Fisher Body Company - 1908-present - Detroit, Michigan & Walkerville, Ontario
|
|
|||
|
Fisher Body Company - 1908-present - Detroit, Michigan & Walkerville, Ontario |
|||
|
The Fisher Body Company, later the Fisher Body Division of GM, had strong
family roots. It was founded by seven brothers whose grandfather, Andrew Fisher, emigrated from Northern Germany
around 1835 and set up a blacksmith shop in Ohio. His son Lawrence Fisher worked in the blacksmith shop. Later, with
his brother Andrew and his brother-in-law, he set up a carriage works, himself directing the woodworking facilities.
Ironworking, woodworking, carriage-building, and brothers working closely together all reappeared in the remarkable
success of the Fisher Body Company. Lawrence Fisher stressed craftsmanship above all else. All of his sons worked in the family business before leaving home. His brother Albert Fisher, who also learned carriage making from Lawrence, established Standard Wagon Works in Detroit in the late 1880s. At Uncle Albert's suggestion Fred Fisher, eldest of Lawrence Fisher's seven sons, decided to seek his fortune in Detroit. In 1902, Fred found work as a draftsman at C. R. Wilson Company, joined by his brother Charles in 1904. Wilson, the largest maker of horse-drawn carriage bodies in the world, also built auto bodies for a handful of pioneer automakers, including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Ford, Peerless and Elmore. The brothers worked there until 1908, when they quit over salaries. Uncle Albert offered Fred and Charles jobs in his carriage shop and the brothers gratefully accepted. Uncle Albert's Standard Wagon Works had supplied some 50 bodies for the fledgling Ford Motor Co. Fred and Charles recognized that bodies for horse-drawn carriages would not do for motorcars. Automobile bodies needed an entirely different technology. For example, driving a car via its rear wheels put a different set of stresses on the body than pulling a carriage by its front axle; also the higher speeds and greater vibration of motorcars demanded suitable engineering advances. At this point, the two brothers invited Uncle Albert to join them in their own auto-body business. Between the three of them, they had connections, expertise, good ideas -- and Uncle Albert agreed to supply capital. On July 22, 1908, Albert, Fred and Charles Fisher formed the Fisher Body Co., capitalized at $50,000, with $30,000 cash paid in by Uncle Albert. Early customers included Ford, Herreshoff, EMF and Oldsmobile. Walter Flanders, a partner in EMF, suggested that the new company build an inexpensive closed car body. Closed cars at that time were not only expensive but were considered undesirable by Ford. As Fred and Charles began to experiment with closed sedan bodies, Uncle Albert not only protested but soon wanted out of the new venture altogether. At this point the Mendelssohn name entered the Fisher story. The younger Fishers didn't have enough money to buy Albert out, but mentioned their plight to Louis Mendelssohn, an architect and civil engineer who, with his brother Aaron, was a major stockholder in the Herreshoff Motor Co. Asked how much Albert wanted for his share, Fred answered, "$30,000 by noon." Louis supplied it. As chairman of the board, Louis Mendelssohn oversaw the financial side of the operation. He supervised the purchase, design and construction of new buildings and eventually negotiated the sale of Fisher Body to General Motors. His brother Aaron joined in 1910 as supervisor of the general office. Aaron's son Herbert entered the business in 1911 and Louis's son Paxton was put in charge of Plant #1. Changes came fast in Fisher Body's earliest years. In 1909, the company set up a formal engineering department for open bodies, with a chief engineer, four body draftsmen and a man responsible for dies and patterns. Its production capacity was 10 open bodies a day. The rapidly expanding automobile industry soon demanded more of the company. In 1910 Cadillac ordered 150 closed bodies, and Flanders placed a similar request. To meet this challenge, a separate closed-body engineering section was created, with a separate staff of engineers and draftsmen, a designer, a blueprint checker and a trim engineer. Finally the Fisher Closed Body Co. was formed, in December 1910. More expansion followed. In 1912, Fisher organized a Canadian adjunct, Fisher Body Co. of Canada, Ltd., headquartered in Walkerville, Ontario, across the river from downtown Detroit. Lawrence P. Fisher joined his brothers in 1912 as superintendent of paint and trim, followed in 1913 by Edward F. and Alfred J. Fisher, who worked in every department of the plant before being given more responsible duties. Finally, William A. Fisher arrived in 1915 from the Fisher Auto Top Co., a large supplier of canvas car roofs. To meet the challenge of growth, Fred and Charles developed new manufacturing techniques. They pioneered precision woodworking on a mass-production scale, developing jigs and fixtures that made it possible to mass-produce identical wooden parts for auto bodies for the first time. Wooden components, interchangeable from one body