1.
Dearborn, Michigan
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Dearborn is a city in the State of Michigan. It is located in Wayne County and is part of the Detroit metropolitan area, Dearborn is the eighth largest city in the State of Michigan. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 98,153 and it later grew into a manufacturing hub for the automotive industry. The city was the home of Henry Ford and is the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. It has a campus of the University of Michigan as well as Henry Ford Community College, Dearborn has The Henry Ford, the United States largest indoor-outdoor museum complex and Metro Detroits leading tourist attraction. Dearborn residents are primarily of European or Middle Eastern heritage, descendants of 19th, Middle Eastern ancestries make up the largest ethnic grouping with Lebanese, Yemeni, Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian groups present. The primary European ethnicities are German, Polish, Irish and Italian, the area had been inhabited for thousands of years by varying indigenous peoples. Historical tribes belonged mostly to the Algonquian-language family, although the Huron were Iroquoian speaking, French colonists had a trading post and developed Detroit during the colonial period, trading with numerous regional tribes. This settlement was ceded to Britain in 1763 after its victory in the Seven Years War, the Dearborn area was settled permanently by Europeans in 1786, after the American Revolutionary War. The town of Dearborn was incorporated in 1893, in 1927 it was established as a city. Its current borders result from a 1928 consolidation vote that merged Dearborn and neighboring Fordson, the area between the two towns was, and still remains in part, undeveloped. Once farm land, this was bought by Henry Ford for his estate, Fair Lane, the open land is planted with sunflowers and often with Henry Fords favorite soybeans. The Arab American National Museum opened in Dearborn in 2005, the first museum in the devoted to Arab-American history. Arab Americans in Dearborn include ethnic Lebanese Christians who immigrated in the twentieth century to work in the auto industry as well as more recent Arab immigrants from other nations. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 24.5 square miles. The Rouge River runs through the city with an artificial waterfall/low head dam on the Henry Ford estate to power its powerhouse, the Upper, Middle, and Lower Branches of the river come together in Dearborn. The river is widened and channeled near the Rouge Plant to allow freighter access. Fordson Island is an 8.4 acre island about three miles inland from the Detroit River on the River Rouge, Fordson Island is the only major island in a tributary to the Detroit River
2.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
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Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP is an American architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm. It was formed in Chicago in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, with a portfolio spanning thousands of projects across 50 countries, SOM is one of the largest architectural firms in the world. Their primary expertise is in commercial buildings, as it was SOM that led the way to the widespread use of the modern international-style or glass box skyscraper. They have designed several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the John Hancock Center, Willis Tower, due to their faithful following of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohes ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright nicknamed them The Three Blind Mies. Notable SOM architects include, Edward Charles Bassett, Natalie de Blois, Gordon Bunshaft, David Childs, Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Gertrude Kerbis, Fazlur Rahman Khan. Lucien Lagrange, Walter Netsch, Larry Oltmanns, Brigitte Peterhans, Adrian Smith, indeed, Khan is responsible for developing the algorithms that made the Hancock building and many subsequent skyscrapers possible. Another notable SOM engineer is Bill Baker, who is best known as the engineer of Burj Khalifa, to support the towers record heights and slim footprint, he developed the buttressed core structural system, consisting of a hexagonal core reinforced by three buttresses that form a Y shape. Davis Allen, a pioneer in corporate interior design, had a tenure at SOM. Throughout its history, SOM has been recognized more than 1,700 awards for quality. More than 900 of these awards have received since 1998. In 1996 and 1962, SOM received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects, SOM is the only firm to have received this honor twic13 R+D Awards from Architect Magazine. In addition, a collaboration between SOM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology, was honored with a fifth award. SOM has completed over 10,000 projects around the United States and in more than 50 other countries around the world, london, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi. Smaller field offices supplement these in such as the Philippines. Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure ever built, at 829.8 m, construction began on 21 September 2004, and the building officially opened on 4 January 2010. The towers architect and engineer was Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, george J. Efstathiou was the Managing Partner for the project. Bill Baker, the Chief Structural Engineer for the project, invented the buttressed core structural system in order to enable the tower to achieve such heights economically, Adrian Smith, who worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill until 2006, was the Consulting Design Partner. The primary builder is a joint venture of South Korean Samsung C&T, one World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom Tower, is located in Manhattan, New York City, and is 1,776 ft high, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere
3.
