This is the first in a series of articles about men who stood at the threshold of greatness, almost stepped through, but stumbled and ended up forgotten and without positive influence, usually due to their own character faults.

Not many people even remember Artemus Twiggley or his infamous "People's motor carriage". Even fewer remember his role in designing light tanks for the Kaiser during the Great War, or his part in the "Television bubble" of 1927-28. Probably no more than twenty of the five thousand or so cars that his company produced are still running. All are in the hands of slightly quirky collectors. Most historians of the auto industry write him off as a simple con man, and to be sure he was that. He used the few thousand cars he actually produced in a sophisticated stock manipulation and confidence scheme that bilked thousands of investors, dealers, and customers out of their life savings, and gave the infant auto industry-especially the low end of it--a black eye that it took several years to overcome.

At the same time, Twiggley was actually a very good engineer. His Artemus I actually did contain a number of technical innovations, and probably could have been mass-produced at or near the prices he claimed he was going to produce it for. Artemus Motors owned several vital automotive patents, as became evident after the company folded and Twiggley became a fugitive. Litigation over those patents haunted the automobile industry, and especially the internal combustion driven end of it for nearly a decade after the bankruptcy of Artemus Motors.

What would have happened if Artemus Twiggley had overcome whatever personal demons led him to forego his chance to become a respected industrialist at the dawn of the American automobile industry? I think he had a real opportunity to reverse the decline of small-town America, by bringing the advantages of mobility not just to the wealthier segment of our population, but to almost all segments of our population. I think he had an opportunity to establish his home-town of Gary Indiana as an automotive industrial center at the same level as Paris France, or the big German and British automobile/industrial complexes. I think he had an opportunity to deliver America from the stranglehold of the inter-urbans and their giant railroad backers.

Opportunity to influence the flow of history generally comes only once, if that often, in a man's life, and the rest of Artemus Twiggley's life reads like the anti-climax it was. He spent years as a fugitive in Europe and South America, apparently going through the bulk of his ill-gotten gains by 1915. He re-surfaced in Germany during Europe's Great War, designing a very good armored and tracked vehicle that was rejected by the German army in 1915, then quickly embraced by them after the first British use of tanks in 1916. The Germans kept a very close eye on Twiggley, and he apparently actually lived up to his agreements with them, designing a series of increasingly advanced tanks that, while never as common as contemporary Allied tanks were usually somewhat more technically advanced.  

Twiggley-designed tanks remained in German service for several years after the 1917 armistice, and served in the armies of Germany's Eastern European client states like Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine into the mid-1930s. The nationalistic Germans shifted new tank design work to German nationals shortly after the war, and have long down-played the significance of Twiggley's designs. 

Twiggley was reported to have died in the Great Flu epidemic of 1921, but appears to have faked his death, probably in the service of one of his many financial schemes. His role in the "Television Bubble" of 1927-28 is somewhat murky because he worked through several intermediaries in that stock manipulation scheme. The bubble, and it's aftermath may have played a role in the decision of Calvin Coolidge not to run for re-election, which cleared the way for the eight year reign of one of America's truly great presidents, Herbert Hoover.