The Crazy Origins of General Motors

companies are often fascinating, and typically they're really complicated. They frequently involved strategic partnerships and acquisitions and mergers and other big moves that can make it a little tricky to trace a history in any kind of linear way. So we're gonna try to do that today, because nothing worth

doing is ever easy or something. So we're going to explore the history and the impact of General Motors, which you could argue is one of the big origin stories for how the automotive industry got so complicated in the first place. And like a lot of my episodes, this story will actually begin before there was any General Motors to speak of, and it will go on after GM ceases to be because spoiler alert, that happened the General Motors today is not the same as the one that

was founded more than a century ago. Now, to talk about the history of general motors. We actually need to talk a little bit about the history of the automobile itself,

and more to the point, the history of automobile companies. Now, I'm not going to do an exhaustive history here, because that would require talking about all sorts of stuff that doesn't actually apply to general motors, like air propelled land vehicles that used wind power, or compressed air engine vehicles, or steam powered tricycles and wagons and all that kind of thing. We're instead going to skip ahead to the era of the internal combustion engine, the gasoline powered engine.

But if you if you folks want me to do an episode talking about the various early attempts to build a horseless carriage and the different methods that people tried, let me know, and we'll all take a very historical

and extremely bumpy road trip together. Now, the first automobiles powered by internal combustion engines originated in the mid nineteenth century around the eighteen sixties, but it really wasn't until the eighteen eighties that engineers stuck around with experimenting with these things long enough to make automobiles that were more

than just a curiosity. Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler independently did this, but ultimately their work would converge later on with the formation of the company Daimler a G also known as Mercedes Benz, but that would happen in the nineteen twenties, and Carlin Gottlieb never actually met one another. But the early days of the automobile were really uncertain,

to say the least. While people like Ben's and Daimler were building automobiles as sort of a proof of concept and occasionally racing them against other people who are making similar type of vehicles, getting any sort of substantial investment behind the effort was difficult. So people were not yet convinced that a horseless carriage really had any legs so to speak, or wheels, I guess anyway, they weren't sure that these automobiles were ever going to be something that

people would actually use. Meanwhile, over in the United States, a guy named George B. Selden applied for a patent as the inventor of the automobile. He did that in eighteen seventy nine. Now that pre dates Ben's and Dameler's automobiles from the eighteen eighties. However, the Patent Office didn't award Selden the patent until eighteen nine. Selden had never

actually built an automobile. He just presented the design for one, so he gets the patent in eight and that was after Ben's and Dameler had already built their internal combustion powered automobiles. And so there's a little debate. It's putting it lightly about who the inventor of the automobile really was, But honestly, I would say it's all kind of meaningless

for a couple of different reasons. One is that, like most really big inventions, the automobile is really more of the product of a lot of different people working on different things, and ultimately those various forms of work converged, so you can't really assign the invention to just one person. For another, all these people are dead, so you know, it's kind of a moot point. Now just watch just because I said that, I bet my car is going to get haunted by angry German ghosts. I'm kidding. I

don't believe in cars, I mean ghosts. By the early eighteen nineties, the United States was starting to see engineers building out cars that would form the foundation of future companies such as the Durya motor wagon Company, which may thirteen whole cars in eighteen nineties six. Now, the reason I wanted to start with all this is that the General Motors Company began not as an automobile company all of itself, but rather as a holding company that bought

existing automobile companies. So, in other words, GM started out as a means of consolidating multiple car companies in an effort to combine resources and share the load across different groups of mechanics, engineers, inventors, salespeople, and so on. So let's talk about some of the companies that would form the early foundation of General Motors before we get to GM itself. One of the earliest companies GM would purchase

is Buick, which was founded by David Dunbar Buick. He was born in Scotland in eighteen fifty four and his family immigrated to America when David was just two years old. His father, who was a carpenter, passed away when David was still a child, and his mother remarried a native Detroit man who owned a candy shop. As a teenager, David worked for a manufacturing company that made plumbing fixtures

