Lost Griffith dealership – Rockford, Illinois

A couple months back, when Automodello sent us one of their 1/43rd-scale Griffith Series 200 models to review, they also sent us an original ad, below, for the Griffith, which came from Gene’s Foreign Car Service at 329 South Court Street in Rockford, Illinois.  The last time the Google Street View car passed by that […]

Salvage yard row, L.A., 1930

Our friend David Greenlees recently posted this photo over on the H.A.M.B.’s excellent thread of pre-WWII photos, noting that it depicts the salvage yards at 15th and South Main in Los Angeles, circa 1930. “Wouldn’t shopping be fun there today?” he asked. If indeed that’s the location, I’ve yet to find a trace left from […]

Nikola Tesla’s pound-per-horsepower engine

While researching the recent post on the Edison-Ford electric car of 1914, it was impossible to avoid coming across references to Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison’s rival and one-time employee, and the story of Tesla’s own electric car, a Pierce-Arrow that supposedly ran on wireless electricity.
Researching that story turned into a hair-pulling exercise that dead-ended all […]