James Scripps Booth (May 31, 1888 - September 13, 1954) is an automotive artist and engineer.
Video James Scripps Booth
Biography
The eldest of George Gough Booth and five children of Ellen Booth, James was born on May 31, 1888 in Detroit, Michigan. He received his education at a private school, he left school before graduating from the tenth grade. At this time, his artistic gifts are well recognized.
At 22, Booth married Jean Alice McLaughlin in 1910 in Detroit. The young couple traveled abroad and lived for a period in Paris, where Booth studied at ÃÆ' â € ° cole des Beaux-Arts. They also spend time in Etaples, France with Michigan-born artist Myron Barlow, who teaches Booth the basics of working with pastels. Booth quickly picked up the medium and then chose it for the others.
He received and completed two important commissions in 1917. One commission, from the directors of the Night News Association, called him to make a series of pastel drawings at the Detroit News Shelby Street factory that would soon be emptied. The second commission came from his father, who wanted to have a set of Cranbrook scenes for his own home. After the completion of these works, Booth moved to Pasadena, California with his wife and children. First in his El Molino home and then in a house he designed himself in Linda Vista, Booth built studios where he executed a masterpiece, especially pastel drawings of naked and clothed models mounted on the surrounding hills. Many of these are on display at the Detroit Art Museum and Scarab Club, where they are well received.
In the 1930s, Booth set up a studio and auto shop in Indian Village in Detroit. Here, he spent a lot of time reworking and lightening his previous pastel and producing much more colorful works than he had ever done before. During this period of his life, he maintained an active interest in the work his parents did in Cranbrook.
Before the death of his wife Jean in July 1942, Booth no longer taught his automotive course. Booth remarried on February 20, 1943 to Ellen Catherine Norlen. Hoping to stay close to his parents, the couple lived in Grosse Pointe. There, after the death of George Booth in 1949, James began editing the biography of Cyril Player about his father (published in 1964 as The Only Thing Worth Finding ).
In 1951, Booth left Detroit for New Canaan, Connecticut, where they bought and restored his historic home, "Sun House". Booth transformed the home bar into a studio and continued painting, working on his car, and writing. There he completed his commentary on the Bible, Adventures in Analysis , which he published in 1954 under the pseudonym "Edmund Wood Gagnier".
He died suddenly in Connecticut at the age of 66 on 13 September 1954 and was buried in a family plot at Greenwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Michigan.
Maps James Scripps Booth
Legacy
At the time of his death, Booth left hundreds of paintings, pastels, scrapbooks, and sketches for the design of the new car. His large collection of engineering drawings and some of his cars, including "Bi-Autogo" and "JB Rocket," were donated to the Detroit Historical Museum by his widow. The "Da Vinci" is owned by Northwood University in Midland, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn owns several Cycecars workshops and Scripps-Booth models. His artwork is a permanent collection of the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, the Detroit Art Institute, the Detroit History Museum, and the Cranbrook Educational Community.
Artwork
Growing up in a home that encourages awareness and art appreciation, James Scripps Booth spends a lot of time sketching in and around his parents' home in Detroit. There he has access to one of the largest private collections of old master paintings and paintings in the Midwest, and it is at the Scripps house that he was taken to the company of many famous artists, writers and musicians.
While attending Detroit University School and St. Luke's School for Boys in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Booth executes posters, leaflets, sketches, and organizes designs for student publications and productions. He also produced several racing scenes and other works that featured cars during this period, giving notice that the automotive theme was never far from his mind.
Booth was essentially self-taught as an artist, although he attended the ÃÆ'â € ° cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1911 and studied during the period under Myron Barlow, a Michigan-born artist, in France. His work received critical acclaim at the exhibits at the Detroit Museum of Art and at other events in Michigan and California from the 1910s to the 1930s. However, Booth's reluctance to part with his artwork severely limits his appeal to collectors. Only a handful of paintings and pastels ever owned outside the Booth family.
Famous for its pastel work, Booth also produces large quantities of oil, charcoal images, pens and ink sketches, watercolors and pencil drawings. None of the statues he executes is known to exist.
Designers and automotive engineers
From the early years of his teenage years to his death at the age of 66, James Scripps Booth maintained a keen interest in both engineering and automotive design. He is a serious student of the car, followed by emerging trends and technologies in the industry, and is responsible for creating many of the standard automotive features in time.