in Detroit, Michigan. He apprenticed with a machine shop in Detroit, but then returned to that plumbing manufacturing company and became a foreman there. Bewick himself became something of an inventor and an engineer. He secured several patents for various inventions and processes, including one that would allow you to bind porcelain to cast iron that led to the development of really large porcelain bathtubs, among other things that were incredibly

fashionable at the time. Buick and a business partner named William Sherwood subsequently purchased the manufacturing company, which had fallen into a bit of financial shambles, and they renamed it the Buick and Sherwood Manufacturing Company. While the company saw great success, Bewick himself was a little bit restless. He had become fascinated by gas lean fueled engines, not just automobiles, mind you. In fact, that wasn't really foremost in his mind.

He was just interested in these gasoline powered engines that could do all sorts of different work, including stationary engines for stuff like industrial uses. By eight seven, Buick had dedicated some of his company's manufacturing capabilities to producing gasoline fueled engines intended to be used on farm equipment. Sherwood, meanwhile, was becoming a little mift that Buick was not tending to the plumbing fixtures company, and ultimately the two decided

to part ways. Buick liquidated his ownership of the company he owned with Sherwood, and he used that substantial sum to found a new enterprise called Buick Auto, Vim and Power Company in nineteen o one. One of Buick's engineers was a guy named Walter Maher who had been building gasoline fueled engines for boats. Now, the story goes that Mar wanted to build a full automobile at Buicks company, but David resisted. He thought it was safer to build

engines and not worry about stuff like automobiles. Like build the engines four automobiles, sure, but don't need you don't need to build the whole automobile yourself. Mar and Buick had some spats, with Marv, you know, quitting and returning a couple of times before that quitting stuck in nineteen o two, whereupon Mar would actually work with another person. We're going to chat about Ransom, Eli Olds and Mars

replacement was a machinist named Eugene Richard. Also around this time, Buick reorganized and renamed his company, now calling it the Buick Manufacturing Company. Guess all that VIM must have worn out by then, Buick did produce a couple of car prototypes. By nineteen o three, the company wasn't a bit of trouble as investors were starting to get nervous and pull out of the company. But then Frank and Benjamin brisco the Briscoe brothers, swooped in to help fund Buick's efforts

to produce a Buick branded automobile. The Briscos owned a sheet metal business, and they saw this as a way to bring different but related businesses together for mutual benefit. Benjamin Briscoe would end up buying the first official Buick for himself, and the company went through another reorganization and transformed into the Buick Motor Company, with the Briscoes overseeing the financials, so they had a substantial stake in the company.

They essentially owned it, and now Buick was working for the Briscoes. The first Buick, apart from an earlier prototype that Buick had sold off, was an open air vehicle and you'll hear this a few times in this episode. It had a padded bench like seat mounted more or less in the middle lengthwise anyway of the chassis. The driver would steer the vehicle using a steering wheel, but that was not always a given in early motor cars.

In fact, the prototype the Buick had produced earlier, the one that he had sold to his former engineer Mar, you had to steer with a handle, not a wheel. It was more like a like a rudder style steering mechanism. Now, that original prototype that he sold to Mar was sold for two dollars. How about that? If you adjust that for inflation, that would be around seven thousand bucks today. Now, I'm not sure what the actual Buicks, the first run Buicks sold for the ones that are being produced for

actual external customers. I only know that that Mar paid two dollars for that original prototype. Now, I do know that the early Buicks, such as the Model B touring cars, were modest in power. No big surprise there. The Model

B had a horsepower rating of fifteen to twenty one horsepower. Now, if you're not a car person, and I'm not much of one, you might wonder what horsepower actually means it's a unit of measurement for engine power, and it's the amount of power needed to move five hundred fifty pounds one foot in one second, or the amount of power needed to move thirty three thousand pounds one foot in one minute. The term dates back to the days of James Watt as he was trying to convince people to

buy steam engine machinery. He was comparing how powerful his steam engines were two horses, which were the main source of power generation for a lot of industries these days. The typical American car generates a hundred twenty horsepower those you might imagine. There's quite a range on this due to different types of cars on the market, so a fifteen to twenty one horsepower vehicle is much less powerful

than what you would typically drive today. Now, the Briscoe brothers did not hold on to Buick for very long. They sold their steak and thus their control of the company, to another corporation called Flint Wagon Works in Flint, Michigan. David Buick was now working for a totally different company in a man named William Durant, another person that we're going to talk about a lot a bit later, came in and purchased controlling interest in Buick from the Flint

