Davidson-Duryea gun carriage

Duryea gun carriage, Patent No. 653,224
1899 Peoria newspaper drawing of Davidson-Duryea gun carriage
Place of origin	United States
Production history
Designer	Charles Duryea
Manufacturer	Duryea Motor Wagon Company
Produced	1899
Specifications
Crew	driver + 3
Main armament	M1895 Colt–Browning
Suspension	3x2 and 4x2 wheel

The Davidson-Duryea gun carriage was a 3- and 4-wheeled armed armored vehicle manufactured in 1898 and 1899 for military use.

Royal Page Davidson of the Northwestern Military Academy in Highland Park, Illinois, was doing some experimenting about this time with automobile chassis, modifying them and adding machine guns with armored shielding for protection of the driver. Davidson was the leading pioneer of armored military vehicles in the United States.

Davidson designed the military gun carriage vehicle and ordered it to be built from the Peoria Rubber and Manufacturing Company using patents of Charles Duryea, a well known automobile manufacturer of the time. Charles Duryea, with his automobile manufacturing company, put it into an automobile style patent which he filed for on May 16, 1898. It was finally approved as Patent No. 653,224 on July 10, 1900. The military gun carriage gasoline driven vehicle was built on a Duryea Automobile Company standard production automobile chassis that was converted for military purposes. The first ones cost $1,500.

Previously in 1896 or 1897 Davidson made an attempt at a three-wheeled gasoline vehicle for military purposes. His experimentation on this vehicle was at the Northwestern Military Academy in Highland Park, Illinois. He made a demonstration of his vehicle to the Army, however it soon broke down when it left Chicago to go to New York. The Army interpreteded this as too severe a task for such a vehicle and that the technology at the time was not up to such a task. The Army from then on leaned away from gasoline-driven vehicles.

In the gun carriage patent Duryea says the lighter form motor vehicle is a tricycle capable of seating two people. He further says the object of the invention was to provide a cheap, simple, and effective steering, a compact and durable speed-varying mechanism, a more ready control, an improved brake, a light air-jacketed engine, a cheap and simple balance-gear, and such other minor objects as may appear in the specification.

Davidson arranged for a Colt .30 caliber automatic machine gun to be mounted on the vehicle intended for military use. The vehicle was the first of a series of military vehicles constructed by Royal Page Davidson for the use by the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy. The first vehicles had three wheels (tricycle) and only a gun shield for protection for the driver while the later vehicles Davidson designed were fully protected by armor.