When Thomas B. Jeffery and R. Phillip Gormully went into the bicycle business,  they were

 paying licensing fees on the Lallement Patent,         purchased by Colonel Albert Augustus Pope.  Pope was the largest bicycle maker in the country, manufacturing the Columbia. 

    At first, on Gormully’s advice, G & J paid the licensing fees, but in 1886, Jeffery re-examined the crank-and-pedal patent, and decided that it was indefensible, as it represented no real invention, merely evolution. 

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   Gormully issued a declaration of independence from the blanket patent. Pope immediately pressed suits, all of which were defended successfully by Gormully and Jeffery Manufacturing, in 1891.  The striking down of this patent single-handedly removed the major restriction in the bicycle industry in North America, and it was Rambler that made the difference.  Jeffery also successfully prosecuted his own patents.  He won a case for his tire patent in the United States, but lost another in England after taking his case to the  House of Lords.

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   In November 1895, Jeffery witnessed a Thanksgiving Day automobile race in the snow,    sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, to be run from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois and back.  This was the first sponsored automobile race run in American history…

The distance was 54 miles.  Entered were the Duryea brothers’  motorwagon,   three Benz automobiles, and two electric-powered cars.  J. Frank Duryea won the event, but not before most of the entrants had broken down repeatedly.  Jeffery was not impressed by the reliability of  these machines, which took over seven hours to make the trip. He felt that much could be done to improve these rudimentary designs.

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     Thomas Buckland Jeffery had a running automobile by 1897.  It was designed   and built in his works at the Rambler bicycle plant on Franklin Street in Chicago, by Thomas and his son Charles.

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   Their initial designs with engines involved mounting powerplants to bicycles, as they felt it would be an affordable means of transport.    There was some experimentation for a couple of more years, returning more power, along with some refinements to the design.

 Some refinements noted are steering wheels instead of tiller steering, engine placement in front instead of under the cockpit, and seating of the driver on the left.  One design actually mounted passengers in front of the driver.

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   In 1899, R. Phillip Gormully passed away, and Jeffery sold out of the Gormully & Jeffery bicycle business, to Pope,    at which time the Rambler Bicycles took a precipitous dive in price, dropping from the 100 dollars they had been at for years, down to as low as 40 dollars.  In 1900, the newly-formed Thomas B. Jeffery & Company purchased the Sterling Bicycles    plant in Kenosha WI. 

Sterling was owned by the American Bicycle trust.  Yes, Pope again. 

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Two more experimental designs were built in the Chicago workshop, one a “stanhope” covered model      and the other a runabout.    Both used steering wheels and front motors, and the pair were driven from Chicago to Milwaukee and back in the summer of 1900.

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  In 1901, two more cars,  the Model A and the Model B,   designed by Thomas’ son, Charles Thomas Jeffery, were the first cars created in the Kenosha plant.   It was felt by Thomas that these cars were a little too radical for general public acceptance, considering such oddities as front-mounted engine and a steering wheel.  Instead it was decided to introduce the Model C, a more conventional design.  Thomas B. and Charles T. Jeffery began producing these cars and showing them to good reception, at New York’s first auto show,   and at the Automobile  Exposition and Tournament in Chicago in 1902, where on March 1st, the first specimen, a Model D Stanhope,   was sold to a doctor in Binghampton, NY. The other model offered was Model C, a runabout.  As the year progressed, the little 72-inch wheelbase buggies sold over 1500 copies, achieving a mark as America’s second mass produced automobile. And in the week of October 9-15, 1902, a Model C completed the New York to Boston Reliability Run, 488 miles at an average of 14 mph, finishing in flying colors.

In this manner,  Rambler established itself as one of America’s earliest and most well-respected cars.

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Egad!  The lamping and instrumentation is growing dim, and we  must take pause for now, and tend to the battery…
mike 

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This post is #2 in a series.

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click here for POST # 1 in this series.
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