Wagon Works. By the end of nineteen o four, the Buick Company had produced just thirty seven automobiles, but since this was in the early days of the automobile industry in the United States, that thirty seven automobiles meant that Buick was just in second place across the nation. First place was being held by Henry Ford's Motor Company. Durant would make Bwick the centerpiece of the company he intended to build, which I'm sure you've all figured out now

would eventually be General Motors. Now, before I move on, I would like to talk about what happened to David Dunbar Buick, and it's a bit of a sad story. So he was now working for William Durant, but he had also had a seat on the board of directors. However, Durant began to push Buick further out from any meaningful role in the company. Kind of makes me think of how Steve Jobs was treated in the eighties over at Apple.

And it seems as though Mr Buick was a disagreeable sort who often found himself at odds with other disagreeable sorts a lot of cantankerous people in the automotive industry. In the early days, there were a lot of oil and water mixtures in other words. Also, Buick's health was taking a turn for the worse and he really wanted to move someplace west to live in a climate that was less humid. He left Durant's employ in nineteen o nine with a huge severance check and some stocks, and

he moved to California. There he founded an oil company, and he ran into some trouble when The New York Times named the securities firm that represented the Buick Oil company had been guilty of stock fraud transactions. So it wasn't his company, but rather the securities firm that represented his company that got in trouble, but that meant he got wrapped up in it as well, and as a consequence,

Buick's oil concern was effectively wiped out. He subsequently got involved in real estate deals in Florida, which sounds like the to Glen Garry Glenn Ross. Anyway, that didn't work out either, and he did have a brief return to running an automotive manufacturing company with the Lorraine Motors Corporation, but saw little success there either. By night he was living in poverty, and he passed away the following year,

very sad. While Buicks vehicles would serve as the entry point for Durance foray into the automotive industry, he would acquire a bunch of other companies and thus car models. When we come back, we'll learn about some of the other cars that joined the GM family shortly after Durant had founded the company. But first, let's take a quick break. Now, let us turn to another pioneer in the automobile business whose work would become part of the young General Motors. Now,

have you heard of Oldsmobile? Some of you younger listeners out there may not have heard of it at all, as GM stopped making vehicles branded as Oldsmobiles back in two thousand four. For those who have heard of it, you might be surprised to learn that the name Oldsmobile comes from the man who founded the original Oldsmobile company comes from his name, Ransom Eli Mobile. Wait, no, I'm sorry. Ransom Eli Olds born in eighteen sixty four in Ohio.

His family made the move to Lansing, Michigan, Michigan obviously the birthplace of the automotive industry in the United States. They moved there when Ransom was just a kid. He grew up interested in mechanical systems, and by the mid eighteen eighties he was experimenting with building steam powered automobiles. He graduated to gasoline powered cars in eighteen ninety six.

By eighteen ninety nine, he had founded the Olds Motor Works Company, securing financial backing from a dude who was really into wood, but that I mean Samuel L. Smith, who owned a large lumber operations and had amassed a significant amount of wealth. By nineteen o one, the first Oldsmobiles were available for purchase, and by nineteen o four

the company had sold five thousand of them. There was a terrible fire at the Oldsmobile manufacturing facility, and the only prototype to survive the fire was a design called the Oldsmobile curved dash Runabout. Runabout is a style of early automobile, and you should search for images of this vehicle and you'll have an appreciation of what a car

was back at the turn of the twentieth century. The runabout is an open air vehicle and it looks a little bit like a sleigh, but with wheels instead of you know, sleds or skis, and it has a handle for steering, sort of like the old fashioned rudder steering mechanisms I was mentioning earlier, before everyone got fancy and

started using steering wheels. Now, at the time, it cost six hundred fifty dollars to buy one of these babies, which if we had just for inflation, would be right around nineteen thousand dollars in today's money, so not an unreasonable amount for a new car. Olds was known for employing advertising and publicity in a savvy way early on in the automotive industry, so I suppose we can thank Ransom for the incredibly weird history of automobile dealership commercials.

