Founding

Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company when Henry Ford departed along with several of his key partners and the company was dissolved. With the intent of liquidating the firm's assets, Ford's financial backers, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland to appraise the plant and equipment prior to selling them. Instead, Leland persuaded them to continue the automobile business using Leland's proven 1-cylinder engine. Henry Ford's departure required a new name, and on August 22, 1902, the company reformed as the Cadillac Automobile Company.

The Cadillac automobile was named after the 17th century French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701.

Contributions to the Automotive Industry

Cadillac helped to define advanced engineering, luxury and style early in Automotive History and would come to be known as one of the world's finest-made vehicles. Precision manufacturing of truly interchangeable parts was an award-winning industry first in 1908. Cadillac was the first manufacturer to release cars with a fully enclosed cab as factory equipment in 1910. In 1912, Cadillac was the first manufacturer to incorporate an electric starter on their cars equipped with gasoline internal combustion engines, replacing the crank start; the device was developed by Charles Kettering and was marketed as a convenience device for female drivers. This along with electric lighting was another award winner for that year.

Cadillac was the first manufacturer to utilize the skills of a designer to produce a car's body instead of an engineer in 1927, giving the public a car that looked as good as it performed. It introduced shatter-resistant safety glass in 1926. In 1928, Cadillac's engineers were the first to design a fully-synchronized manual transmission using constant-mesh gears to prevent clashing upon executing a shift. Not only providing increased drivability, these transmissions were known for their robustness, smoothness and ideal gear ratios, proving ideal for the go-fast crowd. The marque was instrumental in the early development of the automatic transmission beginning in 1932; then in 1941, it became the first luxury car nameplate to offer an automatic transmission, GM's Hydra-Matic (initially introduced the previous year by sister division Oldsmobile).

For the 1914 model year Cadillac introduced the first production V8 engine, and at this time many defects were being discovered in the new V8 Touring model. The competition, most notably Packard, was having a field day with these discoveries in their ads, so the MacManus advertising agency realized something had to be done quickly. Their response to the critics was the beautifully written "Penalty of Leadership", a one-time-only print ad, which became a huge success. Cadillac salespeople requested copies for themselves as well as their customers, and the sales immediately rebounded. In 1945 (nearly thirty years after it ran), this ad was voted the best ad of all time by those in the industry. According to Advertising Age, this campaign is ranked 49th out of the top 100 ad campaigns of all time (Advertising Age 1998). Cadillac offered a production V-16 engine from 1930 through 1940 and introduced the production independent wishbone front suspension in 1934. The marque introduced tailfins for 1948. From the late 1960s onward, Cadillac offered a fiber-optic indication system which alerted the driver of a failed light bulb.