Car Family Feuds Over Who Was in Driver’s Seat : History: The Duryea brothers are credited with inventing the American automobile 100 years ago. But family members and historians are trying to separate fact from friction.

A century after brothers Charles and Frank Duryea collaborated on the automobile bearing their name, descendants are feuding over the family legacy.

The dispute: Which Duryea was father of the American automobile?

Neither, say some experts, who describe the Duryeas as geniuses who did not invent the auto but perfected it. But the Duryeas have their partisans.

“They justly deserve titles of father of the American automobile industry,” insists Richard Scharchburg, a professor at the GMI Engineering and Management Institute in Flint, Mich., and biographer of Frank Duryea.

But which one? The search for the answer goes back a century, to the months before Sept. 21, 1893, when Frank Duryea drove 600 feet in the streets of Springfield, Mass., in a prototype one-cylinder car.

The Duryeas were farm boys from the Peoria area who joined in the rapidly growing bicycle industry of the late 19th Century.

In 1886, at the Ohio State Fair, Charles Duryea saw a gas engine that could, he thought, power a carriage or wagon. His imagination sparked, he decided to try to build a horseless carriage.

The result was the 1893 car, “the first that was actually built and operated in the United States,” according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Two years later, a second model won $2,000 by placing first in the Chicago-Evanston, Ill., Thanksgiving Day race--the first gasoline automobile race in the United States. And in 1896, the Duryea Motor Wagon Co. sold 13 cars.

But the company failed, and the brothers split up. The argument over who was the rightful inventor of that first car drove a wedge between the Duryeas.

Historians describe Charles as a visionary with more than 50 patents, and a shameless self-promoter whose ideas were brought to life by his younger brother, Frank, a master mechanical engineer with 20 patents of his own.

Although Charles took sole credit in patent applications for the 1893 engine, it’s clear Frank deserves great credit, Scharchburg said.

Charles always said Frank was “simply a mechanic” hired to execute his design. But Charles left Massachusetts and returned to his bicycle business in Peoria before the project was completed.

“When Charles left, the car was not running,” Scharchburg said. “It would not run with the engine he described and the transmission would not work.

“A year after Charles left, Frank finished the car and made it run. Frank developed an entirely new engine, new transmission, a carburetor and ignition. Every fundamental part of the car, Frank developed while Charles was in Peoria.”

In the years that followed their split, Charles designed several vehicles, some of them with three wheels. Frank joined the Stevens Arms Co. and designed the Stevens-Duryea, a limousine that was built into the 1920s.

Charles died in 1938 in Philadelphia; Frank died in 1967 in Saybrook, Conn. The controversy over who did what lived on in their family.

“It is sad, and my grandfather felt that way,” said George R. Duryea, 67, Frank’s grandson. “Certainly it was a source of regret for him. He didn’t want any part of the arguments with Charles. But he sulked about for years about all these lies going around by Charles’ family.”

Even today, his family is working to amend a plaque on the Statehouse steps in Boston that honors Charles but doesn’t mention Frank.

But Charles’ great-grandson, Jonathan Duryea Fuller, insists that “credit for the invention goes to Charles, with assistance through building to Frank.”

He and his sister, Susan Fuller Hanson, argue that Charles had the engine running in 1892 and that Frank was unjustly glorified a year later when he test-drove the vehicle.

“We feel like they are trying to discredit Charles and give all the credit to Frank. We don’t want Charles to lose the credit he deserves,” Hanson said.

One of Charles’ granddaughters, Joanne Duryea Armstrong of Lincoln, Mass., just wants the controversy to go away.

“I think it was a joint effort, and it should say the Duryea brothers built it,” she said.

The car the brothers created was truly a horseless carriage: a crude vehicle with oak-spoke wheels turned by bicycle chains and guided by a tiller.

“It was just another experiment,” said Roger White, transportation history specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, where that first Duryea auto is housed.

“There were dozens of people trying to make internal-combustion cars in the 1890s,” White said. “The Duryeas were not the first. We may never know who the very first was.”