He also used a stationary assembly line, the same kind of thing that Ford also would end up doing. It was a stepping stone toward mass production, and it's what allowed Olds to build and sell so many cars within three years. And granted, I know that five thousand cars in three years is not a lot by today's standards, but we now live in the era of precision mass production, and this was before that. He also arranged to purchase transmission systems from the Dodge Brothers from the folks who

built the Dodge cars. So the early days the automobile industry, we're both competitive and a little cozy. Also, in nineteen o four, Ransom had a falling out with Samuel and Olds would actually leave the company he had founded. He went on to create another car company, originally called R. E. Olds Motor Car Company but later just known as R. E. O, which had a quick rise and then a precipitous fall

in the automotive industry. It became a leader in the industry in nineteen o seven, but then began to decline in nineteen o eight. After that roller coaster of a journey, Olds began working on other things, such as a lawnmower. So that's a shout out to a recent tech Stuff podcast where we learned how lawnmowers exist because medieval Europeans like to build castles, and he too would it involved in real estate in Florida. He retired in nineteen twenty

five and would pass away in nineteen fifty. But Olds had left his original company in nineteen o four, so he wasn't part of the deal that would bring Oldsmobile to General Motors. Durant would acquire Oldsmobile, not long after he had already acquired Buick. And now let us consider Cadillac. So this company also has a bit of an odd history, and part of it goes back to Henry Ford. Ford gets a lot of credit for the success of the automotive industry in the United States in the early days,

and for good reason. He was the most successful of all the car manufacturers at that time. But success wasn't always a guarantee with Ford. His first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, began in eighteen ninety nine to a rather rocky start. He reorganized and renamed the company a couple of years later and called the new enterprise the Henry

for Company. But Ford didn't see eyed eye with the people who actually fronted him the money to establish his company, and by nineteen o two Ford was out, but he took his name with him. His third company would go on to be the huge success. That's the actual Ford Motor Company, the third one. But let's go back to

that second company for a second. What happened with that Well, once the tiff with Ford happened, the financiers behind the company decided they need to bring in an expert to figure out what the value of all their assets were so that they could liquidate them, sell them off, hopefully cover their investment, or at least mitigate any losses. So to that end, the investors called in a machinist in Detroit named Henry Leland, who had his own manufacturing company

and who had produced engines for Oldsmobile previously. Leland came in and took a look around and said, say, Fellower's you really ought to stay in the business. You got yourselves the infrastructure to build your own ours, and you've already done enough work. That was some tinkering. We can make something special. I am paraphrasing, of course, but the

investors agreed and Leland got to work. He called both the car and the company Cadillac, named after the French explorer and self proclaimed noble Antoine Lamme de Lamot Cadillac. That's the guy who founded Detroit. Also, as I say, historians believe that he was not in fact a noble

as he called himself, but rather just assumed that. Either way, he is credited for founding Detroit, and Leland's original design was a bit of a Frankenstein's Monster kind of thing, not an appearance, but in parts so he started with Ford's chassis design, which the company owned. Because Ford was so disgusted by his falling out with the investors that he didn't pursue the rights to the designs before he left.

He kept the name so they couldn't call it the Ford come Penny or anything like that, but they owned everything else, and Leland decided to continue the design he had been working on for Oldsmobile for an engine. It was a design that the company had actually turned down, so it had a an Oldsmobile intended engine and a Ford chassis body. Leland's own manufacturing company would produce all the transmissions and the engine parts and other components for

the new car. Well, this actually gives us a chance to talk about what it means to have a single cylinder engine. We need a quick rundown on what cylinders are. So, cylinders are the part of an engine that howls pistons, and a piston can move up and down the length of the cylinder inside the cylinder, kind of like a plunger in a syringe, and there's a tight seal inside the cylinder. There's typically like a piston ring that keeps a nice seal against the interior wall of that cylinder.

