Maxwell Motor Company

Formerly	Maxwell-Briscoe Company
Industry	Automobile
Predecessor	USMC
Founded	1904; 121 years ago (1904)
Founders	Jonathan Dixon Maxwell Benjamin Briscoe
Defunct	1925; 100 years ago (1925)
Fate	Acquired byWalter Chrysler, merged into Chrysler Corp.
Successor	Chrysler (Stellantis)
Headquarters	Tarrytown,New York andDetroit,Michigan , U.S.

Maxwell was an Americanautomobile manufacturer which ran from 1904 to 1925. The present-day successor to the Maxwell company wasChrysler,^[1] now Stellantis North America,^[2][3][4] which acquired the company in 1925.

Maxwell automobile production began under the "Maxwell-Briscoe Company" ofNorth Tarrytown, New York. The company was named after founder Jonathan Dixon Maxwell, who earlier had worked forOldsmobile, and his business partner,Benjamin Briscoe, an automobile industry pioneer and part owner of the Briscoe Brothers Metalworks. Briscoe was president of Maxwell-Briscoe at its height.

In 1907, following a fire that destroyed the North Tarrytown, NY, factory, Maxwell-Briscoe opened a mammoth automobile factory at 1817 I Ave,New Castle, Indiana.^[5] The newspapers reported that the factory "will operate as a whole, like an integral machine, the raw material going in at one end of the plant and the finished cars out the other end."^[5] This factory continued as a Chrysler plant following its takeover of Maxwell until its demolition in 2004.

For a time, Maxwell was considered one of the three top automobile firms in America, along withGeneral Motors andFord.^[6] (though the phrase "theBig Three" was not used at the time). Maxwell was the only profitable company of thecombine namedUnited States Motor Company, which was formed in 1910. Due to a conflict between two of its backers, the United States Motor Company collapsed in 1913 after the failure of its last supporting car manufacturer, theBrush Motor Company. Maxwell was the only survivor.

The company responded to the increasing number of low-priced cars—including the $600Ford Model N, the high-volumeOldsmobileRunabout at $650,^[7] the $485Brush Runabout,^[8] theBlack at $375,^[9] the $500Western Gale Model A,^[10] and the bargain-basementSuccess an amazingly low $250^[7]—by introducing theModel 25, their cheapest four yet.^[11] At $695, this five-seattouring car had high-tensionmagneto ignition,^[11] electric horn and (optional)electric starter andheadlights, and an innovativeshock absorber to protect theradiator.^[11]

By 1913, the Maxwell assets were overseen byWalter Flanders, who reorganized the company as the "Maxwell Motor Company, Inc." The company moved toHighland Park, Michigan. Some of the Maxwells were also manufactured at three plants inDayton, Ohio.^[12] By 1914, Maxwell had sold 60,000 cars.^[13]

• Maxwell Model E^[14]
• Maxwell Model G^[15]
• Maxwell Model H
• Maxwell Model Q3^[16]
• Maxwell Model Q2^[17]
• Maxwell Model Q1^[18]
• Maxwell Model Q Standard^[19]
• Maxwell Model Q 4^[20]
• Maxwell Model AA^[21]
• Maxwell Model G A^[22]
• Maxwell Model E A^[23]
• Maxwell Model I^[24]
• Maxwell Model A B^[25]

Maxwell eventually over-extended and wound up deeply in debt, with over half of its production unsold in the post-World War I recession in 1920. The following year,Walter P. Chrysler arranged to take a controlling interest in Maxwell Motors, subsequently re-incorporating it inWest Virginia with himself as the chairman. One of his first tasks was to correct the faults in the Maxwell, whose quality had faltered. This improved version of the car was marketed as the "good Maxwell".^[26]

Around the time of Chrysler's takeover, Maxwell was also in the process of merging, awkwardly at best, with the ailingChalmers Automobile Company.^[27] Chalmers ceased production in late 1923.^[27]

In 1925, Chrysler formed his own company, theChrysler Corporation. That same year, the Maxwell line was phased out and the Maxwell company assets were absorbed by Chrysler. The Maxwell automobile would continue to live on in another form, because the new4-cylinder Chrysler model that was introduced for the 1926 model year was created largely from the design of the previous year's Maxwell.^[28] This former Maxwell would undergo another transformation in 1928, when a second reworking and renaming would bring about the creation of the firstPlymouth.^[28]

