Benjamin Briscoe was born on May 1867 in Detroit, Michigan. He lived until June 26, 1945. He was an automobile pioneer and a business leader.
At the age of 18, Briscoe started his own business with $472. He created a company called Benjamin Briscoe & Co. to make sheet-metal stampings. This company later became part of the American Can Company.
Briscoe also invented a machine to make corrugated pipe. He developed this machine for the Briscoe and Detroit Galvanizing Works, which later became the Briscoe Manufacturing Company.
Biography
In 1901, the automobile industry was in its early stages when Briscoe helped fund David Buick's first car. In exchange for the money, Briscoe owned 97% of the Buick Motor Company. He sold Buick in 1904 to James H. Whiting, who owned the Flint (Michigan) Wagon Works, and used the money to start the Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Company, which made the Maxwell automobile. This was likely his greatest success in the industry. By 1909, Maxwell-Briscoe was the third-largest American car maker, with 9,400 cars sold. The company was supported by J. P. Morgan & Co. and Richard Irvin & Co., but during the financial crisis of 1907, Briscoe had his first of many difficult experiences with bankers and had to handle his own financing.
Briscoe wanted to combine the four largest automobile makers—Ford Motor Company, Buick, REO, and Maxwell-Briscoe—into one company. His talks with William C. Durant, Henry Ford, and Ransom E. Olds did not work, so he started his own company as he had planned, which became the United States Motor Company.
U. S. Motors continued making the Maxwell car and soon also produced the Stoddard-Dayton car, the Brush Runabout (in which his brother Frank Briscoe was a main owner), Alden-Sampson trucks, and others. The company kept operating the old Maxwell-Briscoe factories and bought other businesses, such as the Columbia Motor Car Co., which owned many patents, including the Selden patent. Briscoe once had the chance to buy the Cadillac car but never did. Eventually, Cadillac went to Durant, who later started the General Motors Corporation.
In 1910, bankers invested $6,000,000 in U. S. Motors, but the money was not enough, and the company went into receivership in 1912. Briscoe was forced out, and Walter Flanders took control, reorganizing the company as Maxwell Motor Co. (Incorporated). This company was later reorganized as the Chrysler Corporation.
A few months after leaving U. S. Motors, Briscoe and his brother started a business called Briscoe Frères in Billancourt, France, near the Renault factory, to design and build a car using American methods. Their car was called the Ajax. A year later, the brothers introduced the Briscoe car in America, made in Jackson, Michigan, and promoted it as the first French-designed American car. When World War I began, Benjamin Briscoe used his factories for war production and never returned to the automobile business. His partners continued making Briscoe cars until 1923.
During World War I, Briscoe joined the United States Navy as a lieutenant commander. He served in Italy and France and received the Navy Cross. He was also a member of the French Legion of Honor.
After the war, Briscoe and others created a new method for refining crude oil. He later became an executive in an oil company in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which was later taken over by the Texas Company (Texaco). He later worked in gold mining and ore processing in Colorado. Around 1940, he retired to a 3,000-acre (12 km²) plantation in Marion County, Florida, where he experimented with growing tung trees.
Benjamin Briscoe died at age 78 in his home near Dunnellon, Florida.