The Death of a Friend and the Birth of the Electric Autostart – 1912 Cadillac
AutoI saw a maroon 1912 Cadillac 30 Demi-Tonneau touring car at the inaugural Concours d’Elegance Australia in 2010. Its shiny brass fittings and tall stance brought a lot of vintage character to the event.
More importantly, this car represents a historic turning point in the history of Cadillac and the car itself. This Demi-Tonneau is a scaled-down, ‘sportier’ version of a regular touring car, with lower body lines. Sitting on the same Cadillac chassis as every other body style available, the Demi-Tonneau is lighter, but not by much, so any performance gains would have been minimal.
The engine is a 30 horsepower side-valve four-cylinder with an actual output of 50 bhp. It has a copper jacket for more efficient cooling, like previous Cadillac engines. But modest size doesn’t explain Cadillac’s preeminence among four-cylinder cars at the time.
The success of the Cadillac was due in part to its excellent manufacturing. Its precision-manufactured parts (many to within thousandths of an inch) and assembly earned the company the prestigious Dewar Trophy in Britain. Cadillac’s technical excellence was the result of Chief Engineer Henry F. Leland and his painstaking engineering. With his son Wilfred, Leland would later design and build the Lincoln V-8 luxury car.
The early years of 20th century motorsport could be characterized as one of experimentation and adventure. Manufacturers were testing and applying innovations in an urgent effort to both make their products more comfortable, more reliable, and more performing. Initially, owners and drivers embraced the “car” as a sport, but soon also as business and leisure travel.
The only way to start a car was to start the engine by hand. The effort to do this, and the danger if done incorrectly, went a long way toward preventing women from taking up driving. It also boosted the popularity of electric cars, at least within the city and suburbs.
Various efforts were made to make starting a car safer and easier. One was to release the compression in the middle of the cylinders of a six-cylinder car. This made the effort of turning against the compression of so many cylinders easier.
Other methods were tried, some quite successful. A compressed air system kept in a reserve tank could be used to start an engine by forcing air into the cylinders until the spark from the magneto could ignite it. Luxury car manufacturers such as Winton (USA), SCAT (Italy) and Wolseley (UK) were generally the only ones to apply this effective but complicated system. An air compressor bolted to the engine was necessary to keep that reserve tank of compressed air filled.
This compressor had the added benefit of being available to inflate tires after punctures were repaired. The unpaved roads of the time had sharp stones and were literally studded with horseshoes, making flat tires an unpleasant feature of early driving.
Some compressed air systems used acetylene gas, presumably from the same pressure tanks that powered the gas headlamps. One hopes that acetylene hasn’t been used to inflate tires too!
Electrical systems for starting a car engine were experimented with, but there was no clear winner in terms of practicality or reliability. Car electrical systems were still quite finicky and unreliable at this time.
At the time, Charles F. Kettering of DELCO Laboratories (Dayton Electrical Company) was employed by Billy Durant, then a director of General Motors, a new combine Durant had launched in 1908 using Buick and Cadillac.
Kettering’s friend Byron Carter, who made the CarterCar, stopped by one day to help a female motorist jump-start her car. He must have leaned too far forward while she was at her homework. The engine backfired, spinning the crank violently backwards with enough force to break Carter’s jaw. While recovering from his injury, Carter contracted gangrene, and before the age of antibiotics, he died from this infection in a matter of days.
His sudden death cast a shadow over Kettering and forged a resolve on his part. He would finally solve the problem of electrically starting a car.
The 1912 Cadillac was the fruit of his efforts. It was the first production car with a built-in electric autostart of the type we still use today. The two unit set consisted of a dynamo and a starter motor. It was heralded “somewhat ominously”, according to David Burgess-Wise, as the “Cadillac with automatic start, start and start”.
A combination dynamo and starter motor also served to unify the electrical system so that it was also capable of providing current for the lights. Until that time, separate dry cell batteries were sometimes used for the minor lights (but certainly not the headlights). Now, not only can the motor be activated at the touch of a button, but one switch can also operate all the desired lights, without having to fiddle around with matches to light each lamp!
The Kettering system was so successful and revolutionary that, by the 1913 model year, every American car manufacturer offered an air-powered or (more commonly) electric starter, on all but the cheapest cars. Acceptance of the electric start was slower in Europe and Great Britain, and it would be the years immediately after the First World War that the way would be set, first by European luxury cars, then by mid-priced cars, then by less expensive ones. At that time, in the United States you could only buy the Ford Model T without an automatic start, although it was optional since 1919.
So this Cadillac Thirty is a harbinger of the future with its electric autostart. But it was also the last model for Cadillac before the new Type 541 V-8 was introduced in 1914. The Thirty was a quality car, but still a car firmly in the mid-price range.
With the introduction of the V-8, Cadillac entered the field of lower luxury cars for the first time. Its Northway-assembled multi-cylinder engine was another revelation, being the first successful V-8 to be produced in any quantity. It joined the new 1915 Packard Twin-Six V-12 to usher in a new era of multi-cylinder luxury.
Cadillac has remained a luxury car ever since, for almost a century. Its continued survival and success was based in part on autostart and other innovations.