Modern cars almost all used the same general roll approach to create motion. It's called a four stroke combustion cycle, also known as the Auto cycle. That's O. T T O named after Nicklaus Auto, who came up with the idea in the eighteen sixties, and the four strokes in question are called intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. So imagine that you've got a vertical cylinder. Okay, we're looking at a cross section of a cylinder. Now, the plunger like

piston comes up from the bottom of the cylinder. It never goes all the way out. It may withdraw to the point where the end of the piston is is essentially at the bottom of the cylinder, but still inside it. At the top of the cylinder, You've got a pair of valves and a spark plug. So one valve only allows a mixture of air and gas to enter the cylinder. However, it prevents anything from going back out the valve. That's how valves work. They allow one way direction of flow. Now,

the other valve is an exhaust valve. It prevents anything from coming into the cylinder through the exhaust valve, but it will allow exhaust to go out at the proper part of the cycle, and the piston has a repeating cycle of moving up and down inside that cylinder. So when the piston is moving downward like it's just completed one cycle and now it's starting to move down the cylinder away from the intake valve, that valve opens and a mixture of air and a small amount of gasoline

come into the cylinder through the intake valve. The exhaust valve remains shut, so the descending piston is kind of drawing in that mixture into the cylinder itself. Upon reaching the bottom of its stroke, the piston reverses direction and now it begins to move up the cylinder. The intake valve is shut and the exhaust valve is shut two, so the piston, acting like a plunger in a syringe,

is actually compressing that mixture of air and gas. This is the compression stroke because is that mixture has nowhere to go. It can't escape the cylinder, so it has to be compressed. As the piston reaches the end of its trip up the cylinder, having compressed the gas and air as much as it can, the spark plug well

it sparks and it ignites this mixture. This is the combustion stroke, and the power from that combustion, which is effectively an explosion with that compressed mixture of air and gas, that pushes the piston down forcefully, so it goes down the cylinder quite fast. So the piston goes back down

to the bottom of its stroke. Then it reverses course, heading back up, and as it moves up, the cylinder's exhaust valve opens, and like the intake valve, it only works in one direction, so the piston drives out the exhaust in the cylinder out through the exhaust valve. When the piston comes up to the top of this stroke and starts moving back down again, the exhaust valve closes, the intake valve opens, and the whole cycle repeats itself. And the next episode, by the way, we'll talk more

about those spark plugs, because this cycle requires initiation. It's not like it's perpetual motion. It doesn't just start and then never stop. You have to start that cycle system. But in the old old days you had to do that manually, So we'll talk more about that in the next episode. However, let's talk about the rest of this system. So the other end of the piston, the part that's

not inside the cylinder, attaches to a crank shaft. So the reciprocal motion of move of the piston moving up and down transforms into rotational motion through interaction with the crank shaft that powers the drive train of the vehicle. So the repeated cycles of combustion or what give the vehicle the umph it needs to power the drive train and thus go into motion. It's kind of like those old hand cars that you would see on railroads, or at least movies and TV shows that would have the

hand cars on rail roads. I think I've only seen two of those in real life in my entire life. But instead of using human powered force of pumping the handrails in order to get the cart moving, this is using the explosive power of ignited air and gas. And that's why it's an internal combustion engine. So the first Cadillacs had that single cylinder engine that was intended for Oldsmobile, so there was only one cylinder with that particular one with one piston in it providing the power for motion.

Most cars today have either four or six cylinders, and most trucks have either six or eight. Generally speaking, more cylinders means that the vehicle will have more power, they will be able to climb steeper hills or go faster, but it also means greater fuel consumption and thus lower energy. So Henry Leland brought two different models of Cadillacs to the New York Auto Show in nineteen o three. One

of the models was called to run About. Just like the other vehicle I talked about earlier, this was a two seater vehicle, and then you had the to Know and that had two additional seats, essentially a second bench added behind the first bench, so you then had a four seater. They were a big hit at the New York Auto Show. Leland sold all three of the cars that he brought to show off, and he started to take orders for more than two thousand vehicles at the show.

