found among hundreds of great old car catalogs at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?word=title_id_list:454055&slabel=Automobiles%253A%2520Manufacturers%2520catalogues%252E&sScope=images&sLevel=1
Showing posts with label Peerless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peerless. Show all posts
The 1912 Official Handbook of Automobiles, (wow, stats and views of brasss era cars still licensed under the Selden patent)
the above delivery wagon is cool, but check out the Locomobile Cup Racer, and the price ... $18,000
the Peerless on the right hand side below... if you read the stat sheet, you might be as amused as I am that the body is known as the "King of Belgium"
the Selden Patent issue:
The above tag has a bit of historical perspective... the Selden company patented the automobile. He collected on every car made... 0.75%
Selden was a patent attorney. His dad was a judge, and a prominent Republican attorney most noted for defending Susan B Anthony.
Yeah, it obviously didn't stand up very long, but for a time, they had the patent on the automobile, and if you wanted to sell a car in America, you either paid a licensing fee or fought them in court.
Henry Ford fought them in court and won... he was obviously better prepared to make a success and a fortune that he'd share with the US Govt by way of taxes, so the right people were persuaded to take the patent of the automobile, and make it go away... the reason given was that the Ford and other cars were using an engine based on a different engine than Selden had patented.
see the whole book page by page at http://www.archive.org/stream/officialhandboo04assogoog#page/n12/mode/2up which is just one of 10s of thousands of online books at http://www.archive.org/
The aristocrat of medium priced cars, the Hudson sharing a dealership showroom with a Peerless
1910's to 1950's fire engines
1910 Peerless
1928 Seldon and I noticed that this and the 1910 Peerless are both marked Ft Washington
"The Old Man of the Mountain"
An early Peerless auto was found in 1965 about to fall off a narrow ledge in the San Mateo Canyon http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm?fuse=NWPS&sec=wildView&wname=San%20Mateo%20Canyon%20Wilderness (near San Juan Capistrano Ca.).
Seen first by a helicopter pilot who was looking for a good place to prospect for gold, and related to a San Diego restorer of Peerless automobiles, who got a team together and the services of a heavy hauler helicopter to lift it out.
About a 1905-1910 car, this came from a company synonymous with quality, and held at the same level of esteem as Packard and Pierce-Arrow. http://cleveland.about.com/od/clevelandattractions/ss/crawford_6.htm
The car had been driven on a horse trail to a gold mine and then used as a source of power, but over a half a century the road had eroded and hillslides had likely taken away most of the trail, until the car rested on the remains of 3 rims, and the other was hanging in free air over a 1200 foot drop.
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