Coming up for air

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Glance at a Vintage Franklin and you might be hard-pressed to see how it differs in any great way from its American contemporaries. When you know, though, you know, and the pre-1920s cars make no attempt to conceal the fact that Franklins were entirely air-cooled.

Franklin Automobile Company

This unconventional approach to car construction stemmed from the ideas of engineer John Wilkinson, who built a handful of prototype cars in which local businessman Herbert Henry Franklin was invited to travel. Impressed, he began financing the manufacture of Wilkinson’s designs and the Franklin Automobile Company was formed in 1902.

Wilkinson’s particular bugbear as an engineer was excessive unsprung weight, so he strove to make his cars’ suspension as light as possible and used aluminium castings as far as he possibly could over the whole car. His fixation with weight led him to identify coolant as unnecessary mass which could be dispensed with, and thus he arrived at the essential Franklin formula which would persist to the end, even though he left the company in a fit of rage when a California distributor demanded his cars be made to look more conventional.

Kit Foster has just purchased a 1926 Victoria Coupé, an early faux radiator Franklin. Enamoured with his new purchase, he sings the praises of the maverick New York marque in the April issue of The Automobile, available now.

Words by Zack Stiling. Photographs by Kit Foster.

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