The Tarkington

automobile A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, Car seat, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport private transport#Personal transport, peopl ...

was a two-door,

six-cylinder A straight-six engine (also referred to as an inline-six engine; abbreviated I6 or L6) is a piston engine with six cylinders arranged in a straight line along the crankshaft. A straight-six engine has perfect primary and secondary engine balanc ...

, gas-powered car built in the early 1920s in

Rockford, Illinois Rockford is a city in Winnebago County, Illinois, Winnebago and Ogle County, Illinois, Ogle counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. Located in far northern Illinois on the banks of the Rock River (Mississippi River tributary), Rock River, Rockfor ...

. Joseph Arthur Tarkington tried very hard to get his car into

mass-production Mass production, also known as mass production, series production, series manufacture, or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. ...

, but was unsuccessful. The company was incorporated in January 1920 with $500,000 of initial funding. It took three years before a

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototype ...

was displayed to the public. The vehicles had a home-made six- cylinder engine with OHV valve control. It was specified with a 260 cubic inches (about 4261 cm³) displacement and 54 hp. The chassis had a wheelbase of 320 cm. The only body design was an open touring car with five seats. Although well received by the press, additional capital needed for mass production was not forthcoming and the company was dissolved on June 1, 1923. Joseph filed several

patents A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

for the car, and there are stories that he was a pioneer in many things related to the automobile, albeit never receiving any credit. Here is an excerpt from the family tree website of

Karl Swenson Karl Swenson (July 23, 1908 – October 8, 1978) was an American theatre, radio, film, and television actor. Early in his career, he was credited as Peter Wayne.

, a man who built the Tarkington with Joseph:

Carl was one of the people who tried to produce an automobile by the name of the Tarkington. He and his dad and Mr. Tarkington worked at this and had 6 cars made. They failed to get the funding needed to get them mass-produced so had to quit the project. Carl was an avid golfer and being the engineer he was, worked very hard to perfect his golf swing.

All six cars produced by the company were eventually scrapped.

References

Cars of the United States {{motorvehicle-company-stub