I promised a little history so here it is. I guess to start properly, I’ll have to go back to 1701 in what was known as “French North America.” A small party of men made their way upstream from Lake Erie. They stepped ashore on the west bank downstream from Lake Saint Clair. The officer commanding the detachment was a tall, handsome figure in thighboots, dark blue frock coat and red sash, white lace jabot and cuffs—his blue cocked hat and sword at his side, symbols of leadership and authority from a noble family. It was decided to build a stockade and establish a trading post and a permanent settlement where they were. It was to be called Ville d’Etroit. The name of the man who just established the site of what was to ultimately be called Detroit was Le Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
Fast forward to February 16, 1843 near Barton, Vermont, when Zilpha, the wife of a farmer named Leander B. Leland, presented her husband with their sixth son. He was named Henry Martyn Leland. His Quaker parents taught him Christian ethics and a set of moral standards to guide him throughout life with an emphasis on practical Christianity—square dealing, kindness, and assistance to others. He also received patient instruction in everyday duties on the farm—the necessity for doing every job properly, no matter how small. Henry went to work at the age of 11 and began showing his aptitude for improving methods. He developed a way to peg soles that enabled him, as a schoolboy, to earn money comparable to adult pay levels. He later went to work at Colt (who had produced the first successful revolver) as a mechanic and made precision his passion. Then he went to work for another company called Brown and Sharpe, prosperous manufacturers of precision machinery where he enhanced his precision standards. They produced the first practical quantity produced hand micrometers with compensation for wear and accurate to one-thousandth of an inch in measurement. They advertised their tools as “The World’s Standard of Accuracy.”
Leland later began to think seriously about his own business and was attracted to the city of Detroit where he had a friend with a business selling machine tools. He met a wealthy man named Robert C. Faulconer and convinced him the city had a need for machine shops and they created the firm of Leland, Faulconer, and Norton in Detroit in 1890. Their main work was gear grinding and the design and building of special tools. Their business was booming with an emphasis on gear making. The bicycle boom swept the country at this time and Leland was asked to design and develop trouble free gears. The gears were accurate to a half thousandth of an inch and fully interchangeable. The company then went into motive power, both steam and internal combustion which was shortly to prove invaluable.
Down the road in Lansing, Michigan, Ransom Eli Olds founded the Olds Gasoline Engine Works. While he and his father built gasoline engines for farm use, early Olds vehicles were steam powered. By this time, the gasoline vehicle idea was making headway, following the pioneering work of Daimler and Benz in Germany in the mid 1880’s. Back in America, Olds joined a group of American inventors in the early nineties and completed one of the pioneer gasoline automobiles in Michigan. In 1897, the Olds Motor Vehicle Company was established. They had a big problem with the gears in their transmissions trying to make them mesh not to mention the fact that they were intolerably noisy. Olds went to Leland and Faulconer (now called L and F), to make a quiet running transmission where the gears were precision ground and interchangeable from car to car without any hand fitting. In 1901, L and F was given a contract to make two thousand engines for Olds. There were 2 other brothers named Dodge that also supplied engines for Olds. The Dodge engine produced about 3.0 horsepower while the Leland engine produced about 3.7 horsepower. The Leland engine ran at higher speeds and had lower friction than the Dodge engine thanks to closer machining due to the higher craftsmanship (some things never change!
). Leland realized that his expertise could be of great use in the new industry. He had his team improve their original engine which now developed 10.25 horsepower. Leland presented his newly developed engine to Olds but they were selling so many cars that they didn’t have a need for a new engine, especially one that would increase cost and delay production. This was disappointing for Leland but it wouldn’t be long before his engine got some use.
In August of 1902, two men came to see Leland about a company they were trying to liquidate. It had been organized three years previously and was named the Detroit Automobile Company. It had only produced a few cars but the company failed in 1900. It was revived and reorganized a year later with the chief mechanic now in charge. He renamed it after himself. It was called the Henry Ford Company but Ford left after 3 months when the company was failing again. The investors claimed that Ford only wanted to build race cars but Ford said the company was in too much of a hurry to make a profit and had no long term plans. The investors, now trying to just get out, asked Leland to appraise their automobile plant and equipment for sale. Leland agreed and went to look the factory over. This gave him a tremendous idea. He went and got his new engine and took it for his meeting. When he later met with the investors, he told them “I believe you are making a great mistake in going out of business. The automobile has a great future. I have brought you a motor which we worked out at L and F. It has three times the power of the Olds motor. Its parts are interchangeable, and I can make these motors for you at less cost than the others for the Olds works and it is not temperamental” (which was a problem back then). Impressed by the man before them, they voted to continue the business and gave him the leading role in the company which now needed a new name. The investors hoped that their new company would be the first successful automobile company in Detroit so what more appropriate title than the one the great French adventurer had first brought to that very spot some two hundred years before? It was dubbed the CADILLAC and shortly afterward, the Cadillac family crest was adopted (the design was prepared using the celebrated many-quartered shield surmounted by a seven-piked coronet and garlanded with a laurel wreath) and registered as a trademark.
I hope this wasn’t too long for everyone but I thought it was interesting info.
Max
