A Danish bicycle apprentice who became an Army general, an Akron founder whose machine made more than half of America's tyres and the executive who sold AMC a French future.
William S. Knudsen led Chevrolet and General Motors before directing wartime production as an Army lieutenant general. Frank Seiberling, a Goodyear co-founder, took the presidency in 1906. Gerald C. Meyers chaired American Motors from 1977 to 1982 and brought in Renault as a major shareholder.
In January 1942 the US Army gave a lieutenant general's rank to a civilian, and it has never done so since. William S. Knudsen, a Danish-born car executive, was to help lead America's war production, and military aircraft output climbed from under 3,000 in 1939 to more than 300,000 by the war's end. Frank Seiberling and Gerald C. Meyers shaped the industry from other angles.
Who were William S. Knudsen, Frank Seiberling and Gerald C. Meyers?
Knudsen ran Chevrolet and then General Motors before the war. Frank Seiberling co-founded Goodyear in 1898 and became its president in 1906. Gerald C. Meyers took charge of American Motors in 1977 and brought Renault in as a major shareholder. Between them they cover assembly lines, tyres and a struggling independent.
William Knudsen was the only civilian ever to join the US Army at the rank of lieutenant general.
Knudsen, Seiberling and Meyers compared
| William S. Knudsen | Frank Seiberling | Gerald C. Meyers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lived | 1879 to 1948 | 1859 to 1955 | 1928 to 2023 |
| Company | Ford, then General Motors | Goodyear, then Seiberling Rubber | Ford, Chrysler, then American Motors |
| Top job | President of General Motors, 1937 to 1940 | Fourth president of Goodyear, from 1906 | Chairman and CEO of American Motors, 1977 to 1982 |
| Defining move | Directing wartime production for the Army | The Seiberling State tyre-building machine | The Renault partnership of 1979 |
| Headline number | Over 300,000 aircraft by the war's end | 60 tyres in ten hours instead of five | 22.5 percent Renault stake in 1979 |
How did Knudsen go from a Copenhagen bicycle shop to General Motors?
He was born in Copenhagen in 1879 to a customs officer, one of a large family, and as a teenager found a place as an apprentice in a bicycle shop, where he is said to have built Denmark's first tandem. He reached New York in February 1900. A shipyard foreman shortened his name on the payroll to William S. Knudsen, and Bill stuck.
By 1911 Knudsen was employed by the John R. Keim Company in Buffalo, which made bicycle and car parts. Ford bought the firm that year for its steel-stamping experience and tooling, and Knudsen went with it. His decade at Ford, to 1921, coincided with the formative years of the moving assembly line, and he ended up running the Highland Park Plant in Michigan as production manager.
He moved to General Motors in 1921. From 1924 to 1937 he was president of the Chevrolet Division, which under him produced more revenue than any other GM division. In 1937 he became president of General Motors itself, a post he held until 1940.
What did Knudsen do for war production?
In 1940 President Franklin Roosevelt, acting on a recommendation from Bernard Baruch, asked him to Washington. Knudsen chaired the Office of Production Management and sat on the National Defense Advisory Commission, drawing a salary of $1 a year. In January 1942 he was commissioned a lieutenant general and made Director of Production for the Under Secretary of War.
The results were large. Machine-tool output tripled. Aircraft built for the American military numbered fewer than 3,000 in 1939 and over 300,000 by the war's end, and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress benefited greatly from his direction. Cargo and Navy ships followed the same curve. Knudsen also smoothed government purchasing and drew firms with no military background into the market. His own verdict was that America had smothered its enemies in an avalanche of production.
In July 1944 he became Director of the Air Technical Service Command at Patterson Field, Ohio, and he left the Army on 1 June 1945. The honours came steadily: the Franklin Institute's Vermilye Medal in 1941, two Distinguished Service Medals, in 1944 and 1945, and, from Denmark, a Knight's rank in the Order of the Dannebrog in 1930 and its Grand Cross in 1946. Time put him on its cover on 7 October 1940, and the Automotive Hall of Fame inducted him in 1968. His son Semon, known as Bunkie, also became a prominent car executive.
Who was Frank Seiberling and how did Goodyear begin?
Franklin Augustus Seiberling, born in 1859 in Western Star, Ohio, now Norton, was the second of nine children. After two years at Heidelberg College he joined his father's farm-machinery firm, J.F. Seiberling Company, where he invented a twine binder that fastened bundles of grain with a bow-shaped knot.
The panics of the 1890s wrecked many firms, including his father's street railway. By 1898 Seiberling was jobless, nearly forty, with a wife and three children. He bought a disused strawboard factory in East Akron and its 7 acres for $13,500, borrowing $3,500 of the deposit from his brother-in-law Lucius C. Miles. With his brother Charles he chose to make rubber goods and named the firm after Charles Goodyear, who had died penniless almost forty years earlier.
Frank was not the first president. That was David E. Hill, who bought $30,000 of the first stock. Raymond C. Penfield followed in 1899 and Miles in 1900. Seiberling, until then secretary and general manager, took the job himself in 1906 as the fourth president.
How did the Seiberling State machine change tyre making?
Seiberling was credited with 19 patents at Goodyear. The best known, from 1908, covered a tyre-building machine developed with chief engineer William State. It replaced hand building, so that one man could produce 60 tyres in ten hours instead of five.
