Henry Leland, daddy of the Caddy, proved the importance of precision

Henry Martyn Leland was the father of the mass-produced luxury car in the United States. And his son, Wilfred, might well be called the luxury car's favorite uncle.

In 1902 they founded Cadillac, which they sold in 1909 to Billy Durant and his brand-new General Motors. The Lelands stayed at GM until 1917, then hit the road because, they said, Cadillac refused to build the Liberty aircraft engine —which Cadillac did build after the Lelands left.

Henry and Wilfred Leland formed Lincoln Motor Co. in 1917 and received a contract to produce 6,000 Liberty engines. Lincoln switched to cars after World War I. Its first car went on sale in September 1920.

The Lelands sold Lincoln to Henry and Edsel Ford for $8 million in February 1922. They left four months later.

You could argue that much of Henry Leland's success could be credited to his mother, Zilpha, who gave him this advice early on: There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Hunt for the right way, and then go ahead.

The advice took root. Long before it became vital to automaking, Leland was a devotee of precision.

One of the people who noticed was Alfred Sloan. In the pre-General Motors days when Sloan ran the family business, Hyatt Roller Bearing Co., he had trouble winning Leland as a customer. In his 1963 book, My Years with General Motors, Sloan wrote: "I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts."

Cadillac parts were so precisely machined that in 1906 Henry Leland took three of his cars to England, disassembled them, scrambled the parts and reassembled three operating vehicles. Given the level of auto manufacturing at the time, it was an impressive feat.

Henry Leland was born poor in 1843 in Danville, Vt. He became a machinist. For 20 years he was an engineer with Brown & Sharpe Co., which built machine tools.

Leland moved to Detroit in 1890 and started Leland, Faulconer and Norton, which made machine tools, gears and internal combustion engines. The company, which became Leland & Faulconer when Norton left in 1894, supplied the transmission for the Curved Dash Oldsmobile.

When the precursor of Ford Motor Co. was disbanding, Henry Ford's financial backers hired Leland to appraise some of their assets. The money men were impressed with Leland's advanced engine design and decided to build a car. From that, Cadillac Motor Car Co. was born in 1902.

Three years later, Leland merged Leland & Faulconer with Cadillac. "The Cadillac car was an overnight success, being cheap ($750), economical, efficient and reliable to an unprecedented degree," Motor Trend magazine said.

Durant bought the company in 1909 for $4.5 million and retained the Lelands as managers.

One of the reasons for Cadillac's success was Henry Leland's insistence that his high standards of precision and quality would spread throughout the organization. To that end, in 1907 he started the Cadillac School of Applied Mechanics, the industry's first school to train machinists, technicians and toolmakers.

When GM went through financial hard times in 1910, Cadillac kept the company solvent.

Leland also was president of the Society of Automotive Engineers. In June 1914, he gave a moving speech to engineers in Detroit that showed his belief in the importance of business. He said, in part:

"The businessman or manufacturer who thus produces materials for human needs, who is honest and square in all his dealings and who is fair, just and true to every need and requirement of society, is the most important person and really does the most for society and the world of any human being."

Henry Leland's great-grandson Bill Hope, 62, of Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., says he heard from his mother, Gertrude Woodbridge, and aunt Miriam Leland Woodbridge that Henry was a doting and generous grandfather.

"He gave his (1905 Cadillac) Osceola to my Aunt Miriam in the late 1920s or early 1930s," Hope recalls. "They had a lot of fun with it, taking turns seeing how many classmates they could fit in it, like people have done with the Volkswagen."

Wilfred shared his father's love of cars and engineering. He was educated at Brown University and worked for Leland & Faulconer before joining Cadillac.

Leland gave Wilfred the credit for the first eight-cylinder V-type high-speed, high-efficiency engine. Cadillac refined the V-8 into an engine that would become its signature for years to come.

The Lelands' time at Lincoln ended on a sour note. The company had financial problems after World War I. After much bargaining and cajoling, Henry Ford bought Lincoln at a bankruptcy sale in 1922 for $8 million — a fraction of its value. Ford retained the Lelands as managers but pushed them out within four months.

Henry Leland died at age 89 in 1932; son Wilfred died at 88 in 1958. Both men left the world with a peerless reputation for doing things the right way. Zilpha Leland would have been proud.