Those orders required a ten dollar deposit, which went toward the seven hundred fifty dollar sales price for a Runabout that to Know, which doubled that vehicular capacity to four writers, would cost an extra one dollars on top of that, in Leland decided to experiment a little bit more and he ordered the design and construction of a prototyped Cadillac. He named the Osceola, and machinists named Fred J. Fisher was put in charge of creating the vehicle, and he

led a team of mechanics to something really interesting. So what set this vehicle apart from most others at the time was that this Cadillac had a closed body, so it protected the rider the driver from the elements. It had windows on all four sides looking out from the passenger cabin, which was pretty snug. I think it looks to me like you could really only fit one person in there comfortably. And it had a top speed of forty miles per hour with a ten horse power single

cylinder engine. The drive train was a chain drive, which provided power to two rear wheels on the car, so it was a rear wheel drive vehicle. The prototype is pretty darn cute. If you want to look it up, look like the N five Osceola that's O S C E O L A. If you want to see a picture of it. Um. It was a little too tall

for its small chassis. If you look at it, you can kind of see that it's it's the chassis doesn't extend very far out, so it's kind of taller than it is long, and that made it a bit top heavy and thus not the safest of cars if you're driving around sharp turns. The experiment did teach Fisher and his team a great deal, and before long Cadillac began offering closed bodied vehicles as an option for buyers, and by nineteen ten they made it so that the closed

body model was standard. In nineteen o eight, Sir Thomas art do War, a member of the UK Parliament, awarded Cadillac the third Everdwar Trophy and the first to ever go to an American car maker. The reason he gave the award to Cadillac was because of Leland's approach to using interchangeable parts during car construction, which made it really easy to produce and repair vehicles. So the story behind

Douar was convinced as a pretty fun one. A British distributor for Cadillac brought three Cadillacs to a test facility. Then he had mechanics disassemble all three of those Cadillacs, then mix up all the parts between those three, reassemble those parts back into cars, and then test each of those cars on a five hundred mile series of courses.

All three vehicles passed the tests with flying colors, showing that the parts from one Cadillac were exactly the same as any other thanks to the precision of the manufacturing process. And that's the reason why de War gave Cadillac the award for that innovation, because he saw that as pushing the invention of the automobile forward in nineteen o nine, On July twenty nine, General Motors acquired the Cadillac Automobile Company for the princely sum of four and a half

million dollars. Today that would be closer to a hundred and thirty one million dollars. Durant actually convinced Henry Leland's son Wilfred, to sell the company, but Henry Leland did stay on as an executive with General Motors until nine teen seventeen, whereupon he had a tiff with GM's leader Durant, who I swear we're going to cover before we get to the end of this episode, because he had a as a pretty crazy story too, and Leland founded a

new car company called Lincoln Motor Company. Now ultimately Lincoln would become part of Henry Ford's automotive empire. Pretty interesting in for someone who had started off as one of Henry Ford's most fierce competitors. Leland and Ford really win at it, so it was interesting that the Lincoln Car Company would end up going over to Ford. Leland himself

would pass away in nineteen two. Now we've got a few more bits and bobs to talk about when it comes to the founding of General Motors, which we will get to after these messages. Okay, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac. These were three of the big names brought together by General Motors. Another one was Oakland, though you're more likely to have heard of Oakland's successor, Pontiac, or maybe you haven't heard of either of them, as GM discontinued the Pontiac brand

in two thousand nine. But let's get to their history. Now we get to learn about Edward Murphy. Born in eighteen sixty three. Murphy started off apprenticing with hardware dealers, and over the years he gained knowledge and experience, and by eighteen ninety three was ready to go into business

with his father in law. Together they created the Pontiac Buggy Company as an horse drawn buggies business went fairly well for a time, but the clock was ticking, and by the early nineteen hundreds Murphy saw that there was

