Historic Car Brands
Kelsey
Kelsey was a US maker, who produced three-wheelers from 1910 and four-wheeled cars from 1919, but the company folded in 1924. Kelsey’s innovation was a very early anti-sway bar.
In 1897, Cadwallader ‘Carl’ Kelsey, built a small four-wheel car, at the age of 17. In 1899, while at Haverford College, he built his second car, aided by a friend, Sheldon Tilney.
This prototype three-wheeler was powered by a 5hp, single-cylinder Buffalo Gasolene (sic) Motor Company engine.The boys christened their creation ‘Autotri’ and wanted to manufacture it, but their wealthy and highly religious Philadelphia fathers thought the automobile was an “instrument of the devil” and sent the two young men back to finish their studies at college. (The Autotri was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1923.)
However, you can’t suppress inventiveness for long, so, in 1901, Carl Kelsey built another car, but this one had four wheels and two-cylinders, wth each cylinder mounted beside the differential.
After Carl graduated from college, he sold Autocars, until his father gave him money for a service shop in Germantown, with the aim of keeping him too busy to keep inventing cars. However, in his spare time he built up another four-wheeler monster, in 1902.
Kelsey sold the service shop and paid US$5000 for the Philadelphia dealership for the fledgling Maxwell brand that was produced by the Maxwell-Briscoe Company.
Carl Kelsey sold plenty of Maxwells and joined Maxwell-Briscoe, in 1905, as sales manager. During his tenure, Maxwell became the third-largest manufacturer of automobiles in the USA.
However, Carl’s passion to build his own car design resurfaced and he left Maxwell, in 1909, to develop his own versions of a low-priced car; the 1910 four-wheel Spartan and a three-wheeler that got the production nod. Rather than taking on Henry Ford’s Model T, Carl Kelsey designed a cheaper, two-seater vehicle.
Introduced in September 1910, his three-wheeled Motorette, was built in Hartford, Connecticut. The Motorette was rear-wheel, chain- driven by a two-stroke, twin-cylinder engine which was initially air-cooled. Two-stroke oil and gasoline were held in separate tanks and mixed via a four-way distribution point near the driver’s seat.
To promote his vehicle, Kelsey was active in early endurance events. He drove a Motorette up Mount Washington, but the car overheated, so subsequent models were powered by a water-cooled engine, with the radiator mounted behind the engine.
In 1911, Kelsey’s brother-in-law and a mechanic drove a Kelsey Motorette from the factory in Hartford, Connecticut, across the country, to San Francisco.
Having a vestigial body and only a 74-inch wheelbase, the Motorette weighed only 700 pounds (320kg) and was advertised with the slogan: “No roads too rough, no hills too high”.
It was priced at US$385 (US$13,303 in 2025), compared with around US$800 for the new Model T Ford. (However, the Model T price fell gradually over the following years as the scale economies of mass production took effect, to only US$300 in 1924.)
Anti-sway innovation
Kelsey Motorette, with visible transverse anti-sway bar and forked linkages
Having only three wheels and soft-riding, fully-elliptic front springs, the Motorette initially suffered from excessive sway when cornering, so Carl Kelsey designed what might have been the automotive industry’s first anti-sway torsion bar, to control that body roll.
A torsion bar was mounted across the frame, under the seat and connected by forked links to the lower front spring pads. As with modern anti-sway bars, the resistance to twist by the torsion bar significantly reduced body roll.
Carl Kelsey didn’t or couldn’t patent this device, so the first stabiliser bar patent was awarded to Canadian inventor Stephen Coleman of Fredericton, New Brunswick, in April, 1919.
Some engines built by Lycoming factory workers were sabotaged and this caused Kelsey financial issues. Production of the Motorette ended in 1914, after 210 had been produced.
At this point, Carl left the auto industry and concentrated on banking, but that resolve didn’t last.
Kelsey prototype – George Allbright
By late 1915 it was obvious to Carl that he’d just have to get back into making cars. Kelsey built two prototypes, using Massnick-Phipps Mfg, four-cylinder, side-valve engines, mounted conventionally under a front bonnet. Interestingly, the engines were branded ’Perkins’, but bore no connection to the same brand of diesel engines that emerged in the UK, in 1932.
(Another unrelated name-share was the contemporary Kelsey Wheel Company of Detroit that produced wheels and bodies for several car makers, but had no connection with the Kelsey Car Company. Kelsey WheeI Company merged with Hayes Wheel Company in 1927 to become Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company and that business continued into the 21st century.)
Post-War revival
1923 Kelsey Touring Car
World War I delayed the production of the four-wheel car, but, In 1919, a reborn Kelsey Motor Company, based in Newark, New Jersey, launched the post-War, GW, six-cylinder, 46hp model.
The Kelsey four-wheeled car powertrain involved clutch at the rear of the engine and a propellor shaft running aft to a friction-drive rear axle.
George Allbright
Friction drive promised infinitely-variable gearing, by torque transmission between two discs: one being spun by the prop-shaft to drive an axle-mounted disc that contacted it at 90 degrees. The axle-mounted disc was slid back and forth along the mid-section of the axle, by a linkage, thus varying the contact radius and, therefore, the effective gearing between the two discs as they spun.
Reverse was selected by moving the axle-mounted disc to the opposite-rotation contact side of the prop-shaft disc.
George Allbright
Kelsey’s friction-drive advertisements claimed huge savings in running and fuel costs: ‘You can coast one mile in three’, but these cars did not sell well and a sliding-gear transmission replaced them by 1922.
That meant that Kelsey was just one of many US makers producing similar machines and facing the early-1920s’ depression.
A change of supplier to Falls engines and a four-cylinder 35hp G model introduction couldn’t stop the company going into receivership in 1923. However, Kelsey soon was holding its own in a very tight market.
Then, in 1924, a group of New Jersey attorneys, known as the ‘Bankruptcy Gang’ organised an investor revolt that forced Kelsey into bankruptcy, after around 600 post-War Kelseys were sold.
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