The Franklin Auto Museum has been called Tucson’s best kept secret. I believe it; I have been to Tucson many times and the museum was news to me. So was the Franklin automobile. I had never heard of either.
Industrialist Herbert H. Franklin owned a die casting company in Syracuse, New York, at the turn of the last century, and in 1901 he entered what promised to be aairflow and consequent cooling capacity matched to engine speed and output. The first Franklins featured 4-cylinder engines; later models had 199-cubic-inch 6-cylinder engines followed by 398-cubic-inch V-12 engines (the V-12 engines used two banks of the 6-cylinder engine sharing a common crankshaft). Imagine that: An air-cooled, 398-cubic-inch V-12! Franklins first had shrouded vertical cooling fins around each cylinder; later models used horizontal cooling fins.
