1914 Ford Model T Runabout

 This Model T Runabout was built by the Ford Motor Company. It cost $500 at the beginning of the 1914 model year, which began at Ford in August 1913. For the 1914 model year, Ford also built a Touring body style, which cost $550, and a Town Car body style, which cost $750.

 The Ford Motor Company was established on June 16, 1903, by Henry Ford and a group of eleven investors. The company's creation was not a foregone conclusion in the years leading up to that day. Ford had driven his first successful homebuilt car about seven years earlier, in June 1896. Despite this relatively early success, Ford got sidetracked by his development of race cars, especially his 999 and Arrow. Ford also co-counded two other companies, the Detroit Automobile Company and the Henry Ford Company, before either leaving or being removed from the firms. It was only after many ups and downs that Henry Ford got into the right manufacturing mindset and found the right investors to get the soon-to-be successful Ford Motor Company going.
 Beginning in 1903, Ford's company made the first Model A – a second Model A, of which three examples are here at Stuhr Museum, was built in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Along with the Model A, the Models C and F became big sellers from 1903 to 1905. All had 2-cylinder engines under the seat. From 1906 to 1908, before the shift to the Model T, Ford's Models N, R, and S became popular cars in America. All of these models had 4-cylinder engines under the hood. When Ford came out with the Model T in 1908, it became perhaps his favorite model. It was the best-selling automobile in America throughout the 1910s and into the 1920s, and it made the Ford Motor Company the largest car manufacturer in the world for a time.

 On the driver's side door of this Model T is a Spartan Echo Type F hand-operated horn made by the Sparks-Withington Company in Jackson, Michigan. Sparks-Withington was formed by Philip and Winthrop Withington and William Sparks. In 1900, the Withington brothers created the Withington Company to produce steel parts for Withington, Cooley and Company, a firm established in part by their father and former Civil War General, William H. Withington. In 1903, the Withington brothers teamed up with Sparks, an English immigrant to Jackson who turned out to be a great salesman and organizer for the company.
 In 1909, the company began making radiator cooling fan assemblies for the rising automobile industry; and, by 1911, its engineers had developed the first all-electric car horn. Adopted as standard equipment by the Hudson Automobile Company, the Sparks-Withington car horn became very popular. Shortly after its introduction, the company called its car horn the “Sparton,” a combination of the names, Sparks and Withington, and a reference to the ancient Spartans. In 1913, it added the hand-operated horn to its product line. By the early 1920s, Sparton horns could be found on forty-two makes of automobile.
 The Sparks-Withington Company did not just stop with its innovations of the car horn. In 1926, the company came out with the country’s first all-electric radio. Expanding alongside the growing radio market, the company made a wide variety of radios throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By 1929, it was Jackson’s largest company, employing about one out of every fifteen workers in the city. By 1939, Sparks-Withington began developing their own television, putting off further experiments with the television until after World War II. By 1948, the company had come out with a black and white TV; a few years later, it had come out with a color model. In 1956, the company officially changed its name to the Sparton Corporation. At this time, the company had shifted much of its energy toward producing sonobuoys to help the U.S. Navy track submarines. After changing over to newer products in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Sparton Corporation closed its Jackson plant in 2009 and moved its offices to Chicago and its manufacturing to Florida and Vietnam.

 On the sides of this Model T's windshield are Victor lamps made in Cincinnati, Ohio, by the Victor Lamp Company. On the front of this Model T are gas-powered headlamps made by the Corcoran Lamp Company, also based in Cincinnati, Ohio. At the driver's side of this Model T is a Prest-O-Lite tank which would have held gas to fuel the Corcoran headlamps. In 1914, both Victor and Corcoran lamps were standard lamps used on Ford automobiles.

 In 1916, both companies became part of the larger Corcoran-Victor Company, a consolidation of the Corcoran Lamp Company, the Victor Lamp Company, the Corcoran Brothers Company, and the Victor Auto Parts Company.

Notes

A wonderful resource for the Ford Model T is Bruce W. McCalley, Model T Ford: The Car That Changed the World (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1994).
A nice website for information on Ford automobiles is the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village site. It has some great pages geared toward the model T. You can view these by clicking or touching here.

To find out even more about Ford Model Ts, you can search the Model T Ford Club of America's website, which you can access here; or The Model T Ford Club International's website, which you can access here.
Information on the Spartan Echo hand-operated horn, introduced in late 1913, can be found in Motor World, vol. XXXVII, no. 10 (November 27, 1913), p.29; and Horseless Age, vol XXXII, no. 22 (November 26, 1913). You can access a good web page for a narrative of the Sparks-Withington Company's history, including photographs, here.
Information on the creation of the Corcoran-Victor Company is from Moody’s Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities, vol. II (New York: Moody Manual Company, 1916), p. 4060, which you can access via Google Books here.
The Victor and Corcoran ads are both from The Automobile Trade Directory: A Classified Trade Directory of the Automobile and Commercial Vehicle Industries, containing the Names and Addresses of the American Manufacturers of Automobiles and Commercial Vehicles and of the Makers of Materials, Component Parts, Accessories, Machinery, Tools, Shop Equipment and Supplies. Contains also a Directory of National Trade Associations, Tables and Data and other pertinent information, vol. XIV, no. 1 (January, 1916), p. 295 (Victor) and p. 299 (Corcoran). Published in New York by The Automobile Trade Directory Incorporated.