The Henry Ford
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The Henry Ford is a large indoor and outdoor history museum complex and a National Historic Landmark in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, USA. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village is the largest indoor-outdoor museum complex in the United States and is visited by 1.6 million people each year and it is one of the largest such collections in the nation. Henry Ford said of his museum, I am collecting the history of our people as written into things their hands made and used. When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived, the Edison Institute was dedicated by President Herbert Hoover to Fords longtime friend Thomas Edison on October 21,1929 – the 50th anniversary of the first successful incandescent light bulb. The attendees included Marie Curie, George Eastman, John D. Rockefeller, Will Rogers, Orville Wright, the dedication was broadcast on radio with listeners encouraged to turn off their electric lights until the switch was flipped at the Museum. The Edison Institute was, at first, a site for educational purposes only. It was originally composed of the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, the Henry Ford is sited between the Ford Dearborn Development Center and several Ford engineering buildings with which it shares the same style gates and brick fences. In 1970, the museum purchased what it believed to be a 17th-century Brewster Chair, created for one of the Pilgrim settlers in the Plymouth Colony, in September 1977, the chair was determined to be a modern forgery created in 1969 by Rhode Island sculptor Armand LaMontagne. The museum retains the piece as a tool on forgeries. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation began as Henry Fords personal collection of historic objects, a model of the nuclear-powered Ford Nucleon automobile An Oscar Mayer Wienermobile The 1961 Lincoln Continental, SS-100-X that President John F. Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated. The rocking chair from Fords Theatre in which President Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was shot, a ten-person safety bicycle made in 1896. A collection of several fine 17th- and 18th-century violins including a Stradivarius, Thomas Edisons alleged last breath in a sealed tube. The bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, fokker Trimotor airplane that flew the first flight over the North Pole. Bill Elliotts record-breaking race car clocking in at over 212 MPH at Talladega in 1987 Fairbottom Bobs, the Automotive Hall of Fame, adjacent to the Henry Ford Museum. A working fragment of the original Holiday Inn Great Sign A Chesapeake & Ohio Railway 2-6-6-6 Allegheny-class steam locomotive built by Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, the Allegheny was the most powerful steam locomotive ever built. The Research Center also contains the Ford Motor Archives, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the Henry Ford Museum exhibited a vast array of artifacts and media documenting the Titanics voyage and demise. The exhibit was hosted from 31 March to 30 September 2012, Greenfield Village, the outdoor living history museum section of the Henry Ford complex, was dedicated in 1929 and opened to the public in June 1933. It was the first outdoor museum of its type in the nation, patrons enter at the gate, passing by the Josephine Ford Memorial Fountain and Benson Ford Research Center
4.
