EDSEL How Not To Build A Car

 

I  am amazed people still consider Henry Ford the greatest auto maker of all time, primarily because he sold fifteen million Model "T"'s.  You never hear about people collecting a model “S”, or a Model “P” Ford. And it was the the Model “T” (above) that made Time magazine’s list of the fifty worst cars of all times; “…a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.” And that wasn’t even the worst disaster that Henry Ford's company ever made. That distinction has to go to the Edsel.

The Edsel wasn’t just a car. It was an entire new line of cars, originally conceived in 1954, to compete with General Motor’s entire Cadillac division. The chief designer on the project was a young Canadian named Roy Brown (above). Years later Brown told "The New Yorker" magazine, “Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique…and yet somehow familiar.”

The design team took ‘front on’ photos of the 19 other cars on the road at the time and realized that from a few hundred feet away they were indistinguishable from one another. But clay models of Brown’s original grill work were so graceful and delicate the engineers questioned how much fresh air would reach the radiator and cool the engine.

So Brown created what he called the “Horsecollar” (officially known as “the impact ring”), front and center. It reminded one critic of “a vagina with teeth”. In fact, while the design still existed only in clay, a prankster taped fur in-between the front grill work which left it, according to Robin Jones, then a young Ford designer, looking like “…a hormonally disturbed cow after giving birth”. 

Kinder critics said it resembled “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”, or just “a toilet seat”.

Looking for the perfect name Ford hired one of the largest advertising companies in the world, Foote, Cone and Belding, (“Successful Advertising is Only a Foote Away”). They offered up 6,000 possible names (including the “Mongoose Civique” and the “Utopian Turtletop”). Growled one Ford executive, “We hired them to come up with a name. They came up with six thousand.” Finally, after months of searching in vain, they settled on “The Ford Edsel”.

Edsel Ford (above, left) was a civilized, cultured, talented and intelligent man who was also a skilled car maker and favorite son of old man Henry Ford (above, right). And suffice it to say that if Edsel hadn’t died of a heart attack from overwork in 1943 there would never have been a Ford automobile carrying his name because Edsel Ford knew too much about marketing to have ever allowed that. 

When Ford’s Public Relations chief, C. Gayle Warnock, was presented with the name "Edsel" he claims to have said, “We have just lost 200,000 in sales”.

They financed the Edsel with the infusion of cash they got by going public in 1957, and from the success of the new Thunderbird. But at the last minute they decided to start pinching pennies. Rather than establish a brand new production line, management chose to assemble Edsels on the same Kentucky production lines used to make Lincolns and Mercurys, and at the same time. 

The assembly line workers and plant management both saw the Edsel as an intrusion into their regular work schedules,  and the results were perfectly predictable. And the "mistakes" which slipped through the quality control were not helped by the advertising campaign.

Ford chose a mystery introduction for the Edsel. New cars were shipped wrapped in fabric, and the 1,160 brand new Edsel dealers were strictly instructed to keep the cars under wraps on their lots until “E” day, which was supposed to be Wednesday, 4  September 1957.

However, a used car dealer in Cleveland, Ohio had an unwrapped Edsel on display two days early. That got national press coverage. So much for the surprise

Meanwhile a $2 million advertising campaign ($14.5 million in 2007 dollars) began by showing only the hood ornament, or just blurry shots of speeding Edsels, and drawings of draped cars on transporters, always with the taunting tag lines, “The new Edsel is coming!” or "The New Edsel is on its way".

Finally, on Friday night, 13 September, during the premier on CBS of the “Edsel Show” - staring Bing Crosby....

...with guest stars Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope and the Four Preps...

...an announcer, spoke in warm, golden tones; “And now for the moment I'm sure you've all been looking forward to, a look at the newest member of the Ford family of fine cars ... the Edsel!" It may have been the greatest advertising buildup since Moses came down off the mountain. 

But like Moses, it was all downhill from there - one stumble downhill after another.

The dealers' showrooms were full of people, but few customers. Ford had expected to sell 2 million Edsel the first year. They only sold half a million. What went wrong?

Stumble Number One was that between August of 1957 and February of 1958 American industrial output declined by 10%. During the same six months unemployment jumped by two million. Retail sales dropped 2% and so did take home pay. The recession was bad enough that it gave Democrats a majority in the House in 1958, and set up Kennedy’s win of the White House in 1960. In short, this was not the time to introduce a new line of expensive high end automobiles.

Stumble Number Two; there were a few small problems with the cars. The much ballyhooed "Vac-U Start" feature displayed a dangerous tendency to restart the car after you had turned the engine off and walked away. And the “Teletouch” push button transmission shifter, located in the center of the steering wheel, was so new and so secret that none of the dealers knew how to service it.

And then there was the famous hood ornament, featured in so many advertisements. When the big V8 engine was pulling the Edsel at over seventy miles an hour (which it easily could do) the hood ornament had a nasty tendency to come flying off and turn into shrapnel.