to another, no longer had to be hand fitted as in carriage-making. Fisher also pioneered a crude but effective sheet-metal stamping technique. Fisher Body supplied roadsters, touring cars, phaetons, and closed carriages to many makes. By 1914, Fisher Body Co. was building 105,000 car bodies a year, most of them open. And by 1920, the total came to 328,978, most of them still open. Closed car bodies were meeting with customer resistance, not so much because "no one in his right mind would ride behind that much glass," as Henry Ford once opined, but because the car manufacturers were jacking up prices of closed bodies far beyond what they were paying for them. As Fisher's volume went up, their unit price per closed body went down. But the automakers to whom Fisher supplied bodies did not discount closed cars proportionately. The Fishers asked auto manufacturers to sell closed cars more cheaply, but it was years before carmakers passed the Fishers' savings on to their closed-body customers. (In 1922, Essex introduced the first closed coach at a price similar to a touring car.) The years before Word War I marked even more expansion, with the construction of several new plants, construction of new buildings, and the acquisition of some 62,000 acres of timberland in Northern Michigan. By 1914, the company had grown with such speed that there were 10 plants in operation around the Detroit area and in Canada. According to historian Arthur Pound, Fisher's combined profits for 1913-14 came to $369,321, then $576,495 in 1914-15, and $1.4 million in 1915-16. In 1916 Fisher merged its two U.S. companies and its Canadian operations, and the Fisher Body Corp. was incorporated in New York, with a stock authorization of $6 million. The company occasionally considered the possibility of building not just bodies but complete cars. It seemed the logical next step. Fisher could sell bodies to themselves more cheaply than to others, and a line of Fisher cars would assure a steady demand, unaffected by market vagaries. The topic kept coming up over the years, but the Fisher brothers could never bring themselves to take the final plunge. After World War I, Fisher again considered total auto manufacture, but the attractions of that plan were eclipsed by another. Three established automakers contemplated acquiring Fisher Body Company as a wholly-owned subsidiary: Ford, Studebaker, and General Motors. GM's Pierre S. DuPont and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., perhaps attracted by Fisher's tidy corporate and organizational structure, struck the bargain with Louis Mendelssohn and the Fisher Brothers. GM's buyout of Fisher Body took place in two steps -- one in 1919 and the final one in 1926. Fisher prepared for the 1919 transaction by increasing its capitalization from 200,000 to 500,000 shares of common stock. The extra 300,000 new shares of stock were then purchased by General Motors at $92 a share, a total of $27.6 million. This arrangement gave GM control of production, finances and 60% of the stock, but left day-to-day managerial leadership to the Fisher Brothers. The Fisher brothers all went into General Motors and became GM board directors and active staff officers. Step 2 came in 1926: GM traded 664,720 shares of its own stock, with a market value of $208 million, for the remaining 40% of Fisher Body stock. Part of the 1919 agreement stated that GM would buy all its car bodies from Fisher for the next 10 years at cost plus 17.6%. After 1919, one of the few independent auto manufacturers who received Fisher bodies was Walter P. Chrysler. His open body styles for 1925 and 1926 were largely supplied by Fisher. But after that, Fisher made bodies only for General Motors cars. The Fisher Division of GM acquired Fleetwood Body Corporation in 1925 for $650,000. What they bought was mostly a name. Fleetwood's Pennsylvania plant was small and obsolete even then, but its reputation ranked at the top of the coach-building industry. Fleetwood became Cadillac's in-house coachbuilder, and GM promoted its name nearly as much as Fisher's. The classic Cadillacs of the early 1930's -- the first-generation V-16s and V-12s -- were all engineered and Fleetwood-bodied under Lawrence P. Fisher's auspices and at his urging. It was his intention to make Cadillac America's top-rated prestige car. He brought in Maurice Olley from Rolls-Royce to improve Cadillac's ride and campaigned hard to put Cadillacs into the White House garage. Ultimately his strategy paid off. Other important Fisher Division acquisitions of the 1920's included the England Manufacturing Company of Detroit; International Metal Stamping Company, Shepard Art Metal Company, and the Ternstedt Manufacturing Company, which soon produced all of Fisher's hardware and trim. A significant development from Ternstedt was the modern window regulator mechanism, introduced in 1921. Ternstedt engineers also produced GM's VV (vision and ventilation) windshield for 1925 and, in 1933, introduced No-Draft ventilation. In 1922 Fisher purchased the O.J. Beaudette Co. of Pontiac, Michigan a
firm that supplied Ford with well over 2,000,000 bodies from 1909-1922.