Fair Lane
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Fair Lane was the name of the estate of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford and his wife, Clara Ford, in Dearborn, Michigan, in the United States. It was named after an area in Cork in Ireland where Fords adoptive grandfather, the residence and part of the estate grounds are open to the public as a historical landscape and house museum and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Part of the grounds are preserved as a university nature study area. Frank Lloyd Wright participated in the initial design, Henry Ford and his wife took a trip to Europe and on returning dismissed Griffin and used William H. Van Tine to add English Manor house details. In 1913 architect Joseph Nathaniel French was brought in to work on the stages to complete the residence in 1915. The house, with 56 rooms covering 31, 000-square-foot, was considered befitting but less grand than other great houses and it included an indoor pool and bowling alley. The pool is now covered over and serves as an event, the powerhouse had its cornerstone laid by Thomas Alva Edison and with hydropower not only powered the estate, but a part of the town of Dearborn as well. It included the garage and on the upper level a laboratory where Ford worked on engine designs. The powerhouse is built of limestone in the Prairie Style. Jens Jensen employed his delayed view approach in designing the arrival at the residence, instead of proceeding straight to the house or even a view of it, the entrance drive leads visitors through the estates dense woodland areas. Bends in the drive, planted on the curves inside arc with large trees, give a feeling of a reason for the turn. Suddenly, the visitor is propelled out of the forest and in the space where the residence is presented fully in view in front of them. This idea of wandering was one which Jensen put forth in almost all of his designs, expansive meadows and gardens make up the larger landscape, with naturalistic massings of flowers surrounding the house. The largest axial meadow, the Path of the Setting Sun, is aligned so that on the summer solstice the setting sun glows through a precise parting of the trees at the western end. The boathouse, with stonework cliffs designed by Jensen, allowed Henry Ford to travel on the Rouge River in his electric boat, the estate was donated to the University of Michigan in 1957 for a new Dearborn campus. The staffs former houses and a barn are used by the University of Michigan–Dearborn. The main house, powerhouse, garage and 72-acre of land are operated as a museum while a restaurant occupied the indoor swimming pool natatorium until 2010. In 2010 the stewardship of the estate was transferred to the same group that operates the lakeside Edsel and Eleanor Ford House
5.
International Style (architecture)
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A visually weightless quality engendered by the use of cantilever construction. Glass and steel, in combination with usually less visible reinforced concrete, are the materials of the construction. Commissioned in 1931 by the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr. The original exhibition catalogue was then followed up immediately by the book titled The International Style, the aesthetics-based definition of The International Style identified, categorized and expanded upon characteristics said to be common to Modernism across the world and its stylistic aspects. Hitchcock and Johnson identified three principles, the expression of volume rather than mass, the emphasis on rather than preconceived symmetry. The aim of Hitchcock and Johnson was to define a style that would encapsulate this modern architecture, all the works in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition were carefully selected, only displaying those that strictly followed these rules. Many Modernists disliked the term, believing that they had arrived at an approach to architecture that transcended style, the British architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner commented, To me what had been achieved in 1914 was the style of the century. It never occurred to me to look beyond, here was the one and only style which fitted all those aspects which mattered, aspects of economics and sociology, of materials and function. It seems folly to think anybody would wish to abandon it. The exhibition Modern Architecture, International Exhibition opened on February 9,1932, at the Museum of Modern Art, in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York. In the largest exhibition space, Room C, were works by Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Room B was a section titled Housing, presenting the need for a new domestic environment” as it had been identified by historian and critic Lewis Mumford. In Room D were works by Raymond Hood and Richard Neutra, among these works was shown Alvar Aaltos Turun Sanomat newspaper offices building in Turku, Finland. The exhibition is significant for its approach to the architectural exhibition. Highly curated in nature, the 1932 exhibition was driven by a desire to promote and consolidate the theory of international modernism, as such, the exhibition featured prominently the work of the core of the modernist group. With Van Der Rohe, Corbusier, Oud, and Gropius at the forefront, moMAs then director Alfred H. Barr hired art historians Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to curate the museums first architectural exhibition. In 1929, Johnson attended the ceremony of his sister in Wellesley College, where he met Barr. In one month, Barr would be interviewed by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller for the position of the director of the MOMA, Barr added Johnson to MOMAs Junior Advisory Committee. Hitchcock graduated in 1924 after having completed his studies in three years and spending his senior year in architecture
6.
