Find out how Harley Earl's hybrid engineering technology changed the auto world

It is important to note, or set up ahead of time, that many of Harley Earl's detractors tried to dethrone the sheer magnitude and success of his innovative tail fin design that swept through an entire nation of car buyers during the 1950s. Fins were an ebullient expression of devil-may-careness, the hoisting of a flag to honor America and a hope of better days ahead. They were splendidly outrageous, impractical and most people loved having them rest on the back ends of their cars. It is likely if you did a national poll today you would probably find out that many Americans still feel this way! Why, because unlike any other innovative idea used over the last 60 years of auto making to sell millions of cars, this one concept was a bold and adventurous strategy that really has no equal.

It's wonderful that the word is getting out there now and many savvy individuals in the worlds of the automobile and the design profession are starting to find out the truth on how one of Mr. Earl's leading design rivals personally felt about "the tail fin." Many industrial designers interviewed for an upcoming biography on Harley J. Earl, some of which had worked closely for Earl inside GM Styling in the heyday of Detroit's '40s and '50s, uncovered a common thread of wisdom going on in the design world at that time: "Raymond Loewy hated tail fins because he didn't think of the idea first." Another reason why so many other car designers over the last few decades tended to sway towards Loewy's way of thinking has a great deal to do with hubris, rather than whether or not tail fins being on any cars in the past, present or future actually made good business sense from a design standpoint. Tail fins on cars were directly responsible for increasing sales of Detroit's motoramic masterpieces of that era. Also, a far-reaching California Institute of Technology report found out that certain tail fin innovations actually improved road handling conditions at high speeds, too.

Realistically, no professional car designers today are brave enough or even have the power or ability to start such a large nationwide trend like this one ended up proving to be. Earl's phenomenon of cars-with-fins lasted well over a decade (1948-63). The bottom line is, "good design sells."

Tail Fins Anatomy - 1950
The overall theme of the LE SABRE vehicle, pictured here, is distinctly identifiable: Timeless Hi-Tech Beauty. Dreamer-In-Chief, Earl, is pictured in the photograph at the beginning of the article standing next to the original pre-engineered/designed Le Sabre sculpture. Like all the significant full-sized models Earl ever created, once their purpose was served — they were destroyed. Even for Harley, parting with this one-of-a-kind artistic masterpiece [the full-sized gold model of LeSabre] must have been a little rough.

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Originally setting up the math-based technological blueprint for “Automobile Design” to first propagate inside Detroit's auto world, Harley Earl’s new profession included many fabricating inventions that involved developing innovative new tools to streamline this all-new conscious business activity to explode inside General Motors. Take Mr. Earl’s introduction of the styling bridge which became the leading technology GM would use to take the master exterior and interior engineering measurement points off any of this company's new models and/or future vehicles... that were first pre-engineered in one of Designer-Earl’s all new body development studios. Improbable but true, the whole story behind how Harley Earl and his secret design section of General Motors Corporation originally developed taking the numerical points off full-size drawings and transferring them to the clay models and visa versa [from the model back to the drawing] has been well concealed for over half-a-century!

Harley J. Earl's 1950 super car, LE SABRE, is a case in point. These pictures demonstrate the "GM way" of engineering technology coming out of the World War II years. By this time, "the cat was out of the bag" and every major auto maker (especially Ford) began copying Earl's laws and principles for pre-engineering, and marketing, their industrialized products of transportation.

But, pioneer Earl and GM's inner circle of leaders still kept GM's "next moves" under wraps during the formidable mid-twentieth century years. And once again, GM hid everything in Earl's area so other competitors could never anticipate the direction GM was going regarding their forward designs.

After GM secured Earl’s involvement full time starting in 1927, all GM’s products began to be remodeled and/or redesigned using Earl’s more-modern industrialized pre-engineering techniques. What this inventor had already perfected in his California factory (Earl’s “new profession” and the many byproducts it entailed) went on to permit General Motors’ range of products to be sculpted and fully fabricated in a novel way. Put another way, Earl’s remarkable hand built clay model prototypes were then used to cast a “perfect model” for which GM could then extract all the necessary math-based data [engineering measuring points] they would then use afterwards in the manufacturing process. What Earl introduced to GM was a radically different pre-production method that no other Detroit auto maker and thousands of their engineers knew anything about! That’s because Earl’s all-new technicalities of engineering design were first introduced to GM and it is the foremost reasons this company would quickly beat out and overtake Henry Ford’s old fashioned methods of mass production. Essentially, by 1931, GM had entirely toppled Ford Motor Co. and GM became the No. 1 automobile maker in the world.