Stumble Number Three was that many Edsels left the factories with wrong or missing parts: wires had been incorrectly connected and an occasional transmission had been installed backwards. And many of those Edsels which did start prompted dissatisfied owners to claim that Edsel stood for “Every Day Something Else Leaks”. (Decades later, when Ford failed to respond quickly to the invasion of well made inexpensive Japanese cars, the name Ford was said to stand for “Found On Road, Dead”).

Stumble Number Four was that Ford had introduced the 1958 Edsel in September of 1957 instead of October, the standard practice at the time, so the Edsells were competing with other Ford products being sold at 1957 inventory closeout prices.

And then there was the advertising blitz; Stumble Number Five. As one observer noted, although customers had been primed to expect a “…plutonium-powered, pancake-making wonder car…” what they were being offered was a “…kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive…” car." The American public simply didn't want this car.

Overnight the Edsel went from wonder kid to village idiot. In 1958, while riding in a brand new Edsel, a  crowd in Peru pelted Vice President Richard Nixon with eggs. He would quip, “They were not attacking me. They were attacking the car.”

By 1961 on the Andy Griffith Show when Deputy Barney Fife bought a used car, it simply had to be an Edsel convertible. 

The audience was laughing even before the steering wheel slowly projected itself into Barney’s face. The Edsel had become “…an agglomeration (sic) of everything the public had grown tired of…vulgar ostentation and superfluous (sic) size…”.

By November of 1959, after building 110,847 Edsels and losing $350 million ($2 and 1/2 billion in 2007 dollars), and even redesigning the "vagina with teeth" front grill,  Ford surrendered, and stopped production of the Edsel. And a legend was born.

Three years later Ford would introduce the Mustang, a car designed to fit what the customer wanted, rather than a car design looking for a customer, which was what the Edsel was.

Today less than 6,000 Edsels survive. But until his death in 2013, Roy Brown, the designer of the “vagina with teeth”, insisted with a straight face, “The car is a complete success as far as I'm concerned." And that kind of thinking is what is wrong with Detroit, today.

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UNDER PRESSURE cutting diamonds

 

I bet the the man who actually first laid eyes on the legendary jewel was not Frederick Wells (above). It seems unlikely that in South Africa in 1905 a white man would have been at the dig’s face, where the danger of a cave in was greatest.

Still, the legend has it that Frederick spotted the rock embedded in the stone wall just above his head (above, reenactment), reached up and pried what he first thought was glass out of the stone with his pen knife. And if that seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, we should both remember that everything about this particular stone is unlikely.

The nursery where this carbon crystal grew was an odd place. First, the surface above it had to have been stable for 1 to 3 billion years – maybe three fourths of the age of our planet. And for all of that time 90 to 120 miles below this stable surface the temperature had to be a constant 1,000 degrees centigrade, and the pressure about 653,000 pounds per square inch. The longer a carbon crystal remains under that pressure and temperature, the larger the crystal grows. And this one grew to weigh one and a half pounds. 

There are only a few spots in the earth where the temperature and pressure has remained consistent for so long; beneath the Canadian Shield, beneath Russian Siberia, beneath the Baltic Shield, beneath the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent,  beneath the Brazilian Shield, beneath northwest Australia, Beneath West Africa and beneath South Africa.

The heat allows the molecular bonds of carbon atoms to become plastic, while the immense pressure squeezes them into an eight sided crystal. Over eons such carbon crystals grow slowly and they must be fairly common in regions of the mantle where the carbon bonds with water. But then something unlikely happens. The earth burps.

If one of these carbon crystals rises to the surface slowly, over decades, the atoms binding its carbon molecules together return to their fail-safe state, which is graphite – pencil lead. 

For carbon to remain a crystal, it must reach the surface in a burst, over no more than a few minutes. To travel from the nursery to the surface, then, the stone must reach speeds of several hundred miles an hour. Supersonic.

Such a speed can only be reached if the capping pressure is suddenly punctured by a narrow fissure, at which point the temperature and pressure produces a powerful volcanic explosion at the surface. For that to happen is unlikely. But over four billion years unlikely becomes inevitable.

The first European who “owned” the surface above this particular jewel was a white immigrant farmer named Cornelis Minnaar.  His farm was in the southern part of Africa, north of the River Valaal, 25 miles east of the city of Pretoria (Tshwane).  The Boers, as these Dutch transplants called them selves, had made the trek to this region to avoid the British, who were intent on stealing their colony. 

In 1861 Cornelis sold a section of his land to his brother, Roelof , who in 1896, sold an even smaller part to Willem Prinsloo (above) who was just starting a family. The sale price was 570 English pounds, and it was William who owned the land when another Dutchman named Fabricus arrived looking for buried treasure.

Being experienced in this sort of thing, Fabricus first inquired as to where the Prinsloo households had dug their “sanitary pits”. This was a euphemism for the holes used to bury the products of your outhouse, politely known as “night soil”. Why dig a hole when a hole had already been dug? But since to date nothing unusual had been found in the sanitary pits, Fabricus assumed he would have to look elsewhere. 

