The Gillette: the 1916 car on the Amplex ground

1916 · Mishawaka

The record, at its true size: The Amplex works did not go dark when the Simplex Motor Car Company left them. Doyle's register seats the succession in the Amplex entry itself — "Simplex Motor Car Co.; Gillette Motors Co. — Mishawaka, Ind." — and his commentary note settles what the second company made there: "1916 car called Gillette." The encyclopedia record agrees in substance: the Gillette Motor Co. took over the Amplex manufacturing facilities in 1916, and, in its telling, refused to manufacture conventional engine-valving, persisting instead with a rotary sleeve-valve engine — a third valving heresy in a works that had already staked its life on the valveless two-stroke. That is the whole of the Gillette's documented size in the record reached: a Mishawaka car of 1916, built in the Amplex plant by its successor company, around a sleeve-valve engine. No model line, price or production figure for the Gillette was found in the sources read, and none is printed.

The second Gillette name, unmerged: The History Museum's account of the same ground gives the plant a different wartime buyer: "The King Gillette Company bought the complex of buildings during W.W. I to produce munitions for the U.S. government." Whether the King Gillette Company of the Museum's account and the Gillette Motors Co. of the registers are the same concern, successive occupants, or two names the record has tangled, the sources reached do not establish, and the two statements are printed side by side here without being merged into one company. What is not in dispute is the ground's course: car manufacture ended on it in the middle of the decade, munitions followed in the war years, and in 1926 the American Foundry Equipment Company purchased the plant and built a foundry — the Wheelabrator works, whose record stands whole in the Businesses section.

Sources:

1. Doyle, The World's Automobiles, full text read first-hand — the Amplex entry's second maker, "Gillette Motors Co. — Mishawaka, Ind.," and note 11: "1916 car called Gillette."
2. The American Simplex marque record as carried in the encyclopedia tradition, read first-hand — the Gillette Motor Co.'s takeover of the Amplex manufacturing facilities in 1916 and its rotary sleeve-valve engine.
3. The History Museum (South Bend), "American Simplex Company-Mishawaka," read first-hand — the King Gillette Company's purchase of the complex during the First World War for munitions production, and the 1926 sale to the American Foundry Equipment Company.