Wow! Electric Lights and Starter!
(First Posted September 6, 2013) You want an obscure ‘teen truck? You gots it: The Denmo.
The 1916 Denmo was “assembled” by the Denneen Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio. From what I can tell, the company produced this truck in the late teens before being bought by General Motors. Company founder Francis S. Denneen went on to work with Boss Kettering at GM, the man credited with introducing both the electric starter (Cadillac) and the first modern ignition system (Delco).
By 1919 Francis Denneen was on to other endeavors, including establishing The Ohio Crankshaft Co. (TOCCO) in his garage in Cleveland. More on that later.
Pneumatic Fronts, Solid Rears
Those of you who are more conversant with pre-1920s trucks than I can comment on the truck’s features:
-Electric starting and lighting
-Windshield
-Boyce Moto-Meter
-Splitdorf generator
-Gould battery
-35 hp Wisconsin four-cylinder engine
-Grant-Lees three-speed transmission
-Borg & Beck clutch
-Torbensen axles
-and more
I’m pretty sure that at the time, electric starting and lighting weren’t found on all trucks–or cars, for that matter.
Wisconsin Engine & Grant-Lees Tranny
The 35 HP Wisconsin four-cylinder engine was governed to 20 mph. Talk about soporific, but with solid rear tires, a full load, and brakes only on the rear end, you probably wouldn’t want to go any faster.
Francis Stanislaus Denneen
This is big Frank. The Denmo truck was just a prelude for more important things to come.
Francis Stanislaus Denneen graduated with a masters in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1903. After graduation, he spent three years with the Chalmers Motor Car Company and in other jobs before starting Denmo. His big contribution to automotive history, which all of us, and I mean ALL OF US (worldwide) use but are not necessarily aware of, was inventing the process for electrical induction hardening of metallic surfaces (i.e., crankshaft journals). Previously, hardening crankshaft journals involved a laborious and time-consuming process; Denneen’s process did the job in mere minutes. It was first used for the 1937 Packard V12, and is used to this day on virtually every car and truck engine made. Denneen and his process are in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
Francis Denneen is my first cousin, three times removed (meaning he was born three generations before me). Learning about this guy is but one of the many joys of genealogical research.
Francis Denneen was born in 1879, in Ft. Covington, NY; he died in 1953, in Cleveland, OH. He and his wife left no children.
This is fascinating. There were so many people producing cars and trucks during that time period and their stories are all fascinating. While there were undoubtedly a goodly number of fly-by-night operations just out to make a dollar, there were the others such as Mr. Denneen who made such vital contributions.
I remember your commenting about the Denmo truck some time ago; thank you for telling us this.
Great piece. Thank you!
Wow, he invented induction hardening? That’s HUGE, I mean friggin HUGE. Sorry to get carried away but that is one of those things that changed the manufacturing world and everyone takes for granted. I’m saying it’s HUUUUGE! My guess is that 99.99% of every spline on any stressed shaft in the world is induction hardened.
A bit more genealogical info on Francis S. Denneen. Twins Margaret Mc Carthy (wife of Edmund Dineen) and her brother, David Mc Carthy (husband of Ellen Kent) emigrated to Ste. Agnes Dundee, Quebec in 1827 where they purchased a farm, lived in the same house, and raised two large families. Both the Mc Carthys and the Dineens were from County Cork, Ireland. Francis S. was the son of Dennis Dineen (who changed the spelling of his name to Denneen-don’t ask).
My gg-grandfather, Edward J. Martin, of County Fermanagh, Ireland, married the daughter of Edmund Dineen and Margaret Mc Carthy, Mary Dineen.
The family photo attached shows Francis S. Denneen, his wife Mary on his right, and his niece Norah Mc Carthy to his left. Norah was the 1940 Canadian Figure Skating champion, who later skated professionally for Shipstad and Johnson’s Ice Follies. She is my 4th cousin, once removed.
The Denneens established their family in Ft. Covington, NY, walking distance from Ste. Agnes Dundee, Quebec. Many of the Mc Carthys remained in Canada, including Norah’s family.
I could almost qualify for dual citizenship.
I had a Mr. Dineen as my high school principal. Only time I’ve come across the name. Funny how as a child you never think about the origin of a name but just take it for granted. I guess when you’re a child nothing is unusual.
A cool piece on an early unsung hero of the auto age. Can you (or anyone else) give a little more of a description of how the induction hardening process works for those of us without an engineering background?
Electromagnetic induction hardening, although a real game-breaker in the automotive and other industries, is pretty esoteric and a detailed description of the process is guaranteed to put most of the CC readership to sleep, if not in a coma.
Wikipedia, although not mentioning Francis S. Denneen by name, does cite The Ohio Crankshaft Co. (TOCCO), the company that FS Denneen established, as a key contributor in the development of the process. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_hardening
As with Edward Budd and the development of the all steel carbody (and ultimately the monocoque or unibody car structure), this happened with the contribution of other geniuses like Joseph Ledwinka (brother of Hans Ludwinka who engineered some pretty cool Tatras), Francis Denneen did not work in a vacuum, but was assisted by others that he worked with.
