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Brush Motor Car Company

Brush Motor Company based in Detroit, Michigan, was founded by Alanson P. Brush who designed a light car with wooden chassis (actually wooden rails and iron cross-members), friction drive transmission and "underslung" coil springs in tension instead of compression. 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. Power was provided by a large single-cylinder water-cooled engine. A feature of engines designed by Brush (who also designed the first Oakland Motor Car, ancestor of Pontiac) was that they ran counter-clockwise instead of the usual clockwise, which, in those days before the invention of the electric starter, was Brush's idea intended to make them safer for a right-handed person to crank-start by hand. With clockwise-running engines, many injuries were sustained, most often dislocated thumbs and broken forearms, if the hand crank kicked back on starting, especially if the car was not properly adjusted before starting, or the person cranking it did not follow correct safety procedures, including fully retarding the manual spark advance, keeping the thumb alongside the fingers instead of around the crank, and pulling the crank upward in a half turn, never in a full circle or pushing down.

The company formed part – among others – of Benjamin Briscoe's United States Motor Company from 1910 and ended when that company failed in 1913.

1907 Brush Runabout