Natalie de Blois
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Natalie Griffin de Blois was an American architect. She began her career in 1944 and became known as a pioneer in the male-dominated world of architecture. She later taught architecture at the University of Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, I told my father that I wanted to be an architect from the age of ten or twelve. She attended the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, while at Columbia, she worked at Babcock & Wilcox during the summer and for Frederick John Kiesler. De Blois began her career at a New York firm, Ketchum, Gina, and Sharpe, but was fired after rebuff the affections of one of the firms male architects and she then joined the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. While working at SOM, De Blois became known as a pioneer as an architect in the male-dominated world of architecture. She designed a number of business buildings on Park Avenue in New York City, including the Pepsi building. She worked with Gordon Bunshaft on the Pepsi building, which was completed in 1960 and was praised by critics for its gem-like, seemingly levitating exterior walls of gray-green glass and aluminum. She transferred to the Chicago branch of SOM in 1962, continuing to work on skyscrapers in Chicago until 1974, while there, she founded the Chicago Women in Architecture. Her works in Chicago include the Equitable Building, De Blois joined Neuhaus & Taylor in Houston in 1974. In 1980, she began teaching at the University of Texas School of Architecture and she died, aged 92, in Chicago. Interview by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings, Department of Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago. Susana Torre, Women in American Architecture, A Historic and Contemporary Perspective Natalie de Blois papers, University of Texas Architecture School AIA Historical Directory of American Architects
7.
William Pereira
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Born in Chicago, Illinois, Pereira graduated from the School of Architecture, University of Illinois and began his career in his home city. He had some of his earliest architectural experience helping to draft the master plan for the 1933 A Century of Progress Chicago Worlds Fair. With his brother, Hal Pereira, he designed the Esquire Theater at 58 East Oak Street and he had two wives, former model and actress Margaret McConnell and Bronya Galef, the latter marriage ending with his death. He has two children, William Pereira, Jr. and a daughter, Monica Pereira, a Spanish teacher, William Pereira died of cancer at age 76 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. At his request, no services were planned. In the 1930s, he and Hal moved to Los Angeles, Pereira also had a brief stint as a Hollywood art director. He shared an Academy Award for Best Special Effects for the action/adventure film Reap the Wild Wind and he was the art director for This Gun for Hire, Alan Ladds first film. He was production designer of the drama Jane Eyre, and of the war drama Since You Went Away, Pereira was also the producer of the noir crime/drama Johnny Angel, and of the Joan Fontaine drama From This Day Forward. Though his buildings were often quite stark and sterile in their appearance and he took pride in the concept of designing for the future. A great deal of Pereiras futurist style is owed to his longtime design collaborator James Langenheim, in 1949, Pereira became a professor of architecture at the University of Southern California. He then formed a partnership with architect and classmate, Charles Luckman. The firm, Pereira & Luckman, grew into one of the nations busiest, the duo designed some of Los Angeless most well-known buildings, including the famed Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. He parted with Luckman in 1959, afterward, he formed the third and final company of his career, William L. Pereira & Associates. He later worked with Ian McHarg on the plan for the new town of The Woodlands, Pereiras buildings were easily identified by their unmistakable style, often taking unusual forms such as pyramids and ziggurats. They usually projected a grand presence, heavyset in appearance and often sitting atop pedestals that were themselves a part of the building. Many of his buildings were complemented by water features and some were almost entirely surrounded by water, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for instance, was a complex of three Googie-esque buildings rising up out of a lake and interconnected by a series of causeways and bridges. Pereira designed the plans of the University of Southern California, the University of California, Irvine. His material of choice in creating his unique geometric forms was pre-cast concrete, working in this medium, he could create his impressive facades by simply attaching them as panels on to the steel frame of the building
8.
