Louis Semple Clarke - The Autocar Company

The Autocar Company

LS was an educated engineer and in the 1890s started working with his brother Charles developing motorized vehicles resulting in the Pittsburgh Motor Vehicle Company supported by brothers, John S. and James K. Clarke along with their father Charles and friend William Morgan in 1897. Initial production included a motorized tricycle and a small car, which the brothers called “The Pittsburgher.”

In 1899, the name of the company was changed to “The Autocar Company,” and operations were relocated to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a western suburb of Philadelphia. In 1901 they produced what is considered to be this country’s first multi-cylinder, shaft driven car. Initial sales brochures touted that it “cannot blow up or burn up” as well as its ease of control, to the point he taught his wife to drive, making her the first known woman driver in the county.

The new design was driven from Ardmore to the Madison Square Garden, New York City, in six hours and fifteen minutes, where it was exhibited in the New York Automobile Show of December 1901. The first eight hundred cars were equipped with steering levers, but new innovations helped the Autocar to generate another revolution in innovative design, placing the steering wheel on the left hand side of the car thus establishing the reason we currently drive on the right hand side of the road. Under the Clarke brothers, the company was an early innovator, developing the first porcelain-insulated spark plugs– a process patented and later sold to Champion, and which still remains the basis for today’s spark plugs. Other early developments included the first American shaft-drive vehicle, double-reduction gear drives, and the recirculating lube–oil system. They even contributed toward the war effort with their engineering abilities as Louis also designed a naval bomb fuse which had been adopted as standard and also had been adopted for army use. His son Louis Phillips or LP during the war was responsible for detonating bombs in the US and France. According to the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, “For approximately the first ten years of the Autocar company's existence Clarke was president and chief engineer of the company. In later years he served the company as vice-president and consulting engineer. He sold his interested in the Autocar Co. in 1929 and retired at that time.”