Adams-Farwell was a brass era American automobile manufacturer from Dubuque

Dubuque, Iowa

Dubuque is a city in and the county seat of Dubuque County, Iowa, United States, located along the Mississippi River. In 2010 its population was 57,637, making it the ninth-largest city in the state and the county's population was 93,653....

, Iowa, founded by Herbert and Eugene Adams and Fay Oliver Farwell at the end of the 19th century.

From 1889 to 1905 they built five prototypes of a car with 20 to 25 hp air-cooled three-cylinder rotary engine

Rotary engine

The rotary engine was an early type of internal-combustion engine, usually designed with an odd number of cylinders per row in a radial configuration, in which the crankshaft remained stationary and the entire cylinder block rotated around it...

 with a vertical crankshaft

Crankshaft

The crankshaft, sometimes casually abbreviated to crank, is the part of an engine which translates reciprocating linear piston motion into rotation...

 over the rear axle.

Prototype no. 5 got into serial production. From 1905 to 1912, Adams-Farwell built 52 such cars, the last one called Model 9 and used a 5-cylinder 8-litre rotary of 50 hp. 1904 saw the introduction of a convertible brougham where the front driver's seat could fold up, which allowed controls to be transferred to the rear seat. The forward control model was dropped in 1908, after which no new models were introduced, with only small changes made from then on. Prices reached a lofty USD$3,500 by 1912.

See also

• List of defunct United States automobile manufacturers
• Bailey
• Balzer
• Intrepid