson, Ind. in 1914. One of the more euphonious names was coined by a gentleman who had a pretty romantic sounding name himself, Childe Harold Wills. A Ford engineer and one of the guiding geniuses behind the Model T, he left Ford in 1919 to build a car on his own. Wills located his factory on the shores of the Sainte Claire river in Marysville, Mich. and named his automobile the Wills Sainte Claire. An American creek inspired Wilbur Gunn to add a melodic-sounding name to England’s auto terminology. When Gunn started building a car in Middlesex the name he chose for it was the name of the stream he recalled playing in when he was growing up in Springfield, Ohio — the Lagonda. When there were too many senior members of a company to allow for a compound name, honors were sometimes equally distributed by the use of initials. Messers, Everett, Metzger and Flanders called their Detroit-made car (1908-1913) the E.M.F.; the letters in the C.G.V., a French car built under license in Rome, N.Y. around 1903, stood for Charron, Giradot and Voight; a company founded by three gentlemen named Fauntelroy, Averill and Lowe manufactured the FAL in Chicago from 1909-1915. In 1907 three wealthy young men in Brooklyn, N.Y. named Breese, Lawrence and Moulton joined forces to market a car which they claimed incorporated the best features of expensive European automobiles. their B.L., M line ranged from a sedate town car to a racy speed machine powered by and 85-hp engine. In 1909 the Hudson Motor Car Co. produced its first automobile. The company wisely refrained from giving it the name of its brilliant designer, Howard E. Coffin. Instead they settled on the name of the wealthy Detroit department store owner who was financing the venture, Joseph L. Hudson. The Hudson became a roaring success almost overnight. In 1918 a low-priced companion car, the Essex, was added to the company’s line. It owed its name to a map of England. Hudson had wanted a name with snob appeal and several top executives sat down with a map of the British Isles. Their scanning produced the name Essex. By 1929 Essex was the third larges selling car in the U.S. However, sales slipped badly in succeeding years and in 1932 the company brought out a beefed-up Essex called the Terraplane. Hudson’s advertising proclaimed that the Terraplane was “the plane that skims the earth . . .land flying is what Terraplaning is.” The aeronautical theme was further stressed by staging a grand presentation ceremony at which the car was unveiled with Amelia Earhart breaking a be-ribboned bottle of aviation gas over a Terraplane’s radiator. after miss Earhart’s dedication, the car was presented to Orville Wright. END OF PART II. |
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| PART III. . . . . . . A LINK?. . . . . . |
| The Blood Brothers of Kalamazoo, Mich., tried unsuccessfully to sell cars called the Blood in 1901 and again in 1913. Their third attempt a year later showed a neat bit of verbal gymnastics. This time they called their vehicle the cornelian after the blood-red gemstone of the same name. Though the Cornelian was short lived, it is well-remembered by Indianapolis 500 race historians. Louis Chevrolet took a Cornelian racer to Indianapolis in 1915 and posted the fastest qualifying time of the entire field. Long before the individual car makers began to coin trade names for their products, a good acceptable name had to be found for the self-propelled vehicle itself. In a way, the automobile had a gestation period of thousands of years. Ever since man started to set his thoughts down in written form we catch shadowy glimpses of the idea of the modern automobile. In the Iliad (Alexander Pope’s translation) Homer describes Vulcan’s efforts to build a line of motorized three-wheelers this: “There the lame architect the goddess found, Obscure in smoke, his forges flaming round. While bathed in sweat from fire to fire he flew; And puffing loud, the roaring bellows blew. That day no common task his labor claimed; Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed, That placed on living wheels of massy gold, (Wondrous to tell), instinct with spirit rolled. From place to place around the blessed abodes, Self-moved, obedient to the beck of gods.” (One might facetiously infer from the “wheels of massy gold” that Vulcan had anticipated a modern practice of the auto industry; that is the construction of special customized models intended for show only). The old-testament prophet Nahum predicted that “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broadways; they shall seem like torches; they shall run like lightnings.” The literature of the middle-ages continued with many uncannily accurate descriptions of what was to become a reality someday. Yet when the automobile did arrive, America at least, was unprepared with a name. Some of the terms used in the 1980’s to describe the motorized vehicle were: autocar, electrobat, auto-vim, autocycle, motor buggy, horseless carriage, quadricycle, motor wagon and mechanical carriage. The Chicago Times-Herald newspaper thought it had settled the matter in 1895. The paper offered a $500 prize for the best generic term to call the newfangled invention; the winner was “motorcycle”, a term that was lampooned by most of the press and pretty well ignored by the man on the street. Instead, America looked to France, the leader of the auto world and, as far as society was concerned, the arbiter in language matters. With society’s acceptance of the French term “automobile” (plus other French motoring words such as chassis, garage, chauffeur, taxi cab, coupe, cabriolet, etc.), the wrangling over a suitable name gradually subsided. However, some purists were still uneasy about another facet of the horseless carriage, its sex. The French practice of assigning a gender to nouns caused grammarians to wonder whether the automobile was masculine or feminine. The august French Acadamey pondered the question and solemnly proclaimed the “L’Automobile” to be masculine, as masculine as a three-day growth of whiskers. With its usual Freudian commonsense the public continued to refer to the automobile as “she” — praising “her” virtues and grumbling about “her” fickle ways. This feminine mystique was occasionally recognized by a gallant car maker who would choose a female name for his auto. |
| PART IV. . . . . . . A LINK?. . . . . . |
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