Financial History Issue 114 (Summer 2015) | Page 35
Cleveland was the motor city first,
before Detroit. And before Duisenberg
gave rise to the term “doozie,” Peerless
was just that: peerless. In the early days
of automobiles the Peerless Motor Car
Company set the standard for engineering
innovation and for luxury in an era when
motoring was much more adventurous
than it has become a century later.
But well before and well after its heyday
as a car maker, Peerless was an early innovator and pioneer of two more ephemeral
essentials in business history: tenacity and
reinvention. It was formed out of an alliance between the Mercantile Manufacturing Company of Cleveland and the
Peerless Wringer Company of Cincinnati.
In 1869 the two companies merged and
formed the Peerless Wringer & Manufacturing Company, which produced washing wringers. The company later switched
to the manufacture of bicycles, and then,
as was typical of the times, began producing automobiles. The company would
eventually end up brewing beer.
The last vestige of the direct corporate
lineage did not cease operations until
1984, which means Peerless, its predecessors and successors did business over 115
years. Peerless automobiles have car clubs
and legions of loyal fans, but the