Booth gained his knowledge of mechanics right after the turn of the century in the garage of his parents, where he carefully dismantled and reassembled the family cars to learn as much as possible about their operations. Much of this knowledge is quickly practiced, because as a family driver, he is often called to make improvements on the road.
As evidenced by the marginalia of his schoolbook, James Booth developed his precocious talent for automotive design at an early age. On his fortieth birthday, he engineered and built his first car, Bi-Autogo. It is designed to travel on two large wheels with speeds above 20 mph; at lower speeds a smaller pair of wheels can be lowered to balance the engine. Booth intends the car to be a limited production vehicle that will appeal to young men who are rich in sports characters. Due to the tremendous engineering challenges that the design presents, however, Booth is obliged to postpone the construction of the prototype. In May 1913, he eventually produced a vehicle that incorporated many innovative features: it has the first V-8 engine ever built in Detroit, has a compressed air self-starter, has a four-speed transmission, and even brags a retractable arm.. Cowling machines and body panels are built from aluminum, and the top speed of the car, Booth states, is 75 mph (120 km/h). Nevertheless, lacking a power steering unit, "Bi-Autogo" is very difficult to turn at low speeds. Once the prototype is made and a complete set of parts is created, the funds for the vehicle stop. As a result, "Bi-Autogo" never entered the market.
With John Batterman, a distant relationship, Booth organized the Cyclecar Scripps-Booth Company in Detroit. In 1913, they began producing "JB Rocket", a small roadster, and delivery model, "Package". Despite the rapid sales of his car, Booth realized the cyclecar trend had gone its course and sold the company in 1914. As a supporter, he immediately started another business, Scripps-Booth Company. The company is set to market its design for "luxury luxury cars... designed to meet the ideal of large and expensive family car drivers who want light cars with the same luxury and equipment." The first car to roll out the company's assembly line, the Model C, was the first car to be sold with spare wheels and tires and horn steering buttons. Then the model is equipped with facilities such as electric door locking system and removable hard top. Beautiful, clean lines and good promise from the Scripps-Booth car, as Booth had predicted, attracted rich client appetites. Among those who bought Scripps-Booth cars were the King of Spain, the Queen of the Netherlands, Winston Churchill, and the tenor of John McCormick.
Booth objected that moving from lightweight car production would weaken the market share of the Scripps-Booth Company, the company's directors began approving the addition of larger and larger models to its product line. Angered by the turn of events, Booth submitted his resignation to the company in the fall of 1916, just as Scripps-Booth began to experience severe sales declines. At the end of 1917, the company was absorbed by Chevrolet and the following year, when Chevrolet was acquired by General Motors, Scripps-Booth became part of the General Motors family. The line was stopped completely in 1922.
In 1923, Booth began designing his main engine, "Da Vinci". This compact car features an underslung worm drive axle allowing for a flat floor of nineteen inches (much lower than other cars on the market), controlled cable hook hooks, hanging brakes and clutch pedals, and parking brakes on transmission. Not interested in producing his own car, Booth is trying to sell his novel design to an established car maker. He obviously cringed, then, when Stutz produced the car with the same underslung drive a year after he showed the company the "Da Vinci" plan. An expensive patent infringement suit, which Booth ultimately won in 1935. However, at the time, Stutz was suffering financially and the decision Booth received almost did not cover his own legal expenses. After this confusing ordeal, Booth produced only one other vehicle - "Da Vinci Pup", a slim little cyclecar - and it was solely for his own pleasure.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Booth realized that women would need to know more about the operation of their cars. As a result, he started doing Red Cross classes on car mechanics in his Detroit studio. In addition, he writes and publishes the General Handbook, Simple Motor Mechanics: Understand Your Car as a text for the course.
Through his relationship with the Scripps-Booth Company and as an independent designer, Booth championed the cause of small cars in America from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s. In this case, the automotive historians regard it as a decade ahead of time. After retiring from active participation in business, he continues to design the car for his own pleasure and keeps a small number of cars, including some of his own designs, which he maintains in excellent running conditions. Some of them are now owned by the Detroit History Museum, Henry Ford Museum, and Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.
Source
- Coir, Mark; James Scripps Booth: Artist and Engineer. Cranbrook Archive. 1988.
- The personal paper of James Scripps Booth and John McLaughlin Booth. Archives of Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
- James Scripps Booth: Artist, Engineer, Polymath . Preface by Jason Weems; University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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