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Hildred and brother changing tire on Brush Runabout car (1912)

From Page 10a in Hildred's album.

According to Wikipedia:

The Brush company was founded by Alanson Partridge Brush (February 10, 1878, Michigan – March 6, 1952, Michigan). He was a self-taught prolific designer, working with Henry Leland at Oldsmobile, and went on to helped design the original one-cylinder Cadillac engine.[1] Although there were many makes of small runabouts of similar size and one to four cylinders at this time (before the Model T Ford dominated the low-price market), the Brush has many unusual design details showing the inventiveness of its creator. The Brush Runabout Company, along with Maxwell-Briscoe, Stoddard-Dayton, and others formed Benjamin Briscoe's United States Motor Company(USMC) from 1910, ending when that company failed in 1913. Runabouts, in general, fell out of vogue quickly, partly due to the lack of protection from the weather.

After Brush and the other companies of the USMC folded into Maxwell Motor Company, President Walter Flanders wrote in 1913 document "Why We Did Not Use All Our Plants", the Brush factory in Detroit (along with the Flanders and Sampson Plants) were to remain open and running as factories.

Touted as the "Everyman's Car", Brush designed a light car with a wooden chassis (wooden rails and iron cross-members), friction drive transmission and "underslung" coil springs in tension instead of compression on both sides of each axle. Two gas-powered headlamps provided light, along with a gas-powered light in the rear. The frame, axles, and wheels were made of oak, hickory or maple, and were either left plain or painted to match the trim. Wider axles were available for use in the Southern region of the United States, where a 60-inch tread fit wagon ruts on country roads.[3] The horn was located next to the engine cover, with a metal tube running to a squeeze bulb affixed near the driver. A small storage area was provided in the rear, with a drawer accessible under the rear of the seat.

The engines were a single-cylinder, four-stroke water cooled design, producing 6BHP, with power going to a chain-driven rear axle. The rear-axle disengaged one of the rear wheels while driving around a curve to avoid undue wear and tear on the drivetrain. A feature of engines designed by Brush was that they ran counter-clockwise instead of the usual clockwise. This was Brush's idea intended to make them safer for a right-handed person to crank-start by hand. Prior to the invention of the electric starter, crank-starting a clockwise-running engines frequently resulted in dislocated thumbs and broken forearms if the hand crank kicked back on starting.

According to a contemporary review from Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal in 1907, author Hugh Dolnar described the recently introduced Brush as a "...very, very new and also very, very old, as will be seen from the detailed construction illustrations below..." In his critique of the Brush, Dolnar was referencing the decision to use wooden axles.

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