Brass Era car

Elsewhere in the world, this period would be considered by antique car enthusiasts to consist of the veteran (pre-1904), and Edwardian eras, although these terms are really not meaningful outside the former British Empire.

Key developments included the electric ignition system (by dynamotor on the Arnold in 1898,[5] though Robert Bosch, 1903, tends to get the credit), independent suspension (actually conceived by Bollée in 1873),[5] and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909).

[7] In January, 1904, Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly magazine catalogued the entire range of automobiles available to the mass market in the United States.

This list included: Fred H. Colvin, who covered the American automotive industry for many years as a journalist and editor of trade journals, wrote in his memoir (1947) about his experiences:[9] I have already indicated how the early "craze" for horseless carriages caused automobile plants to spring up like mushroom growths all over the country, just as hundreds of locomotive plants had sprung up in the early days of railroading.

For the sake of the completeness of the present record, and in order to aid future scholars and research workers, I should like to give the list of American automobiles current thirty years ago [i.e., 1917]: