1907 Adams 10HP Two-Seater

1907 Adams 10HP Two-Seater

The Adams car was manufactured in Bedford by the Adams Manufacturing Co Ltd, a firm that had been founded in 1899 to make electrical equipment. Introduced in 1905, the Adams had resulted from the collaboration of company founder A H Adams and the American businessman Edward Ringwood Hewitt, the former making the engines and transmissions and the latter supplying axles and other components from his factory in New York. The joint venture's first car was powered by a 1.7-litre single-cylinder horizontal engine located beneath the front seat, which drove the rear wheels via a two-speed epicyclic transmission and chain. At first the cars were known as Adams-Hewitt in the UK and simply Hewitt in the USA, though when Hewitt quit the automobile business at the end of 1907 his name was dropped from the British cars.

Within a year there were more conventional shaft-driven two- and four-cylinder models in the range, and in 1907 the Adams featured sliding-gear transmission for the first time. Adams was an early adopter of the V8, its design being based on the French Antoinette aero engine, also used in the car of the same name. Hewitt offered essentially the same model in the USA, although few were sold on either side of the Atlantic. For a relatively small manufacturer Adams offered a wide range of models over the course of its nine-year existence, including a brace of six-cylinder cars, though by 1914, the last year of production, there were just two: a 10/12hp twin and a 16hp four. By this time the firm had switched to proprietary engines supplied by Astor and Coventry Simplex. It had also lost its founder, A H Adams having perished aboard the Titanic, and the make did not re-emerge after WWI, though its factory lived on.

One of very few survivors of this short-lived make, this Adams was discovered in Turkey by the Key Museum and then restored by them.

Descriptions & pictures by bonhams