Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay_LHD3
So I was flipping channels last night and got stuck again watching the program on the History Channel where they show how J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie built our country. At the end they show the piece on Henry Ford and while watching this time I was reading the facts that were popping up on the bottom of the screen.
It stated that Henry Fords' first company was the Henry Ford Company that became Cadillac. I thought this was very interesting and figured that there has to be a fair number of other facts like this too in the automotive history that most people don't know about.
You guys or gals know of any other interesting historical automotive facts?
Reference to the Henry Ford Company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company |
Well, yes and no. Ford's company became defunct and from that plant and its equipment a new company was formed. Ford's former backers brought in a guy named Henry Leland to do an appraisal en route to selling everything off, instead they organized the shambles into Caddy, using an engine that Leland, conveniently, had developed. Sounds to me like ol' Hank had a conflict of interest...but it's not like they took Ford's company, re-named it, and kept on keeping on building the same cars with a new name
This part may qualify as an interesting fact: GM's history is strange. They owe it all to a guy who patented a way to get ceramic to stick to iron, a good inventor and bad businessman, a Scot named David Dunbar Buick, who sold the works to Billy Durant, who in turn used Buick as the financial backing to found GM.