#128 Henry Leland (Cadillac)

**David Senra** (0:00)
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Henry Leland laid the foundation for the future American industry. He had established manufacturing procedures never previously so effectively employed and took a position of leadership. He was to maintain it and in the next decades would be comparable in stature with, although quite different from, William Durant, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan.
In comparing Leland with Durant and Ford, it should be pointed out that Leland's contribution to the development of the motor car was the establishment of high standards of manufacturing.
Ford, of course, through the moving assembly line, also developed standards, but for the manufacture of a cheap car. He, himself, recognized Leland's great contribution. Durant, as the founder of General Motors, was a promoter, but made contributions as the head of an organization, offering a variety of cars and the establishment of companies supplying parts. Sloan reorganized General Motors on a sounder basis and established its highly successful system of financial controls.
The Dodge brothers would be included by some experts as a major force in the early automobile industry, and in the 1920s, Walter P. Chrysler took a prominent place in the industry. Leland's period of eminence might be set as 1908 through 1922
How had he reached this eminence? Let's go back and follow the Leland story from its beginnings. It takes us first into an earlier industrial era, goes hand in hand with the steady rise of American manufacturing through the bicycle and the pioneer automotive stages, enables us to understand more fully the maturing of the motor car in the United States, and still has relevance to the developments that are taking place today. That's an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Master of Precision. All right, so I wanna start there because after I took a slight detour doing a three-part series on Larry Ellison, I'm back on this multiple part series on the early days of the automobile industry in the United States, and every single person listed there have already done podcasts on, or I will do podcasts on in the future. I just had to wait for some books to arrive. Okay, so let's start in the introduction. There's an overview of his personality here, and I would say a brief overview of his general life story. Henry Leland is the founder of both Cadillac and Lincoln. So it says Henry Leland always got deep satisfaction out of anything which was made right. He had in high degree the pride of craftsmanship that had marked the master workman down the centuries. Originality of conception had to be matched with close attention to practical effectiveness and both had to be crowned with artistry of form. And so that paragraph really gives us insight into how Leland approached his work. He had by far the highest standards in terms of quality standards than any other early automobile pioneer.
It continues, Leland's role was an inspiring and often a successful one. He developed the Cadillac, the Self-Starter, the Lincoln car. He held up high standards of performance for the industry and established the first notable school of automotive mechanics. Unfortunately, near the end of his life, he saw his company, the Lincoln Motor Company, go into receivership. Eventually it passed under the control of Henry Ford, who had first proposed to keep Leland and his son in the industry as a public service, but in the end failed to live up to his professions. I would say failed to live up to his promises. The authors go fully into this painful episode as they do in all phases of Leland's career. So that's a good overview of where we're gonna be going. Okay, so I want to get right into his early life.