Maxwell was one of the first car companies to market specifically to women. In 1909, it generated a great deal of publicity when it sponsoredAlice Huyler Ramsey, an early advocate of women drivers, as the first woman to drive coast-to-coast across the United States. By 1914, the company had strongly aligned itself with thewomen's rights movement. That year, it announced its plan to hire as many male sales personnel as female. At that time, it offered a promotional reception at its Manhattan dealership which featured several prominentsuffragettes such asCrystal Eastman, while in a showroom window a woman assembled and disassembled a Maxwell engine in front of onlookers.^[29]

In 1920, the Maxwell Company contracted with actress and producerNell Shipman to create a short promotional film featuring the Maxwell. She was able to stretch the money budgeted for the project into amulti-reel feature entitledSomething New.^[30] The Maxwell's abilities were prominently featured in this melodramatic film, which had Nell Shipman and Bert Van Tuyle escaping a band of Mexican bandits by racing the sturdy little car across the Mexican badlands where they overcame obstacles such as boulders, rivers, gulches, and all other sorts of rough terrain. Maxwell dealers presented this motion picture at various venues to promote the car, often with the now-battered Maxwell on display. The Maxwell Company had assisted in the film's production by supplying a car and by deploying a mechanic to the filming location. The mechanic's job included repeatedly replacing the car'stransmission, which kept getting torn up by the harsh desert landscape.^[31]

A decrepit old Maxwell was famous as the carJack Benny drove, for decades after it had stopped being manufactured, on his long-running radio (and later TV) comedy seriesThe Jack Benny Program. The running joke was that Benny was too stingy to buy himself a new car—or even a newerused car—as long as his old one still ran, however poorly. The sounds used for it initially were pre-recorded, but when a technical fault prevented one of the records from playing,voice actorMel Blanc himself improvised the sounds of the sputtering car starting up. His performance was received well enough for him to continue that task permanently. In one gag from the showRochester tells Benny that he reported to the police that the Maxwell had been stolen although he didn't make the report until three hours after the theft; when Jack asked why Rochester delayed so long, Rochester explained that it was because that was when he stopped laughing.

The gag of the Maxwell as Benny's car was used in the classic cartoonThe Mouse That Jack Built. Many people erroneously assume that the antique automobile Jack Benny is seen driving during his cameo appearance in the 1962 comedy filmIt's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a Maxwell; that car is, in fact, a 1931Cadillac convertible coupe.

In the "Mr. Bevis" episode ofThe Twilight Zone, Bevis (Orson Bean) is talking to a police officer (William Schallert) about buying his wrecked 1924 Rickenbacker. The officer responds facetiously that he has his eye on a 1927 Maxwell, which is two years after the Maxwell company closed.

• Carl Breer
• List of defunct United States automobile manufacturers

• Clymer, Floyd.Treasury of Early American Automobiles, 1877–1925. New York: Bonanza Books, 1950.
• Darke, Paul. "Chrysler: The Baby of the Big Three", in Northey, Tom, ed.World of Automobiles, Vol. 4, pp. 364–9. London: Orbis, 1974.
• Kimes, Beverly Rae, and Clark, Henry Austin Jr.Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1805–1942 (second edition). Krause Publications, Inc. 1989.ISBN 0-87341-111-0.
• Kimes, Beverly Rae, and Clark, Henry Austin Jr.Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1805–1942 (third edition). Krause Publications, Inc. 1996.ISBN 0-87341-428-4.
• Yanik, Anthony J.Maxwell Motor and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.ISBN 9780814334232.

• Maxwell automobiles at ConceptCarz
• Maxwell: First Builder of Chrysler Cars at Allpar.com
• Maxwell/Maxwell-Briscoe with photos of various Maxwells
• Early Chrysler history (including Maxwell)
• Watch the 1920 movie "Something New" featuring the robust Maxwell-car in a 1-hr. extremely grueling albeit entertaining mountain-terrain ordeal.

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