1926 Hudson Model O Super Six Sedan

 This Sedan (serial #578484) was made by the Hudson Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan. The company was incorporated on February 20, 1909, with Joseph L. Hudson, Hugh Chalmers, Roscoe Jackson, Howard Coffin, Frederick Rezner, Roy Chapin, James Brady, Lee Counselman as the main stockholders, and Goerge W. Dunham as the chief engineer. Dunham had previously been chief engineer for the short-lived American Motor Carriage Company (represented by a Runabout here at Stuhr Museum) from 1901 to 1903, and for the more successful Olds car company from 1907 to 1909.
 Slowly getting off the ground, Hudson built about 1,100 of its Hudson Twenty cars in 1911. During the 1910s and 1920s, however, the company grew, moving in among the top American automobile manufacturers. In 1925, the company made nearly 270,000 Hudson and Essex automobiles, ranking the company third behind Ford and Chevrolet. Over these years, Hudson made several models, including the Hudson Twenty, the Hudson Six, the Hudson Super Six (introduced in 1916), and the Essex (introduced in 1919).  The Hudson company merged with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation to form American Motors Corporation in 1954.
 On a side note, a 1926 Hudson Super Six is featured in the John Steinbeck book, The Grapes of Wrath, and the same model of Hudson was used for the film based on the book. You can read more about this bit of trivial knowledge on Old Cars Weekly's page here.

 Stuhr Museum's 1926 Hudson Sedan has a series of patent dates: April 28, 1908; May 18, 1909; May 28, 1912; August 6, 1912; October 22, 1912; November 18, 1913; April 24, 1917; December 11, 1917; December 17, 1918; February 18, 1919; June 2, 1919; September 20, 1921 (2 patents issued on this date); November 8, 1921; December 27, 1921; and September 18, 1923. It was also licensed under the Jensen patents.

 If you look closely at this Hudson's hood, you will see what looks to be a hood ornament. That hood ornament on this Hudson is actually a Boyce Moto Meter, a device used to measure the temperature of the car's radiator. Before the radiator's temperature gauge was placed on the dashboard of automobiles, many automobiles had their gauges on the hood. Dominating the market for these radiator gauges, or "motor meters," the Moto Meter Company of Long Island City, New York, which made Boyce's gauges, reportedly sold over 10,000,000 of them by 1927. The company continued making them until the early 1930s. Stuhr Museum's 1926 Star also has a Boyce Moto Meter on its hood.
 Stuhr Museum's 1926 Hudson's Boyce Moto Meter has a series of patents, including:

1090776, assigned on March 17, 1914, which you can access as a pdf here.
1272002, assigned on July 9, 1918, which you can access as a pdf here.
1272367, assigned on July 16, 1918, which you can access as a pdf here.
And 1275654, assigned on August 13, 1918, which you can access as a pdf here.

Notes

Information on Hudson’s founding can be found on Old Cars Weekly's website which you can access here.
An informative source for Hudson's history is Charles K. Hyde, Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, and American Motors (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).