But that’s not to minimize FS Denneen’s genius. Not bad for a boy who grew up far from any industrial activity, on the border of Quebec.
At a super high level, think of combining how a blacksmith hardens steel, for example, when making a sword, and how an induction cooker works.
When hardening steel, a blacksmith will heat up the steel and then quench it to quickly cool it off. This makes the steel harder, but more brittle (typically for a sword the blacksmith with later temper it to make it less brittle).
An induction cooker heats up food by inducing current in a metal pan using an electromagnetic field to heat up the metal, which cooks the food.
Induction hardening works by heating the metal using induction like an induction cooker, and then quenching it to harden the metal. What makes induction hardening so interesting, as opposed to just heating the metal in a furnace like a blacksmith, is that an induced current is primarily on the surface of the metal, so if you do it right you are heating and hardening just the surface of the metal and not the entire metal piece. So you get the benefit of hardened steel, but not the downside of the entire piece being brittle.
Thanks,Todd, for this easy-to-understand explanation.
Going down that list of components, it’s pretty obvious that the Denmo wasn’t cheapening out on anything. Pretty much all the names listed there were first class suppliers in the pre- and immediate-post WWI era.
That was one of the neat things about the car industry back then: There were enough independent suppliers of components that just about anybody could pick and choose, do a little bit of designing, a lot of assembling, and voila . . . . . you’re in the car business!
The vast majority of pre-Depression marques were “assembled” cars (and trucks). Unfortunately, using this system you could never get the economies of scale that Ford and GM were able to do. In the long run, that was a killer.
The Medium & Heavy Truck Industry stayed on this model for a lot longer than cars. A lot of major fleets had their prefered mix of engine, transmission and axles. You could have 3-5 makes of truck that were identical under skin. You still see ads in todays major trade journals “spec XYZ compenent for best results”.
Its diminshised somewhat in the past 10-15 yrs as the industry has consolidated into a few major players.
Syke that is very reminiscent of a recent radio discussion/critique of the early years of the (indigenous) Australian motor industry in the wake of Ford’s decision to close local manufacture. Same result too, I don’t think any of them lasted past the early 1930’s. It didn’t seem as though the geniuses having the discussion had given much thought into the realities of trying to get a new company off the ground in the face of others that had been in business for up to 20 years, nor the scale of the task of manufacturing the bought-in components in-house.
The ‘assembled’ car from proprietary components upside was engineered correctly, it would produce a great product. Downside was less well engineered cars quickly gained a poor reputation and came and went just as quickly, tarnishing the reputation of all other such cars.
Manufacturers who built their own engine cast aspersions on those who didn’t, suggesting the latter were lesser products not on par with ‘real’ car manufacturers. Much of the public came to believe this; the era of the ‘assembled’ car largely drew to a close in the 1920’s. Economies of scale also worked its adverse affects on those relatively small producers.
The Ohio Crankshaft Co – didn’t they used to tour with Foghat back in the 70s? 😛
You are a perspicacious one. If you twist up a fattie and get real, any concept is believable.
My school is too small to have an assistant principal therefore I have a Head Teacher. I always say her job is to make sure that the smartest thing about me isn’t that I’m a smart ass. In my off hours however, I can’t help it.
That is really cool though that you had a relative like that. My great-grandfather had a clay tile factory something which has gone the way of the dodo with pvc tile being the more practical alternative.
I was too young to see the bands of that time touring, I turned 10 in late 1974, which is about the time I started listening to rock and the new kid on the block, disco. I wish I had been able to see the bands of that time – Foghat, King Crinsom, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and so on…
Beaker Street on KAAY introduced me to a LOT of bands that ween’t being played anywhere else on the radio.
My most inventive and illustrious ancestor was made both rich and famous* for inventing a process to skin hogs using compressed air.
* Rich and famous being comparative terms – since the rest of my family had nuthin’, a guy who had $12 and had somebody besides the Parole Officer known his name was rich and famous.
Reading about someone who actually invented an important process is very cool.
Fascinating man, thanks for highlighting his significant contribution to the automotive industry. There are legions of individuals who made such contribution that advanced the industry and we should recognize as many as possible.
I currently am employed at Ohio Crankshaft in Cleveland, Ohio and have been since 1976, so I found your post about Mr. Denneen to be very interesting. He and William C. Dunn founded the company in May 1920. Their method to harden metal, induction hardening, changed industry forever. Their process, the TOCCO process, an acronym for The Ohio Crankshaft Company, allowed steel to be hardened in seconds, in a localized area, producing an exact result time after time and in mere seconds vs. other methods of the era (nitriding, chrome plating, cyaniding, etc.) that could take hours, even days. The process was initially developed by Dunn and Denneen to harden crankshafts and camshafts, but they soon discovered that they could build machines to induction harden virtually any type of metal part. The company they started almost 100 years ago is still going strong thanks to their ingenuity!