Reinforced concrete
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The reinforcement is usually, though not necessarily, steel reinforcing bars and is usually embedded passively in the concrete before the concrete sets. Reinforcing schemes are designed to resist tensile stresses in particular regions of the concrete that might cause unacceptable cracking and/or structural failure. Modern reinforced concrete can contain varied reinforcing materials made of steel, Reinforced concrete may also be permanently stressed, so as to improve the behaviour of the final structure under working loads. In the United States, the most common methods of doing this are known as pre-tensioning and post-tensioning, durability in the concrete environment, irrespective of corrosion or sustained stress for example. François Coignet was a French industrialist of the century, a pioneer in the development of structural. Coignet was the first to use iron-reinforced concrete as a technique for constructing building structures, in 1853 Coignet built the first iron reinforced concrete structure, a four story house at 72 rue Charles Michels in the suburbs of Paris. Coignets descriptions of reinforcing concrete suggests that he did not do it for means of adding strength to the concrete, in 1854, English builder William B. Wilkinson reinforced the concrete roof and floors in the two-storey house he was constructing. His positioning of the reinforcement demonstrated that, unlike his predecessors, in 1877, Monier was granted another patent for a more advanced technique of reinforcing concrete columns and girders with iron rods placed in a grid pattern. Though Monier undoubtedly knew reinforcing concrete would improve its inner cohesion, before 1877 the use of concrete construction, though dating back to the Roman Empire and reintroduced in the mid to late 1800s, was not yet a proven scientific technology. His work played a role in the evolution of concrete construction as a proven. Without Hyatts work, more dangerous trial and error methods would have largely depended on for the advancement in the technology. G. A. Wayss was a German civil engineer and a pioneer of the iron, in 1879 Wayss bought the German rights to Moniers patents and in 1884 started the first commercial use for reinforced concrete in his firm Wayss & Freytag. Up until the 1890s Wayss and his firm greatly contributed to the advancement of Moniers system of reinforcing, ernest L. Ransome was an English-born engineer and early innovator of the reinforced concrete techniques in the end of the 19th century. With the knowledge of reinforced concrete developed during the previous 50 years, ransomes key innovation was to twist the reinforcing steel bar improving bonding with the concrete. Gaining increasing fame from his concrete constructed buildings Ransome was able to build two of the first reinforced concrete bridges in North America, one of the first concrete buildings constructed in the United States, was a private home, designed by William Ward in 1871. The home was designed to be fireproof for his wife, one of the first skyscrapers made with reinforced concrete was the 16-storey Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, constructed in 1904. Many different types of structures and components of structures can be built using reinforced concrete including slabs, walls, beams, columns, foundations, frames, Reinforced concrete can be classified as precast or cast-in-place concrete. Designing and implementing the most efficient floor system is key to creating optimal building structures, small changes in the design of a floor system can have significant impact on material costs, construction schedule, ultimate strength, operating costs, occupancy levels and end use of a building
9.
Curtain wall (architecture)
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A curtain wall system is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, but merely keep the weather out and the occupants in. As the curtain wall is non-structural it can be made of a lightweight material, when glass is used as the curtain wall, a great advantage is that natural light can penetrate deeper within the building. The curtain wall façade does not carry any dead load weight from the other than its own dead load weight. The wall transfers horizontal wind loads that are incident upon it to the building structure through connections at floors or columns of the building. A curtain wall is designed to resist air and water infiltration, sway induced by wind and seismic forces acting on the building, curtain-wall systems are typically designed with extruded aluminum members, although the first curtain walls were made of steel. The aluminium frame is infilled with glass, which provides an architecturally pleasing building. However, parameters related to solar gain control such as thermal comfort, other common infills include, stone veneer, metal panels, louvres, and operable windows or vents. Buildings were constructed with the walls of the building supporting the load of the entire structure. The exterior walls could be non-load-bearing and thus much lighter and more open than the masonry load-bearing walls of the past and this gave way to increased use of glass as an exterior façade, and the modern-day curtain wall was born. Oriel Chambers and 16 Cook Street, both built in Liverpool, England, by architect and civil engineer Peter Ellis, are characterised by their extensive use of glass in their facades. Towards the courtyards they even boasted metal-framed glass curtain walls, which makes two of the worlds first buildings to include this structural feature. The extensive glass walls allowed light to penetrate further into the building, utilizing more floor space, oriel Chambers comprises 43,000 sq ft set over five floors without an elevator which had only recently been invented and was not yet widespread. An early example of a curtain wall used in the classical style is the Kaufhaus Tietz department store on Leipziger Straße, Berlin. Some of the first curtain walls were made with steel mullions, eventually silicone sealants or glazing tape were substituted, using a glass mullion system. Some designs included a cap to hold the glass in place. The first curtain wall installed in New York City, in the Lever House building, was this type of construction, earlier modernist examples are the Bauhaus in Dessau and the Hallidie Building in San Francisco. During the 1970s began the use of aluminium extrusions for mullions. Aluminum offers the advantage of being able to be easily extruded into nearly any shape required for design
10.
