Henry M. Leland

Biography

Henry Martyn Leland was born in Vermont on 16 February 1843; sources name either Danville or Barton, where he grew up. He learned precision engineering at the Brown & Sharpe plant in Providence, Rhode Island. From 1870 he was a principal of Leland & Faulconer, a firm that went on to supply engines to Ransom E. Olds's company.

In 1902 the backers of the Henry Ford Company hired Leland to value its factory. He advised them to reorganise rather than close it, and the company was renamed Cadillac. Cadillac won the Dewar Trophy for 1908 and a second one in 1913 for the electric self-starter Leland developed with Charles Kettering. On 29 July 1909 he sold Cadillac to General Motors for $4.5 million and stayed on as an executive.

A dispute with William C. Durant over wartime production made him leave GM in 1917. That year he formed the Lincoln Motor Company, which had a $10 million contract to build the V12 Liberty aero engine. Lincoln later became insolvent. In 1922 Ford bought it at a receivers' sale for $8 million, and that June Leland and his son Wilfred were removed from the factory. He died in Detroit on 26 March 1932.