Manufacturing Methods
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" and "Chinese Blue". Black was also available. The most-flamboyant of color schemes was on the four-passenger Sport model, which could be ordered in "Submarine Gray", with khaki top and orange wheels.
Details given the cars were unusually advanced for an independently made assembled car; for example, Jordans boasted one of the first cowl fresh-air ventilation systems. Jordan also went to all-steel construction in the mid-1920s, some ten years before Buick and eight years before Chrysler introduced the advanced Airflow models.
In 1917, Jordan's 60 Series Limousine had a 6-cylinder, 303.1-cubic-inch Continental engine. 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.
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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"), Tomboy, and Playboy. He originally wanted to name the car with the World War I term "Doughboy," but decided on the common-sensical-but-provocative Playboy instead. 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.:
SOMEWHERE west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is - the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose, face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There's a savor of links about that car - of laughter and lilt and light - a hint of old loves - and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing - yet a graceful thing for the sweep o' the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.
While other Jordan ads contained the same winsome prose, one in particular had an unseen outcome: Jordan's "Port of Missing Men", which also appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (1920), featured Jordan's musings on restless men and those places where they travel to when they needed to get away. The ad featured art work showing a Jordan Playboy in front of a cottage in winter by the sea, with a young boy walking by, looking up to the second story window aglow red from within.
Jordan wrote to the editor of the Post:
We regret that our recent advertisement has offended your high moral sense... perhaps had we placed lights in the downstairs windows as well, the suggestive implications would have been minimized.
