March 26, 1932
Auto legend passes away
Henry Martyn Leland, the founder of Cadillac & Lincoln, died in Detroit (MI) at the age of 89. Leland was born in Vermont, the 8th child of New England farmer Leander Barton Leland & his wife Zilpha Tifft Leland. He began his industrial career as an apprentice engineer at Knowles Loom Works in Worcester (MA). With the outbreak of the Civil War, Leland began work at the U.S. Armory in Springfield (MA). After the war, Leland served as an engineer & mechanic in a series of manufacturing firms in New England. He distinguished himself as a tireless worker & an exacting supervisor only satisfied w/his own high standard of quality. Leland was a real New Englander, a Presbyterian stickler w/good manners & a titan's work ethic. He moved to Detroit to run a company w/his old partner Charles Norton that was to be financed by Detroit lumber mogul Robert Faulconer. After successfully runnning, for a few years, as a supplier of various machine-shop products, Leland & Falconer gained entrance into the automobile industry at the request of Ransom Olds. Olds needed a supplier of transmissions for his Olds Runabouts. Leland wasn't the only major player in the automotive industry to get his start w/Olds. Olds also hired the Dodge brothers to manufacture the bodies for his cars. After a successful run supplying Olds transmissions, Leland was asked by the Detroit Automobile Company to appraise their holdings, which they were preparing to liquidate. Leland surprised them by recommending that they hang on to their facilities; he offered to run their car company for them & revealed to them an engine design he had come up w/which produced 3 times the HP of Olds' engines. The Cadillac Car Company was born, named after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the founder of Detroit. The 1st Cadillacs came on the market as low-priced cars, but soon, due to Leland's high standards, the car was marketed as a luxury item. The car company that became a symbol of excess & ostentation in the '50s began as the product of a puritanical perfectionist. Cadillac distinguished itself further by becoming the 1st car company to introduce a self-starting mechanism. Charles Kettering invented the system at the urging of Leland, who was said to be distraught over the death of a friend caused when an errant crank-shaft broke the man's arm & jaw. In '08, William Durant & GM bought the Cadillac Motor Car Company for $4.4 million in cash. Leland continued to run Cadillac, & it became GM's most successful marque. Eventually, Leland & Durant fell out over GM's participation in WW I. Leland had been to Europe just before the war, become convinced that the war was inevitable, & that it would decide the future of Western Civilization. Durant's disinterest in the war cause infuriated Leland so much that he quit. He went on to found Lincoln, which he named after the man he admired most & for whom he had cast his 1st vote as a 21-year-old, Abraham Lincoln. Leland was never able to escape financial trouble w/Lincoln, & he ended up selling the company to Henry Ford. Ford eventually ran Leland out of the business, most likely as a result of some personal jealousy on Ford's part. Nevertheless, Leland was responsible for creating the luxury marques for America's two largest automotive manufacturers.
