The Autocar Company

Rico says he stumbled across this piece of local history by accident:

The company was called the Pittsburgh Motor Vehicle Company when it started in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1897, but was renamed the Autocar Company in 1899[,when it moved to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. One of the company's early cars was the Pittsburgher. By 1907, the company had decided to concentrate on commercial vehicles, and the Autocar brand is still in use for commercial trucks. Autocar is the oldest surviving motor vehicle brand in North America.
Autocar founder Louis Semple Clarke (1867–1957) was a successful mechanical engineer. Among Clarke's innovations were the spark plug for gasoline engines, a perfected drive shaft system for automobiles, and the first design of a useful oil circulation system. Clarke's insistence of placing the driver on the left hand side of the vehicle led to that standardization throughout most of the automotive industry worldwide, and consequently we drive on the right side of the road. The patented porcelain-insulated spark plug process was sold to Champion and remains the industry standard.
Clarke was also a talented photographer. His family were members of the elite South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, whose earthen dam at Lake Conemaugh burst on 31 May 1889, causing the Johnstown Flood.
Clarke sold his interest in Autocar in 1929 and retired from business. He died in Palm Beach, Florida, on 6 January 1957, and is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh.
Autocar experimented with a series of vehicles from 1897, with a tricycle, Autocar No. 1, now in the collection of the Smithsonian. In 1899 Autocar built the first motor truck ever produced for sale in North America. The first production Autocar automobile was a 1900 single cylinder chain drive runabout. About 27 were made. In 1901, Autocar built the first car in North America to use shaft drive. This vehicle is also now in the Smithsonian.
The 1904 Autocar was equipped with a tonneau, it could seat four passengers and sold for $1700. The horizontal-mounted flat-2, situated at the front of the car, produced eleven hp. This was a somewhat unusual engine design for the time, with most companies producing inline designs. A three-speed transmission was fitted. The steel and wood-framed car weighed 1675 lb. The early cars had tiller steering.
In 1905 the company was selling the Type XII car for $2,250, and another it called the Type X for $1,000. It discontinued the Type XI and sold the last of them in 1905. The cars now had wheel steering with left hand drive.
Commercial vehicles were made the focus from 1907 and soon outnumbered cars.
As of 1911, Autocar was making only trucks.
In 1929, Autocar sold 3300 units, though the number fell to a thousand in 1932 and continued to decline during the Great Depression. Larger trucks with Blue Streak gasoline engines and diesel engines, mainly from Cummins, came later.
During World War Two, Autocar supplied fifty thousand units to the military; during its entire prewar history, the company had only built seventy thousand units. Autocar ranked 85th among United States corporations in the value of World War Two military production contracts. Civilian production resumed in 1944, and sales increased greatly after the war.

Rico says it's all news to him...