Frank Jardine (1888-1963) was a pioneer in the development of aluminum as a material for automotive parts, especially the automobile piston. Jardine was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied at the Central Institute in the early 1900s. In 1918 Jardine joined Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) as engineer in charge of piston design. He was appointed chief engineer of the castings division in 1925, and from 1940-1953 he managed Alcoa's developmental division in Cleveland. Jardine held numerous patents for automobile parts manufactured from aluminum. In the late 1920s Jardine was part of an Alcoa team that worked with the Peerless Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio, to produce a luxury automobile from aluminum components, the Peerless V-16. The automobile never went into production. However, the prototype of the Peerless V-16 is in the Crawford Collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society.
click here to view the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry for the Peerless Motor Car Company
click here to view the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry for the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA)
The Frank Jardine Papers, 1921-1963, consist of correspondence, speeches, technical articles, and newspaper clippings.
The bulk of the collection consists of testimonial letters to Jardine upon his retirement in 1955, which provide insight to Jardine's long career at Alcoa and the importance of his technical expertise in the aluminum manufacturing industry. Included in the collection are a number of articles written by Jardine for technical publications, and several articles on the aluminum industry and its role in automobile manufacturing which cite Jardine as an authority in the field. The collection has value to local historians, especially those interested in Cleveland's role in the automobile industry, and to those interested in technological developments in the automobile industry prior to 1950.
The collection is arranged by document type in six folders and one oversize folder.
Processed by Patricia J. Stahley in 1990.
None.
[Container ___, Folder ___ ] MS 4510 Frank Jardine Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
Herbert J. Hauser, 1978.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.