The first thing you need to know about the
Mason Motor Car Company is that it never should have worked. Not in Des Moines,
not in 1906, not in a state where most people still trusted a good horse over
any contraption that hissed, rattled, and tried to kill you on a dirt road. Yet
for a few bright, reckless years, two brothers with machine oil on their hands
and speed on their minds tried to drag Iowa—kicking, screaming, and
occasionally bleeding—into the automobile age.
Mason Motor Co. ad, 1906
Fred and August Duesenberg weren’t normal. They looked at a peaceful bicycle and thought, What if this thing went 60 miles an hour and tried to shake its rider’s fillings out? The Des Moines Daily News called them “the sort of young men who consider mechanical noise to be a form of conversation.” They were tinkerers, racers, mechanics, engineers—whatever you want to call them—but above all, they were hungry. Hungry for speed, recognition, and the clean snapping sound an engine makes when it finds its rhythm and behaves. So when Des Moines attorney Edward Mason threw some money at them and said, “Make a car,” they didn’t hesitate. They built the Mason, a small, explosive two-cylinder machine that rattled windows, terrified horses, and made its owners feel like they were cheating death—or at least borrowing trouble from it.
