Some of you may recall, just before Christmas, I was contacted by an individual who had a number of glass plate negatives. After visiting and determining what I believed was a treasure, we made plans for me to return after catching up on other projects.

We are blessed in our Town with a number of outstanding individuals who devote their efforts in preserving bits of our past and often help when things like this come up. And this time, one with a special skill set stepped up and is helping clean, scan, and archive these plates.

We met with the owner and all parties agreed these plates need to be properly archived as they provide a crystal clear gateway to our past. We’ve removed them for cleaning and scanning, which is now in progress. What I’d like to share this week is, well at least to me and my buddy, something we discovered from the plates we had no knowledge of, the Sunderman Corporation!

It only took a moment or two on Google Earth to see that their building still stands! Where is it? This is at 9-11 Chambers Street in Newburgh. So, let’s look at the Sunderman Corporation.

Frederick R. Sunderman was born in Germany and was a mechanical engineer. The automobile age was in its infancy and many jumped on board this ride, using their technical skills to forge new inventions, hoping perhaps to turn these copyrights into a personal pot of gold.

Sunderman had both the skill set and the ambition. The Sunderman Safety Carburetor was founded in 1912, with the name changed in 1916 to the Sunderman Corporation, and then changed again in 1922 to Sunderman Products, Inc. The Newburgh location being the birth place and instrumental as a brass foundry where the devices and equipment he developed would be produced.

Interestingly, even in the beginning of the automobile era, there was concern with improving the efficiency of the internal combustion engines they were powered by. The Sunderman Carburetor was an aftermarket device promoted to dramatically improve engine performance and fuel economy.

In only a couple of years this business endeavor had an office on the west coast, boasted of selling their carburetors and other products worldwide, and were participating in national trials, sponsoring autos using their equipment in the trials. If you’re interested you can find a number of articles in old issues of the New York Herald from 1918.

Not only did Sunderman design carburetors, he also had other offerings to round out his product line including hydraulic jacks, self-oiling cups, and one, when I saw it, I became enamored with, The Knee Steering Control! I wonder what old Captain Sunderman would think of today’s self-driving vehicles!

Well, sometimes it seems the deck is stacked against you, and this may have been the case with the Sunderman Corporation. After talks failed to secure funding, and assets were seized in a judgement against Sunderman Carburetors, bankruptcy was announced on January 31st, 1925, in the Newburgh Daily News.