He installed a machine in its own room at the plant and showed it to rival makers. Goodyear granted 50 licences and, by one estimate, collected $2,000,000 in royalties. By 1913 more than half the tyres made in the United States came off the Seiberling State machine.
Other firsts followed from the same team: a universal tyre rim, the double diamond all-weather tread, and a pneumatic truck tyre that eventually pushed out the solid kind. Goodyear was the largest tyre producer in the world by 1916. Seiberling's size and drive earned him the nickname "little Napoleon" of the rubber industry, and he played a leading part in Akron's rise from small town to "rubber capital of the world".
Then, in 1921, Goodyear was refinanced and reorganised, and Frank and Charles Seiberling resigned. Frank started the Seiberling Rubber Company in Barberton, Ohio. He had a name for treating workers fairly, and in 1985 he was among the inaugural inductees of the Tire Industry Hall of Fame.
What else did Seiberling build in Akron?
A great deal, much of it aimed at his own workforce. He developed and financed Goodyear Heights for factory workers and Fairlawn Heights for white-collar staff, and his founding efforts included Fairlawn Country Club, Peoples Hospital and Akron's Metropolitan Park system. He also backed four schools, among them Heidelberg College and the University of Akron.
Drivers should note one more entry on his list. He was a founding member of the Lincoln Highway Association in 1913 and its president from 1918 to 1921, and in 1921 he chaired the highways committee of the US Chamber of Commerce. In June 1911 he financed a transatlantic airship attempt led by Melvin Vaniman; the airship Akron exploded in July 1912 and killed Vaniman and his crew.
His home, Stan Hywet Hall, is a Tudor Revival house finished in 1915 and now open to the public as a National Historic Landmark. The estate once took in about 3,000 acres. The museum today keeps 70 acres, a 64,500 square foot manor house and thirty acres of gardens laid out by Warren Manning. Seiberling died in Akron on 11 August 1955.
Who was Gerald C. Meyers and how did he reach American Motors?
Meyers was born in Buffalo in 1928, the son of a Polish-born tailor and an opera singer. He graduated from Bennett High School in 1945, then took an engineering degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1950 and a business master's there in 1954. He joined Ford in 1950, served as an Air Force officer in Greenland during the Korean War, and then spent eight years at Chrysler, including three in Geneva running overseas manufacturing.
In 1962 he became director of purchasing at American Motors in Detroit and moved up through a series of roles. As the company's product chief he introduced the AMC Buyer Protection Plan, the first warranty in the industry to cover a whole car for 12 months or 12,000 miles (19,000 km). He cut the model range by dropping stripped-down versions and pushed mechanical upgrades and better standard equipment. He also drove the AMX/3 project from first idea to prototype and test.
By 1973 he was pressing for a Wankel rotary engine in an AMC car within two years, though he ruled out AMC building the engine itself. On 24 May 1977 he succeeded William Luneburg as president and chief operating officer. Meyers had opposed the purchase of Jeep in 1970, a fact the press kept raising, but he became one of the brand's loudest supporters.
What was the three-legged stool strategy at AMC?
When Roy D. Chapin Jr. retired on 21 October 1977, Meyers took over as chairman and chief executive at 49, the youngest top executive in the industry. He argued that American Motors could survive by dropping head-on competition with the giants, concentrating on four-wheel-drive vehicles that the large makers neglected, and acquiring advanced technology.
Meyers called it a "three-legged stool": small cars, Jeeps and dependable government and military orders. The early figures backed him. For fiscal 1977 profit more than doubled, reaching a record $83.9 million from $3.1 billion of sales, and AMC's car sales rose 37% in a year when the industry's fell 21%.
How did Renault end up part-owning American Motors?
In 1979 Meyers brought in the state-owned French maker Renault, which bought 22.5 percent of the company's stock. France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1981 for the deal. The partnership was meant to supply what AMC could not afford alone, because by the start of 1982 the firm held two percent of the domestic market and had lost about $300 million in two years.
Meyers said AMC could not raise the $6 billion it needed for more competitive products. The company staked its future on Renault, including development of the Renault Alliance, a small car to be built at Kenosha in Wisconsin, and in early 1982 asked its 16,000 hourly workers for wage concessions worth $150 million.
He retired in February 1982, aged 53, after 20 years with the company. Renault by then controlled 46 percent of American Motors, and W. Paul Tippett Jr., an AMC manager for only three years, replaced him as chairman.
What did Meyers do after leaving the car industry?
He turned to teaching, writing and consulting. Meyers held the Ford Distinguished Research Chair at Carnegie Mellon's business school and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business from 1991 to 2017. His consultancy, Gerald C. Meyers Associates, advised senior executives on crisis management and governance.
He wrote a book on business crises, When It Hits the Fan, and co-wrote Dealers, Healers, Brutes & Saviors with his daughter Susan, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2000. Carnegie Mellon gave him an honorary doctorate on 17 April 2007. Meyers died at home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on 19 June 2023, aged 94.
What did each man leave behind?
Seiberling and Goodyear's patents brought the universal rim, an all-weather double diamond tread and a pneumatic truck tyre. Meyers' 12-month, 12,000-mile warranty was the first of its kind in the industry, and Jeep sat at the centre of AMC's plan under him. Stan Hywet Hall can be visited, and the Chevrolet Division that Knudsen ran earned more revenue than any other part of General Motors.
