Cadillac
Brief History
The make started in 1902, when Henry Ford's latest auto venture went bust. Ford's shareholders called in master machinist Henry M. Leland to catalogue and sell the defunct company's assets. So in August 1902, Leland and Ford's former backers founded the Cadillac Automobile Co.
Henry Leland introduced the $850 Cadillac at the 1903 New York auto show. Within a week, he'd taken 2286 orders. Cadillac built nearly 2500 cars that first year.
In 1909, General Motors bought Cadillac, bringing along Henry Leland as president. Three years later, Cadillac offered the world's first successful electric starter, developed at Delco by Charles F. Kettering. The Delco starter used a combined generator and electric motor that cranked the engine flywheel. The same electrical system contained a storage battery and breaker-point ignition.
For 1915, Cadillac fielded a 90° flathead V8, an engine boasting 70 hp at 2400 rpm and 180 ft.-lb. of torque. The V8 gave Cadillac a top speed of 65 mph—faster than most roads of that era could accommodate. Detachable cylinder heads followed in 1918, by which time Henry Leland had left GM to found Lincoln, a marque Henry Ford bought in 1922. Lincoln, of course, became one of Cadillac's prime rivals. And for 1923, Cadillac pioneered the dual-plane V8 crankshaft. This meant that the crankpins were set at 90° instead of 180 as in all previous V8s. The dual-plane crank plus the addition of counterweights eliminated most “rocking couples” and resulted in infinitely better balance, thus a smoother-running engine.
In August 1928, Cadillac introduced the first clashless Synchro-Mesh manual transmission. In this, internal clutches automatically made gears spin at the same speed before they engaged. Prior to Synchro-Mesh, a driver had to do a lot of fancy clutch work to shift without crunching gears.
Cadillac helped pioneer no-draft ventilation in 1933, independent front suspension for 1934 and introduced the Turret Top for 1935. GM's all-steel roof quickly made fabric-top inserts obsolete.
In 1938, Cadillac developed a totally different V16. This was a flathead design with a 135° vee angle. But the big news that year was a smaller series, the 60-Special. This sleek sedan had a coupe trunk plus thin chrome side-window frames. It set the style throughout the industry—as did the 1941 Cadillac, with its “tombstone” egg-crate grille. The egg-crate continues as a Cadillac hallmark even today.
In 1940, Oldsmobile began offering GM's Hydra-matic automatic transmission, and Cadillac made it an option for 1941. Twin Cadillac flathead V8s and Hydra-matics powered M-24 tanks in World War II, and the Hydra-matic's reliability and robustness were greatly improved through lessons learned in combat duty.
After the war, the 1948 Cadillac kicked off America's passion for tail fins. And the next year, 1949, saw the introduction of the division's revolutionary overhead-valve V8. This compact, lightweight, high-compression, 331-cu.-in. 160-hp V8 set the pattern for the entire American auto industry. Cadillac led in styling, engineering and performance. Again, competitors rushed to catch up.
Cadillac helped pioneer another trend with the introduction of the 1949 Coupe de Ville. Cadillac didn't invent the pillarless “hardtop” coupe, but it and other GM divisions led in popularizing it.
Cadillac was now Detroit's undisputed luxury leader. Nothing came close in terms of prestige, quality, styling and technical innovation. In 1950, thanks to Briggs Cunningham and Bill Frick, a virtually stock Caddy coupe finished third at Le Mans. In 1953, the semicustom Eldorado convertible boasted a wraparound “panoramic” windshield, and in 1957 Cadillac released the stainless steel-topped Eldorado Brougham pillarless sedan, a car that rivaled Rolls-Royce in appointments and price ($13,075) but with much more style. It had air suspension and a tri-power V8.
Cadillac grew ever larger over time, culminating in the 500-cu.-in. V8 and the fwd Eldorado series of the late 1960s and '70s. In 1976, the downsized but luxurious Seville became an immediate success and once again changed America's styling direction toward the “sheer,” folded-paper look.