no future and horse drawn buggies. Murphy partnered with a mechanic and designer named Lanson Partridge Brush, who had previously worked with Henry Leland back at Oldsmobile when they were making engines for that company, and then he followed Leland onto Cadillac and assisted in the design of the Cadillac one cylinder engine. So yeah, this is the guy who designed the engine that Oldsmobile initially turned down and that

subsequently became the original Cadillac engine. There are no records of Brush having ever attended anything beyond high school level education, so the general consensus is that he was a very gifted designer who learned through observation and experience. Murphy and Brush and some investors created the Oakland Motor Club in nineteen o seven and began making cars in nineteen o eight. They named it after Oakland County, Michigan. The city of

Pontiac is there. Brush would leave before the end of nineteen o eight, hoping to pursue his own dream of building a car with a two cylinder engine and getting some money from the Brisco brothers. See I told you the automotive world in Detroit was a pretty small one. Brush would go on to found the Brush Runabout Company, but that company went out of business a few years later. But Brush went on to have a successful career as a consulting engineer. He worked for numerous companies over the

following years. He passed away in nineteen fifty two. Back at the Oakland Motor Company, Durant approached Murphy with an offer, and Murphy sold off his share in the Oakland Motor Company in nineteen o nine. Tragically, he died not long after making this deal. He passed away in the summer of nineteen o nine. At that point, Durant was able to convince the other shareholders in Oakland Motor Company to

sign their steak over to General Motors. GM would later create the Pontiac brand as a sort of spinoff of Oakland. Only the Pontiac cars sold better than the Oakland ones did, so then GM decided to phase out the Oakland brand and keep Pontiac around for several decades. I'm sure we'll

talk about that more in the next episode. Now, there are some other companies that General Motors acquired early on with names that might not be as familiar to you unless you're a car history buff So, for example, another company Durant acquired in n nine was the Ewing Automobile Company,

previously known as the Cleveland Auto Cab Company. The Cleveland Auto Cab Company was to produce a car called Geneva, but then the company owners decided to rename the brand Ewing after Levi Edward Ewing, a major investor in the company that particular Ewing. Levi would then go on to buy the company itself. While Ewing was able to produce around thirty vehicles, it was impossible to scale up operations

in Geneva, Ohio. There just wasn't enough of a talent pool for an experienced workforce in that part of the country as far as automobiles were concerned. You know, At that time the company was poised to relocate to Erie, Pennsylvania, But before that could happen, Durant came in with his offer and Ewing accepted it. The Ewing line wouldn't make it very far in the history of GM. General Motors

would discontinue it in nineteen eleven. Other companies that GM acquired early on included Carter Car, the Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, and the Reliance Motor Truck Company, which was sort of the ancestor to GMC trucks. The Carter Car was really interesting, largely because it featured a friction drive, but I don't quite have enough time to go into that in this episode.

Maybe in the next one. Now, if you've listened to my episodes about businesses that make lots of acquisitions, you know that that kind of a strategy is a risky one. And that's because all these acquisitions begin to pile up, and at the same time, you're accruing a lot of debt because you have to spend a ton of money to buy these companies. Manufacturing cars is also pretty expensive, so you still have your operating expenses to deal with on top of all these acquisitions, and then there's all

the distribution and sales side of the business. So GM was in kind of a precarious position. It spent an awful lot of investors money, and there was the danger that the company might over extend itself and then it would just be a massive debt machine. And this brings us to finally talk about William C. Durant, the man largely responsible for creating General motors. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in eighteen sixty one, but he grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Like a lot of the other people I mentioned in this episode, Durant found a living originally working in the carriage industry, as in the horse drawn carriage industry. In eighteen eight six, he co founded the Durant Dort Company and manufactured carriages, which made Flint the carriage capital of the United States. As various investors and engineers developed early automobiles, Durant saw both an existential threat to his business as

well as a huge opportunity. I mean it was a threat and that should these horseless carriages prove reliable and as full, it would inevitably lead to the decline of the carriage business. But it was an opportunity, and that if someone could build out a business that could find a way to produce cars in enough volume to sell them at moderate prices, you could make a killing. And that's what led Durant to make his first acquisition of Buick.