Naturally, GM’s top leaders knew that by keeping Earl’s advanced car-building technique and/or ingredient a “GM trade secret”, that all Detroit’s other auto world members would just keep following Henry Ford down his more-utilitarian path of building self propelled transportation products long into the 1930s and even the 1940s. It is common knowledge in auto history that Mr. Ford had legions of businessmen and engineers following his ways. So, what GM’s leaders did during this time period was a stroke of brilliance, for they all knew that “Detroit’s engineering world crowd” would just stay all wrapped up following and using Ford’s already established methodology and/or traditional business paradigm well into the future. In effect, GM’s main competitors got tricked and it really wasn’t until after WW-Two before all GM's main competitors, like Ford, figured it all out how bad they’d been hoodwinked. But by then it didn’t matter to GM, because by this time they were way out in front in the volume production game.

Never before, had leading edge body shell art offered such consistent engineering principles to be used in the scientific development of man made self-propelled products. Naturally, GM helped Earl keep his dynamic invention cloaked in a veil of secrecy. The fact that the manufactured product, the automobile, was a symbol for mass production in America by 1925, helped seal its growth potential once Harley Earl introduced this highly systematic new organization of laws and engineering principles in Detroit’s auto world, exclusively for GM. It was at this time that Mr. Earl (after being given a mandate by GM’s largest shareholders Sloan, Fisher and DuPont) began to control the “body politics” stage of how GM’s transportation products would be pre-engineered.

This very technique allowed GM to rapidly speed development time for new car models Earl and his team were beginning to pump out going into the 1930s. The virtues of Earl’s ultra streamlined designs saved time and money and during the economic depression he was already having GM’s prewar cars undergo the rigors of wind-tunnel tests of clay models. But in the end, many new GM models didn’t even have to go down this road, since Earl gained a reputation for often creating aerodynamically correct vehicles, ahead of time. A new level of keenly attuned leadership arose whereby Harley Earl’s specified production cycle allowed GM to dramatically innovate their future engineering product line. At this point in history, no other company, or country, had this leading edge technology. GM became dependant on Earl’s new body of engineering knowledge, some of which were based on a theme of “art with intent.” Inside GM, this new kind of inventor aimed to maintain this edge of leadership as long as possible and did a good job keeping a tight lid on this juggernaut, but after WW II, most all other auto manufactures caught on.

Conclusion: Mr. Earl was an ultramodern thinker who first introduced a revolutionary new production method. His “styling bridge” invention supplied a new math-based engineering code which he then allowed GM to exclusively have license to use! This radical new pre-engineering technique was first generated and perfected in America during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Theoretically, if Germany had had this technological know-how (an individual with an equivalent knowledge), the war could have been prolonged. For example, Mr. Earl’s hybrid engineering technique could have significantly speeded up Nazi Germany’s development of wartime products just as it had to America’s arsenal of defense in Detroit. Again, since the true story behind the person who invented the "Automobile Design" profession has never been publicly released, very few people actually know its real significance or how it radically changed our modern world.

Creating the “ultimate sketch” and having it take shape and metamorphosis into a crucial full-scale clay model was always Earl’s original brainstorm. And, pure and simple, he taught the largest engineering company in the world how to profit from it. The financial backers of Mr. Earl’s dreams that “usually took shape on wheels” were some of GM’s largest shareholders, and they supported him ever step of the way after this Californian moved to the Motor City in 1927. For example, men like this company's longtime president and CEO, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., ran General Motors Corporation from the firm's treasury office building in mid-town Manhattan, and Sloan always remained a permanent resident of New York, New York. Essentially, Sloan never once lived in or around Detroit, Michigan. And contrary to popular belief, Harley Earl was the true auto pioneer who radically changed GM along with the modern automobile world. And yes, this champion player who invented the auto design profession did live and work here in Motordom during GM's and Detroit's meteoric rise.