thumb|1920 Jordan Playboy at Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum
The Jordan Motor Car Company was founded in 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio by Edward S. "Ned" Jordan, a former advertising executive from Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The factory produced what were known as "assembled cars" until 1931, using components from other manufacturers. Jordan cars were noted more for attractive styling than for advanced engineering, although they did bring their share of innovations to the marketplace. The company's advertising was often more original than the cars themselves; said Jordan, "Cars are too dull and drab." He reasoned that since people dressed smartly, they were willing to drive "smart looking cars" as well.
Establishment in Cleveland
Jordan Motor Car established its plant east of downtown Cleveland at 1070 East 152nd Street in the Collinwood neighborhood along the Nickel Plate Railroad tracks. This not only provided an ideal location for shipping the finished cars but also provided Jordan with ready access to out-of-area suppliers. The plant was built in two stages: the first building was begun on April 5, 1916 and finished some seven weeks later, while the second addition was completed within months of the first structure. In their first year of production (1916), Jordan sold over one thousand vehicles.
Manufacturing Methods
right|thumb|300px|A 1928 Jordan Sedan prior to restoration work
The Jordan was an "assembled automobile", with parts obtained from outside vendors. The cars were powered by Continental engines, used Timken axles, Bijur starters and Bosch ignitions. According to Ned Jordan's biographer, James Lackey, the source of early Jordan bodies was somewhat a mystery. While Jordan had the capacity to paint the automobile bodies, attach them to the chassis and outfit the passenger compartment, the facility was unable to fabricate the bodies themselves. Later production bodies were shipped from a variety of manufacturers in Ohio and Massachusetts, fabricated from aluminum.
While most automobile producers limited themselves to a single color combination and Ford relied exclusively on the fast-drying Japan Black lacquer which cured in a matter of hours, Jordan automobiles were available in three colors of red - "Apache Red", "Mercedes Red", and "Savage Red"- as well as "Ocean Sand Gray", "Venetian Green", "Briarcliff Green", "Egyptian Bronze", "Liberty Blue" Jordan purchased and installed straight-six engines for its 1919 Series F and 1920-1921 Series M cars. In 1922, the Series MX model featured a 246-cubic-inch, six-cylinder flathead engine. In 1926, their Line Eight and Great Line Eight models offered, corresponding to their names, eight-cylinder engines. The 1931 Model 90 was powered by an eight-cylinder, 85-horsepower engine.
Jordan marketing
Jordan was also one of the first automakers to christen its model types with unique, evocative names, such as the Sport Marine (with "fashionably low" 32×4-inch {81×10 cm} wheels, it was "essentially a woman's car"), In 1920, the company issued the Friendly Three coupe, with the slogan "Seats two, three if they're friendly".
Jordan used the suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights as backdrops for his advertising photographs, setting the cars in front of the mansions of Overlook and South Park Drives.
Appearing in the June, 1923 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, the ad promoted the Jordan Playboy in art by Fred Cole, driven by a cloche hat wearing flapper hunkered down behind the wheel in abstract fashion, racing a cowboy and the clouds.