But that wouldn't be enough to achieve his goal. He needed to add other companies for a couple of reasons. One was that he needed to increase the scale of production to bring those costs down, and it was way easier to buy out somebody else who had already done the work of creating a manufacturing facility and also a manufacturing process. Then it would be to build that kind

of stuff out from scratch. At least, it's easier as long as you had people willing to give you money so that you could do it, and Durant had those people. But another big reason was that Durant could see that different people had different preferences when it came to automobiles, just like everything else in life. So it made sense to offer up of a rye any of different options. Some might appeal to one person but not another, and

so on. So he began to envision a business in which different types of cars could occupy slightly different places in the market. You could have cars that cost a little bit less, maybe they're a little less flashy, little less powerful, but you could appeal to people who want a car, but they can't afford the more impressive or luxurious models. So you can build up different lines of cars marketed under different brands and aimed at different potential customers.

That was sort of the early thinking, though Durant hadn't made much progress on that by at which point things went rather pear shaped for Durant for a bit. Durant's acquisitions had spooked his investors, who were worried that their money was just going to sink into an ever expanding group of car companies and that they would never see their money back. It would just be a big problem labeled General Motors. The investors and Durant had a big

old corporate battle, and Durant was the loser. He had pushed the company to the point that it needed some significant help from the financial industry to cover the considerable debt that it had accrued, and Durant was shown the door. He had essentially founded General Motors in nineteen o eight and was out by nineteen ten. But this is not the end of his history with General Motors. Heck, it's not even the end of him getting kicked out of General Motors. See when he was given the boot, Durant

landed on his feet. See I always land on my rear end anyway. One year after being ousted from General Motors, he co founded a new car company called Chevrolet. This company took its name from a couple of the other co founders, brothers Louis and Arthur Chevrolet, and there were several other co founders involved as well, but that's a story all in itself. So Chevrolet built a manufacturing facility

in Flint, Michigan. Chev La would make a few expensive cars that very few people could afford, but the company followed that up with a vehicle called the Series for ninety. It had that name because, at least originally, it sold for the princely sum of four nine dollars, which made it one of the most affordable cars on the market at the time. Durant and Louis Chevrolet had several differences of opinion, and ultimately Durant would buy out Chevrolet's shares

in the company. The Series for ninety proved popular enough to fuel Durant's ambitions. Durant was building up more wealth, and with that wealth he was buying up shares of General Motors. He essentially bought himself back into the fold at GM, which became complete in an acquisition between General Motors and Chevrolet. By Durant was back in the driver's seat as it were, and the new company he would

oversee became the General Motors Corporation. Durant had also made some friends, not not really friends, I guess, in the du Pont family, and they helped finance his takeover of General Motors. So to sum up, William Durant saw the opportunity to create an automotive empire that he would call General Motors. He took several different young car companies with varying degrees of success under their respective fan belts, and then brought them together to make cars at a larger scale.

He even attempted at one point to buy the Henry Ford Company early on, but Ford would only accept a buyout offer if it was in cash, and Durant just didn't have that kind of cheddar on hand. Durant's acquisitions, however, made his investors nervous they pushed him out of the company. He co founds another car company, Chevrolet, builds that up, buys out most of his co founders, comes back, takes over GM again, and we're only scratching the surface of

this remarkable story. There's so much more to talk about here, including what was going on at GM between Durant's remove in nineteen ten and his return in nineteen sixteen. That includes the incorporation of an electric starter, which won the company a second award from de War and also what happened to that friction drive of the car to car

Where did that go? But if I were to cover all of that for this episode, it would run another forty minutes easy, and that's not even touching what happened in the years since about how General Motors would eventually go into bankruptcy and a new General Motors would emerge from it. But to get to that story, I've got to do part two of this episode, so be on the lookout for that next week. If you have any suggestions for things I should tackle in future episodes of

tech Stuff, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle I use there is text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H