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Frederick H. Simms
Born in Hamburg in 1863 - the same year as Henry Ford and Henry Royce - the young Simms was an inveterate inventor and one of the first people to realise the commercial potential of the compact internal combustion engine devised in the 1880s by Gottlieb Daimler. Simms acquired the British rights to the new power unit, which he began importing In 1891. On February 8 of that year, he wrote a letter containing the first recorded use of the term "motor car". Simms also invented the name "petrol".
Simms rented a railway arch beneath Putney Bridge Station in London as the workshop where his mechanic Jo van Toll installed German Daimler engines in British-built boat hulls. The Daimler agency proved so successful that in 1893 Simms founded the Daimler Motor Syndicate. Two years later, he announced plans to form the Daimler Motor Company Limited, to build Daimler engines in this country.
He founded the Motor-Car Club and was named vice-president, but the MCC was soon under the control of the steam lord Harry Lawson, a company promoter whose British Motor Syndicate aimed to control the manufacture and sales of all motor vehicles in Great Britain. Lawson offered Simms £35,000 in cash for the Daimler patent rights, which Simms accepted.
At the same time, the German Daimler company was heading towards bankruptcy. After quarrelling with the board, Herr Daimler and his engineer withdrew at the end of 1892 to develop horseless carriages. Simms offered the German Daimler directors £17,100 for the Daimler licence, provided that Herr Daimler rejoined the company. Thus Lawson's money assured the futures of both the English and German Daimler companies. The Coventry Daimler company took nothing from Herr Daimler but his name, basing its production cars on the French Panhard & Levassor rather than the already obsolete German Daimler.
Simms himself drifted away from the company he had helped create, to pursue new interests. His Motor-Car Club, which had organised the first London-Brighton Run in November 1896, had become little more than a mouthpiece for Lawson. In 1897, Simms founded the Automobile Club of Great Britain & Ireland. A decade later, the patronage of King Edward VII transformed the ACGBI into the Royal Automobile Club.
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