History of the Jeep: The Company That Built It Never Got the Name

The word Jeep is on cars you see every day. But the tiny company that built the very first one, American Bantam, never got to use it. This video follows one word from 1940 to today: the Army's impossible list, 49 days in Butler, Pennsylvania, the prototype that arrived half an hour before the deadline, the Army handing Bantam's drawings to Willys and Ford, a word from a Popeye cartoon, a Willys driving up the Capitol steps in 1941, about 640,000 wartime jeeps, the trade commission case, and the owners after Willys - right up to Stellantis. Chapters 0:00 Who owns the word? 0:35 An impossible list 2:08 The Army shares the drawings 3:10 The heaviest car wins 4:30 A word from a cartoon 5:43 Up the Capitol steps 6:30 The war makes the word huge 7:30 A fight over the word 8:55 Owner after owner 9:55 So who owns it? Sources Wikipedia: Jeep; Willys MB; Bantam BRC; American Bantam; Ford Pygmy; Karl Probst; Eugene the Jeep; Stellantis Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "The little Jeep that could" Gale blog: "Karl K. Probst and the birth of the Jeep" Military History Now (2018): "What the hell is a jeep?" TIME (22 March 1948): "Facts & Figures" Merriam-Webster: jeep WW2DB: Bantam BRC-40 Photos: Wikimedia Commons. CC-licensed photos by Valder137, David Berry from Rohnert Park CA, USA, Sicnag, Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA (CC BY 2.0); Eric Friedebach (CC BY 4.0); Arjun Mohan (CC BY-SA 2.0); Spurzem - Lothar Spurzem (CC BY-SA 2.0 de); Toytoy at English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0); George Neat, Joshbaumgartner, Jonashtand, Noah1806, Abiez, Choinowski, Acabashi (CC BY-SA 4.0). The other photos are public domain or CC0. Every photo with its title, author, license and link is in the pinned comment. Thumbnail: AI scene drawn from these photos. #history #jeep #ww2