Anybody know of a good book on the Peerless Motor Car Company

[Durant Mike]

Anybody out there know of a good book on the Peerless Motor Car Company?

[jeff_a]

There is an excellent 30 pg section on Peerless in a 1973 Automobile Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 1.

Quite a few magazine articles in HCCA, Cars & Parts, AACA.

Should there be a thorough work exclusively about the Peerless Co? Yes. -----Jeff

[Guest BJM]

The idea of a comprehensive Peerless book is long overdue and sometimes discussed among Peerless fans. Packard certainly has many books on their historical developments and many coffee table books.

No one book exists on strictly Peerless.

It would be a major undertaking for many reasons, not the least of which is time since thye were last made, a prospective publishers reticence at underwriting such a book, what with limited possible purchasers, getting the facts straight (there are as many Peerless tales as their are facts) getting adequate photos (you can only paint so good a "picture" with words - people want to see the CARS)

Can it be done? Most definately. There is an (in)active Peerless Club with some knowledgeable souls to assist.

Bryan (Jake) Moran

[jeff_a]

Dear Durant28,

There is a book about Cleveland Auto Manufacturers that has some Peerless info. It's called Golden Wheels, by Wager. Peerless Motor Car Club President Richard Lichtfeld reccommended it to me, but I haven't read it yet. Has anybody out there seen it? I am curious how many pages about Peerless it has, since there were more than 80 carmakers in that city over the years. -Jeff

Edited November 1, 2011 by jeff_a (see edit history)

[jeff_a]

Another book on antique cars which mentions Peerless is Ralph Stein's The American Automobile by Random House,NY. It has eight pages on Peerless (plus ten on Pierce-Arrow and fourteen on Packard)...not a lot of pages, but a really good book "...on the great American cars of the period which ended in 1940."

About 40 makes are covered -- with most getting six to ten pages ( e.g., Auburn 6, Cord 6, Duesenberg 6, Mercer 8, Stutz 20 ). The book doesn't show a publishing date, but probably came out about 1972.

[jeff_a]

Finally got to read the book Golden Wheels, which is the history of Ohio automakers from about 1893-1933. Authors name is Wager, not Wagner ( my misspelling ). It's a very good book, with a few pages about most of the many companies: 23 on Winton, 18 on Peerless, about 10 each on Chandler and Jordan. Good data on Peerless, including the answer to a question I had been unable to answer: What type of Peerless did John D. Rockefeller own? He had a 1904 AND a 1913, with a photo of him riding in the the 1913 Touring.

[Guest BJM]

Awesome! Where did you get that book?

[jeff_a]

Since I'm out in the boonies, I used my local library's inter-library loan. Only took a week to arrive and it was free. The picture of the 1913 Peerless looks a lot like one of the Mod. 60-Sixes with the 825 cu. in. engine.

They only made around 50 or 60 of that model annually (1912-1914), but JDR stikes me as the kind of man who would have gone for the big engine. I believe the next smaller engine available in the Peerless lineup was a 577 (48 taxable h.p., Mod. 48-Six). I read that the Mod. 48-Six tested at 90 h.p. with an electric dynamomotor but the 60-Six (60 taxable h.p.) was too big for any electric dynos and they had to rig-up a fan dyno to test it. They got an estimated 110-120 h.p. The only surviving 60-Six I know of is in the Crawford Museum.

Sorry to go on forever about the 1913. --Jeff (definitely in the top-1000-list of people knowledgeable about Peerless cars)

[Guest BJM]

The curious part is why would they and Pierce Arrow make such monster engines. For starters, no pun intended, the 825 would be so hard to hand crank to get going. Also, hard electrically (self-starter if available) to get going.

The swept volume would create frictional nightmares in a 6 Jug set up. It was a breif time in history for sure, as once sound engineering got involved, it had to overtake the sheer cubic inch arguments.

Let others make the huge displacement engines.

These were 6's right? I should check my AQ Hendry story first before writing this but if they were fours, that's insane. Frictional losses had to be enormous and reliability compromised. The nergy required to push the cylinders down meant energy losses exceeding the possible out put gains of higher displacement.

In other words they were probably using 100 hp to make 100hp.

[jeff_a]

Bryan,

I was just going to the Peerless Forum to add something to my post about the production numbers of the 60-Six Peerless cars when I saw your comments.

My addition is that I saw some production numbers for the cars w/ the 824.8 cu. in. motors in a reference book I have at home. These 60-Six, or Mod. 37 Peerlesses, according to ser. # data, were built in #'s about like I recalled, for 1912 (68) and 1914 (58), but the #'s don't "jive" for 1913, as my Dad would have said. Would you believe 2,755 cars? Just seems like a big spike in production for a $6,000 car. I did say, earlier, that 50 or 60 were built each year, and 2755 is a lot more than that!