General Motors
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With global headquarters at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan, United States, GM manufactures cars and trucks in 35 countries. In 2008,8.35 million GM cars and trucks were sold globally under various brands, current auto brands are Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Holden, and Wuling. Former GM automotive brands include McLaughlin, Oakland, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Hummer, Saab, Saturn, Vauxhall, the company was founded by William C. Durant on September 16,1908 as a holding company. The company was the largest automobile manufacturer from 1931 through 2007, in addition to brands selling assembled vehicles, GM also has had various automotive-component and non-automotive brands, many of which it divested in the 1980s through 2000s. General Motors produces vehicles in 37 countries under twelve brands, Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Holden, HSV, Opel, Vauxhall, Wuling, Baojun, Jie Fang, and Ravon. The current company, General Motors Company LLC, was formed in 2009 following the bankruptcy of General Motors Corporation, the new company purchased the majority of the assets of the old GM, including the brand General Motors. In addition to its twelve brands, General Motors also holds a 20% stake in IMM, General Motors employs 212,000 people and does business in more than 140 countries. General Motors is divided into five segments, GM North America, Opel Group, GM International Operations, GM South America. General Motors led global vehicle sales for 77 consecutive years from 1931 through 2007, longer any other automaker. General Motors acts in most countries outside the U. S. via wholly owned subsidiaries, GMs OnStar subsidiary provides vehicle safety, security and information services. In 2009, General Motors shed several brands, closing Saturn, Pontiac, and Hummer, in 2010, the reorganized GM made an initial public offering that was one of the worlds top five largest IPOs to date, and returned to profitability later that year. General Motors Corporation was formed on September 16,1908, in Flint, Michigan, GMs co-founder was Charles Stewart Mott, whose carriage company was merged into Buick prior to GMs creation. Over the years, Mott became the largest single stockholder in GM, and spent his life with his Mott Foundation, GM acquired Oldsmobile later that year. In 1909, Durant brought in Cadillac, Elmore, Oakland, also in 1909, GM acquired the Reliance Motor Truck Company of Owosso, Michigan, and the Rapid Motor Vehicle Company of Pontiac, Michigan, the predecessors of GMC Truck. Durant, along with R. S. McLaughlin, lost control of GM in 1910 to a bankers trust, because of the amount of debt taken on in its acquisitions. The next year, Durant started the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in the U. S. and in Canada in 1915, Durant took back control of the company after one of the most dramatic proxy wars in American business history. Durant then reorganized General Motors Company into General Motors Corporation in 1916, merging Chevrolet with GM, shortly thereafter, he again lost control, this time for good, after the new vehicle market collapsed. These facilities were added to the factories that were exclusive to Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Oakland
11.