Once he had located some “virgin dirt”, he scrapped away the thin red top soil, and then hacked his way through ten feet of yellow limestone gravel (above), the bi-product of primordial coral reefs...

...before reaching a blue slate gravel (above) peppered with tiny red garnets. This rock was called Kimberlite.  And when he saw it, Fabricus realized he had struck pay dirt

Fabricius was working for an Englishman named Henry Ward, who had paid for the option to search on Prisloo’s land.  But Ward didn’t have the money to make the buy, and besides William Prisloo (above) was not interested in selling to an Englishman, since it looked like war was about to break out between the Boers and the English. 

Which it did.  Two of them, in fact.  After the second war was finally settled in 1904 – The British won – Ward now sold out his options to Thomas Major Cullinan.  

By then Willem Prinsloo was dead. So Thomas Cullinan (above) made an offer to William’s widow, Maria Prisloo.  Broke and defeated, she sold the farm for 52,000 pounds. Not a bad profit.

Cullinan and partners named their new venture "The Premier Mine". Production started at the end of April 1903, and in a year 2,000 people, mostly local Africans were blasting, chopping, digging and hauling blue Kimberlite out of the open pit. They were looking for diamonds.

Most diamond mines start out as open pits. A Kimberlite Pipe is famously “carrot shaped”, wide at the top, narrow towards the bottom. And after less than a year of digging, on 25 January, 1905, this new mine is credited with producing the largest gem quality diamond ever found.  

Diamonds are not rare, but gem quality diamonds are. On average two hundred tons of ore must be culled for every 1 caret of gem diamond, (there are 141.7 carets in every ounce) and only one out of every five million diamonds weighs two carets or above. 

The one and one half pound diamond Mr. Wells claimed to have pulled out of the rock face that January afternoon, was rated at 3,106 carets. In the name of good publicity, it was named after Mr, Cullinan.

After a nondescript voyage to England via the royal mail in an unmarked plain brown box, The Cullinan, as it was now known, was presented to King Edward VII. He asked as many experts as he could find - geologists, gemologists and even the physicists Sir William Cookes (above) -  how to cut this hunk of rock.

Cookes noted that around a small black spot in the interior of the stone the colors were very vivid, changing and rotating round the black spot.  "These observations indicated internal strain…there was a milky, opaque mass, of a brown color, with flakes of what looked like iron oxide trapped as the crystal formed around it.  There were four cleavage planes of great smoothness and regularity.” At issue was how to turn this indescribably rare nondescript lump into something indescribably rare and beautiful.

Diamonds had been known by Europeans since the tenth century, but it was not until the 17th century that they became popular amongst the aristocracy, not until the first “Brilliant Cut” by Italian jeweler Jules Mazarin, really showed the beauty that was hiding inside. His diamonds sparkled with 17 facets, or faces, each one reflecting light back out at the viewer. By 1900 the skill of the diamond cutter had increased the possible reflections to 57 facets.

The general consensuses was that the best cutter for this job was Joseph Asscher (above), ironically another Dutchman. He studied the Cullinan for six months in his shop in Amsterdam, surrounded by a small crowd of bankers, experts and royal representatives, laying out a plan of attack.

As the London Evening News reported in mid-January, of 1908, “…a special model of the diamond in clay was made…It was cut into pieces to give an idea of what would happen if the genuine stone were treated in the same way. After several experiments a definite plan was arrived at…”

Finally, on Monday, 10 February, 1908, at 2:45 pm, Joseph was ready. Surrounded by a small crowd of anxious interested third parties, Joseph poised his hammer over the chisel (above), the blade of which was lodged against the precise point which he had calculated the first strike had to be made. If he missed, or struck a glancing blow, the one-of-a-kind diamond worth a million pounds would be rendered damaged and might end up being worth a few thousand. Joseph drew a breath, and sharply struck the chisel….which cracked apart against the diamond.

Immediately Joseph ordered the room cleared, except for the notary republic for the bankers, who were financing this entire thing. Joseph checked the Cullinan and found it, thankfully, undamaged. He checked his tools (above), re-examined his plans and announced a week's delay while he fashioned a new, larger, chisel.

So it was that on 17 February, 1908, alone in the room with the diamond and the notary, Joseph lined his hammer up for a second time over The Cullinan. He struck the precise strong blow, directly above the dark inclusion...

...And the diamond fell apart into three perfectly clear pieces. Despite legends to the contrary, Joseph did not faint. He did, however, drink a glass of Champagne.  Eventually the Cullinan was cut into nine large stones (above)....

....and 96 smaller diamonds, so many that it took 8 months just to polish them all. 

And if you ever get to the Tower of London, you might make a note that the Crown Jewels of England on display there, (including the Queen Mother's broach, above)   might be literally billions of years old, but they have only been in the English royal families’ possession for a little over a hundred years. And they will always be a testament to the creation of timeless beauty under pressure.

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