Why Pierce-Arrow and Peerless produced 824.8 cu. in./13.5 liter engines is a good question. Probably has something to do with the American interest in doing things bigger, better, faster, etc. If an all-knowing car statistics guy were reading this, he would jump in and remind us that the there's a 3-way tie for world's largest production car engine and that the 3rd company is Fageol (I don't know much about them except Robert DeMars Appraisals uses one on their logo and someone ran one at Indy in 1949).

This huge engine came in at about the same time as the self-starters on Peerless. Some 1912's had electric start, and some Peerlesses before that had air starters. I did read once that the first electric starters put in the 1912 and 1913 Peerlesses were powerful. To paraphrase Ralph Stein's book The American Automobile, you could use the Gray & Davis starter motor alone to move a 2 1/2 ton Limousine up a 7% grade, 660 ft. high, in 15 minutes; or turn it over for half an hour.

The 60 h.p.'s were sixes with 5 in. bore & 7 in. stroke. I think there HAVE been bigger piston engines in race cars, trucks, and tractors -- but not a lot. Any old tractor people out there reading this? My grandfather's Emerson-Brantingham tractor supposedly had pistons bigger than coffee cans. The Maurice Hendry history of Peerless includes some comments by engineers who worked for the company in the early days. One of them said that it WAS difficult getting rid of the heat under all conditions with the motor.

Readers should take what I say with a grain of salt....I'm very interested in Peerless motorcars, but I've never owned one or driven one. Maybe someone will join in who can comment from experience. I doubt that any magazines have tried a "Drive Report" on a 60 H.P. Peerless from this era, which is ashamed. I did hear about the one in the Crawford museum being used on a long tour, back in the 70's.

Some large car engines, 1902-1927:

a. 1908 4 CYL Benz G.P. race car....... 12.4 L

b. 1927 8 CYL Bugatti luxury car....... 12.7 L

c. 1908 6 CYL Stearns 45-90 sports car. 13.4 L/800 cid

d. 1908 4 CYL Benz G.P. race car....... 13.5 L

e. 1912 ? CYL Benz #40 race car........ 15.6 L/928 cid

f. 1903 8 CYL Winton Bullet #2 race car 17 L/1,029 cid

g. 1906 4 CYL Locomobile race car...... 17.7 L

h. 1902 4 CYL Ford 999 race car........ 18.9 L/1,080 cid

Some of the math is questionable, as far as metric conversions are concerned, but this will give you an idea what some of our predecessors were doing in their workshops back then!

I found 2 sources saying that there were 2,755 60 H.P. Peerless made in 1913. That's pretty amazing if it's true. How would you feel about finding one of those on your next drive in the country? I know of a Governor of a western state who would be great to take on tours for when you needed to hand-crank the engine.... ----Jeff

[jeff_a]

Well Gee, there's the old standby Peerless Automobiles In The Brass Era: 1900-1915, written by Alex Cauthen in 2020.

All early Peerless enthusiasts should have a copy of that one. 

Hardcover, about 230 pages. 

Edited June 20, 2022 by jeff_a (see edit history)

[alextheantiqueautoguy]

On 1/19/2008 at 3:49 PM, jeff_a said:

Finally got to read the book Golden Wheels, which is the history of Ohio automakers from about 1893-1933. Authors name is Wager, not Wagner ( my misspelling ). It's a very good book, with a few pages about most of the many companies: 23 on Winton, 18 on Peerless, about 10 each on Chandler and Jordan. Good data on Peerless, including the answer to a question I had been unable to answer: What type of Peerless did John D. Rockefeller own? He had a 1904 AND a 1913, with a photo of him riding in the the 1913 Touring.

I have the "Golden Wheels" book. Overall, it is an invaluable resource on cars made in Cleveland. That sounds like a joke but before 1905, Cleveland was the center of automobile production in the US. Detroit bankers and Henry Ford changed that.

The information on Peerless in Golden Wheels is not always factually accurate, this is not meant as criticism, only that electronic research is able to cover a vast amount of information that chasing down books in libraries will never compare. Golden Wheels is otherwise invaluable and well written.

The purpose of the 824.8 cubic inch engine was prestige. Only Pierce Arrow and Peerless could have engineered an engine of this size. As with Cadillac V-16 in 1932, the motor made a statement about which car company was the leader. And like Cadillac in 1932, the sales never matched the motor.
 

Thanks for Jeff for mentioning my book Peerless Automobiles of the Brass Era. He is a never-ending source of support for Peerless. The book was self-published, and copies are available in the Western Reserve Historical Society library in Cleveland and the Library of Congress.