Until and unless the claims of the 1891 Lambert are proved, Charles Edgar Duryea remains as the man primarily responsible for America's first working internal-combustion-engined road . vehicle. Charles and his brother Frank were bicycle mechanics. He built his first gasoline engine in 1886, and three years later read about the Be:rz cars from Germany in the Scientific American. In 1893 his first complete car was running in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was nothing but a horse buggy with an engine, like the first Daimler, and like that car, was an experiment. Illustrated here, it had a single-cylinder engine and two forward speeds. The brothers were encouraged by its success to form the Duryea Motor Wagon Company at Peoria, Illinois, in 1894—the first company in America to be founded for the purpose of making motor vehicles. The second Duryea, with its two cylinders and three forward speeds, was an improvement on the first. This was the machine that won the 54 mile Chicago Times-Herald Race from Chicago to Evanston and back, America's first motor race, on Thanksgiving Day, 1895. The Duryeas now went into production, making thirteen cars during 1896. Two crossed the Atlantic to take part in the London-Brighton Emancipation Run of November that year; a very early instance of showing the flag.
   Both appear to have finished, in spite of prejudiced reports. These machines used belt primary drive and gear final drive, instead of all gear transmission, and were fully sprung, whereas the Chicago race car was sprung only at the front. Now the brothers parted, to quarrel over the credit for their first car, and the company stagnated. It died in 1898, but was revived as the Duryea Power Company of Waterloo, Iowa. For several years thereafter the staple model was characterized by a transverse, inclined, three-cylinder engine with desaxe crankshaft (a feature it pioneered), 'one-hand' control by means of a lever that tilted to steer, twisted to operate the throttle, and pushed down to change gear, and some elegant, comfortable bodies in opulent curvilinear shapes that tried to conceal the ingenious motor-car beneath. The firm's last product was the extremely melegant Buggyaut high-wheeler, which was made as late as 1913. Convention was against the Duryea; even the British Duryea Company, founded in 1904, which made a range of its own models as well, was a failure.
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