20 October: Cadillacs

On this date in 1902, according to the book Henry Leland – Master of Precision, this is the date the first Cadillac car rolled off the production line. While there are other apparently reliable sources that say this happened on the 17^th or even earlier I'm trusting the Master of Precision on this one and presenting you with 10 things you might not know about Cadillacs.

1. The company was named after a Frenchman called Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a French army officer. Why him? Because he founded a town called Ville d’Etroit, which we now know as Detroit, Michigan.
2. His family coat of arms was adopted as the car company's logo. The original design is thought to have been created by Antoine himself in 1687. It included a crown, a laurel wreath for aristocracy and victory, stripes in Black (superiority), gold (wealth), Red (boldness), silver (virtue) and Blue (valour), and... ducks. The ducks appeared in threes to symbolise the Holy Trinity. The logo has changed many times over the years. The current version is a flattened version of the shield, which has lost the crown, and the ducks.
3. The company's founder was Henry M. Leland, who'd apprenticed under gunmaker Samuel Colt. Henry Ford was a long time friend and rival of his. He helped set up the Cadillac company but they fell out and Ford left to start his own company. Once the Cadillac company was well established, Leland left to start another firm, Lincoln, but it soon went bankrupt, after which it was bought by Henry Ford.
4. The first cars Cadillac made were the Runabout and the Tonneau.
5. Cadillac was a pioneer in many of the things we take for granted in cars today. They invented the electric starter, meaning the driver no longer had to turn a crank handle to start the engine. This, incidentally, is the origin of the expression, “cranky” which is the mood a driver might be in after struggling to start the car. It was the death of one of Leland's friends, Byron T. Carter, which kick-started the development of the starter. Carter's car backfired while he was trying to start it, sending the handle spinning out of control. It hit Carter on the head and killed him. Leland said, “I won’t have Cadillacs hurting people that way.”
6. Other innovations he made which we take for granted today are electric headlights, airbags and air-conditioning.
7. Leland was so concerned with precision that he imported tools from Sweden to use in his factory. He boasted that his factory was the most precise on Earth, and set out to prove it. In front of a group of judges, his engineers disassembled three Cadillacs and had the judges shuffle the parts before the engineers assembled the cars again with the parts all mixed up. The cars all worked perfectly, even on a 500 mile trip. Cadillac was awarded the Dewar Trophy, a kind of Nobel Prize for cars, for that.
8. Today they can produce parts by 3D printing. Cadillac has the second largest 3D printing facility in the world, second only to General Electric.
9. The tail fin on the 1949 Coupe DeVille was inspired by the P38 Lightning fighter plane.
10. Gangster Al Capone had a bullet-proof Caddy to protect him from rival gangs. When he was sent to Alcatraz it was impounded by the Treasury. Legend has it that when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to deliver his “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress after Pearl Harbour in 1941, and a bullet-proof car was needed, the Secret Service used Al Capone's car. The President, when asked where he got hold of a car like that so quickly, quipped, “I hope Mr. Capone doesn’t mind.”

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