The Franklin Automobile

Between nineteen oh two and nineteen thirty-four, a company in Syracuse built something that most of the American automobile industry thought was a mistake. They built cars without water.

The Franklin Automobile Company was founded by Herbert H. Franklin, a die-casting entrepreneur who in nineteen oh one joined forces with a Syracuse engineer named John Wilkinson. Wilkinson had been developing an air-cooled engine, one that dispensed with the radiator, the water pump, and the cooling hoses that every other manufacturer was treating as fixed requirements. Franklin saw the logic. He put up the money. Wilkinson went to work.

The first Franklin was sold in nineteen oh two. It was light, responsive, and mechanically elegant in a way that the heavier, water-cooled machines of the era were not. The company offered six cylinders by nineteen oh five, an automatic spark advance in nineteen oh seven, and innovations in suspension that gave the car a ride quality its competitors could not match. When Packard and Pierce-Arrow were making ponderous machines for people who wanted to feel their wealth, Franklin was making something closer to an engineer's argument: that you could have a fine car that did not weigh like a safe.

The cars found a devoted audience. Of approximately one hundred fifty thousand Franklins built over thirty-two years, roughly thirty-seven hundred survive, a remarkable preservation rate that reflects how fanatically their owners cared for them.

The Depression killed the company. Franklin went into receivership in April nineteen thirty-four. The air-cooled engine technology lived on, however: the successor company, Aircooled Motors of Syracuse, later sold its technology to an entrepreneur named Preston Tucker, who used it in his famous Tucker automobile of nineteen forty-eight.

An H.H. Franklin Club still exists. Members restore and drive the cars. The cars hold their air.