Lincoln Motor Company
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The Lincoln Motor Company is a division of the U. S. -based Ford Motor Company that sells luxury vehicles under the Lincoln brand. Founded in 1917 by Henry M. Leland, Lincoln has been a subsidiary of Ford since 1922, while currently sold primarily in North America, Ford introduced the Lincoln brand to China in 2014. Lincoln vehicles are also sold in the Middle East and South Korea. The current Lincoln model range in North America consists of two sedans, three crossover utility vehicles, and a utility vehicle. Lincoln also sells two vehicles specifically for use, both based on the MKT. The Lincoln Motor Company was founded in August 1917 by Henry Leland, an engineer, Henry Leland named his new automobile company after Abraham Lincoln, the first presidential candidate for whom he had cast a vote. Following the end of the war, the Lincoln factory was retooled entirely for automobile production, during the early 1920s, Lincoln suffered severe financial issues, balancing the loss of revenue of Liberty engine production with the obsolete design of the expensive Model L. For Henry Ford, the purchase of Lincoln was a personal triumph, the company, renamed Cadillac in 1902 was purchased by General Motors in 1909, serving as the chief competitor to Lincoln. While Henry Ford had previously introduced Ford-branded luxury vehicles, the company found little acceptance, with the acquisition of Lincoln, the nameplate became a top-selling rival alongside Pierce-Arrow, Marmon, Peerless, Duesenberg, and Packard. Although the chassis itself saw few changes, the body saw significant updates. At the direction of Henrys son Edsel, in 1923 several body styles were introduced, that included two- and three-window, four-door sedans and they also offered a two-passenger roadster and a seven-passenger touring sedan and limousine, which was sold for $5,200. A sedan, limo, cabriolet, and town car were offered by coachbuilders Fleetwood, Derham and Dietrich. Murphy, Rollston, and Waterhouse were added in the 1930s, in 1924 large touring sedans began to be used by police departments around the country. They were known as Police Flyers, which were equipped with four-wheel brakes, Police whistles were coupled to the exhaust system and gun racks were also fitted to these vehicles. Optional equipment was not necessarily an issue with Lincolns sold during the 1920s, however, a nickel-plated radiator shell could be installed for $25, varnished natural wood wheels were $15, or Rudge-Whitworth center-lock wire wheels for another $100. Disteel steel disc wheels were available for $60. Lincoln chose not to make yearly model changes, used as a tool of the time. Lincoln customers of the time were known to more than one Lincoln with different bodywork
12.
Continental Mark II
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The Continental Mark II is a personal luxury car that was produced by the newly created Continental Division of the Ford Motor Company, in 1956 and 1957. An attempt to build a post-World War II car to rival the greatest of the era, or anything produced in Europe, it is regarded as a rare. As Lincoln introduced its first post-war model line for the 1949 model year, having considered using an outside design team, Ford turned inside to their own Special Products Division. In Fall 1952, they designated John Reinhart as chief stylist, Gordon Buehrig as the chief engineer, assisted by Robert McGuffey Thomas. Ford had wanted to use technology, but Copp argued against such a choice for a high-brand/low volume model. What emerged was something quite unlike other American cars of the period, while other makes experimented with flamboyant chrome-laden styling, the Continental Mark II was almost European in its simplicity of line and understated grace. The new Continental was introduced in October 1955—but not at big American auto shows, such as those in New York, rather it was unveiled at the Paris Auto Show, and later that October at Ford headquarters in Dearborn. The fender line went back to behind the doors, at point the line kicked up a little before curving back down to the taillights. Little chrome was used compared to vehicles of the time. The car had power steering, power brakes, power windows, power seats, power vent windows, the vanes on the wheel covers were individually bolted inside the frame of the cover. It sported a high greenhouse and a wraparound windscreen, fueling was accomplished via a swingaway left taillight. The Continental Mark II had only one option, air conditioning, cars with A/C had different body parts. Most of the car was hand-built to a standard, including the application of multiple coats of paint, hand sanding, double lacquering. Bridge of Weir leather was used throughout the interior, for power, the Mark II featured the newly offered 368-cubic-inch Lincoln V8. Standard equipment in the Lincoln line, the selected for the Mark II were effectively factory blueprinted, assembled from the closest-to-specifications parts available. Turning out 285 hp in 1956, the engine was tuned to produce 300 hp in 1957, the engine was mated to a three-speed Lincoln automatic, and both engine and transmission were subject to extensive pre-release testing. In a 1956 report from Popular Mechanics, the Mark ll got 16.7 mpg at 50 mph and its perimeter frame was of ladder form with a central spine between the transmission and the crossmember at the kick-up ahead of the rear wheels. The crossmember under the front seat was of box form, but all the other six, a Mark II chassis was used to create the Lincoln Futura concept car
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