This car has now been identified by Paul Dunlop as a three-wheeler made by Robert Reynold Jackson & Co Ltd in Notting Hill, London. Fifty of these cars were ordered for use in Costa Rica, where the unmade roads were so deeply rutted it was impossible to steer a car as the front wheels could not swivel. The idea was that the front wheel would travel on the ground between the two ruts and so be able to steer. It has not yet been confirmed that the cars were either made or successfully delivered.
The vehicle was considered unusual enough to attract some attention in British and German periodicals in 1910. Normally Jackson made conventional four-wheel cars, often with parts imported from De Dion in France.
The signboard in the background carries the address ‘26 High St, Notting Hill Gate,’ presumably close to the location of the Jackson factory.
Robert Reynold Jackson (1871–1947) was born in Ipswich, Suffolk. He first appears in the motor industry in 1900 as the secretary of the Yorkshire Motor Car Manufacturing Co in Bradford. In 1900 he moved to London and imported American cars. By 1903 he had established R. Reynold Jackson & Company. and was manufacturing cars under his own name, probably constructed of parts imported from Lacoste & Battmann, and using De Dion-Bouton engines. Jackson produced some strange cars with unconventional single-cylinder long-stroke engines– so long that the driver had almost to peer around the bonnet– such as the 1909 Black Demon racer with engine dimensions of 104 x 213 mm under a slipper-shaped bonnet coming to a sharp point.
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