Wilbur Curtis did not have the luck of the Irish as he tried to get his project up and running
The first Shamrock prototype was built 65 years ago in Guildford and shipped off to the US to generate interest, while Wilbur Curtis worked on opening his Irish production plant. Photograph: Getty Images
The first Shamrock prototype was built 65 years ago in Guildford and shipped off to the US to generate interest, while he worked on opening his Irish production plant. The Irish connection was hyped up in an article in Mechanix Illustrated magazine, which has been reproduced by the Vintage News Daily website. Faith and begorrah, every Irish cliché you can think of was shoe-horned into the article.
Although he was said to have Irish heritage, poor Wilbur did not have the luck of the Irish as he tried to get his project up and running. He wanted to open the factory in Tralee but his vision was not enthusiastically embraced by the powers-that-be in Kerry so he shifted his attention further north and opened his factory in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, in 1960. But he couldn’t get any American distributors and he pulled the handbrake on the enterprise less than a year after the factory opened.
Wilbur Curtis may have discovered there was no pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, but when he died in 1987, the obituaries put his invention of the fibre-glass car only second to his invention of the glass coffee pot when listing his achievements.
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