By 1924 Fisher boasted 44 plants and 40,000 workers, and was turning out over half a million car bodies a year.
© 2004 Mark Theobald - Coachbuilt.com xxxxxxx Former O.J. Beaudette Co. plant - Baldwin and Kennet Roads Pontiac, MI Charles and Fred Fisher, two of the seven Fisher brothers born into a second generation carriage-building family, followed family tradition and became highly skilled carriage craftsmen. They left their home in Norwalk, Ohio and moved to Detroit after gaining employment with the C.R. Wilson Body Company. Shortly thereafter, with financial support from their Uncle Albert, Charles and Fred established their own automotive business: Fisher Body Company. As the company evolved, brothers Edward, Alfred, William and Lawrence joined the business. (Their youngest brother, Howard, was never involved with the automotive company, but was in charge of operations for the Fisher Building in Detroit.) Advances in car body design became Fisher Body's specialty. Innovations such as interchangeable body parts, modular body production, and the creation of inexpensive closed body styling, led the company to become the largest autobody manufacturer in the world prior to World War I. In 1910, Cadillac became their first major customer placing an order for 150 autobodies. Closed body styling quickly gained popularity, and by 1914, Fisher Body was producing 105,000 units/year; by 1917, they were manufacturing 370,000 bodies/year. As a result, a separate Fisher Closed Body Company was formed. Enormous success also led the Fishers to open a company in Canada. Ultimately, the three companies merged into Fisher Body Corporation. In 1919, the Fishers sold 60 percent interest in the corporation to General Motors and were in turn contracted to provide bodies for all GM vehicles. Also in 1919, the Fishers purchased the O.J. Beaudette Company in Pontiac and used the facility to produce parts for Chevrolet cars and bodies for Oakland Motor Car Company. Fisher Body Corp. rapidly expanded in the 1920's and was in need of a larger facility. Construction began on a new plant at Baldwin and Kennet Roads in 1922, and the Beaudette factory was eventually shut down. In 1926, GM purchased the remaining 40 percent share of Fisher Body Corporation and it became a division of General Motors. Fisher Body Plant contributed to the military effort during World War II by ceasing automobile production and building both the 90mm army anti-aircraft gun and the five inch navy gun mount. Pontiac's Fisher Body Plant still stands today.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
For more information please read: Fisher Body Craftsman - 1983 GM publication John L. Jacobus - The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild Body by Fisher: The Closed Car Revolution, Automobile Quarterly Vol. No. , August 1991. Michael Lamm - The Fisher Brothers: Their Lives & Times - Special Interest Autos #45 May-Jun 1978 Beverly Rae Kimes - The Classic Car Beverly Rae Kimes - The Classic Era Beverly Rae Kimes - Packard: A History of the Motorcar and Company Beverly Rae Kimes & Henry Austin Clark Jr. - Standard Catalog of American Cars 1805-1942 Richard Burns Carson - The Olympian Cars Raymond A. Katzell - The Splendid Stutz Brooks T. Brierley - There Is No Mistaking a Pierce Arrow Brooks T. Brierley - Magic Motors 1930 Nick Georgano - The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile: Coachbuilding John Gunnell - Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975 James M. Flammang & Ron Kowalke - Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1976-1999 Daniel D. Hutchins - Wheels Across America: Carriage Art & Craftsmanship Marian Suman-Hreblay - Dictionary of World Coachbuilders and Car Stylists Michael Lamm and Dave Holls - A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design Thomas E. Bonsall - The Lincoln Motorcar: Sixty Years of Excellence Fred Roe - Duesenberg: The Pursuit of Perfection Arthur W. Soutter - The American Rolls-Royce John Webb De Campi - Rolls-Royce in America Hugo Pfau - The Custom Body Era Hugo Pfau - The Coachbult Packard Griffith Borgeson - Cord: His Empire His Motor Cars Don Butler - Auburn Cord Duesenberg George H. Dammann - 90 Years of Ford George H. Dammann & James K. Wagner - The Cars of Lincoln-Mercury Thomas A. MacPherson - The Dodge Story F. Donald Butler - Plymouth-Desoto Story Fred Crismon - International Trucks George H. Dammann - Seventy Years of Chrysler Walter M.P. McCall - 80 Years of Cadillac LaSalle Maurice D. Hendry - Cadillac, Standard of the World: The complete seventy-year history George H. Dammann & James A. Wren - Packard Dennis Casteele - The Cars of Oldsmobile Terry B. Dunham & Lawrence R. Gustin - Buick: A Complete History George H. Dammann - Seventy Years of Buick |
| © 2004 Coachbuilt.com, Inc. | Index | Submit a Pic | Disclaimer | Privacy |
