Harley Earl: The Man Behind the Chevy Corvette

Throughout history, there have been men and women who have been remembered as pioneers in their individual professions. Of course, we remember the greats like Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, and Henry Ford - every one of them pioneers in their given fields. Each of these individual names (and the accomplishments of the men behind them) have stood the test of time and are still celebrated today by people across the globe. But for every Walt Disney or Henry Ford, there are countless others whose names are not so readily remembered, though their imparted legacies are as much a cornerstone of our culture as any of those men listed above.

Harley Earl was such a man - a man who would change the face of the automotive industry for all time. While many would scratch their heads when asked what Mr. Earl's legacy to our culture was, a great many more would be surprised to learn that Mr. Earl was the man most singularly responsible for the birth of the greatest American automobile of all time - the Chevy Corvette - a sports car that has survived six different incarnations and more than a half century of life on this planet. From his 1953 prototype to today, millions of Corvettes have been assembled and sold around the world - and it all started with one man's ambition to build a two seat convertible roadster shortly after the end of World War II.

Harley J. Earl was born on November 22, 1893 in Hollywood, California. Earl's father, J. W. Earl, who had started his career as a horse-drawn coach builder in 1889, eventually changed his business practice and opened Earl Automobile Works - an automotive business that specialized in custom body panels and accessories - in 1908. As a teenager, Harley Earl was surrounded by customized automobiles and automobile parts, and the experiences he had while working at his father's shop would leave an indelible mark on him, helping to shape the direction he would one day venture in his own professional endeavors.

When it was time for Earl to venture off to college, he began his studies at Stanford University but, driven by a passion to work in his father's trade, left college prematurely and returned to Earl Automotive Works to apprentice under the guidance of the senior Earl. He worked hard for his father, and learned as much as he could about the mechanics of his father's business, which had grown by that time to become a respected name among the Hollywood elite.

As fate would have it, Earl Automotive Works was purchased by (then) Cadillac Dealer Don Lee. Impressed by both his work and his work ethic, Lee hired Earl as director of his dealership's custom body shop. Already familiar with custom fabrication work, Earl's work produced some truly captivating designs that quickly started to catch the attention of others who would help launch his career.

Lawrence P. Fisher, who was the General Manager of the Cadillac Division of General Motors in the early 1920's, had been touring a number of independent Cadillac dealerships and distributors around the country, including Don Lee's. While Fisher was visiting Lee's Hollywood Cadillac dealership, he met Harley Earl. As with Lee before him, Fisher was impressed by Earl's approach to design, and took special interest in Earl's methodology of modelling his ideas in clay to develop the forms for his designs.

Fisher was so taken with Earl that he commissioned Earl to design the 1927 LaSalle for Cadillac's companion marque - General Motors (GM). Earl set to work on the design and, after the LaSalle went to market, it's first year sales figures utterly shocked the automotive community. The public's response was overwhelmingly positive and it didn't take GM long to recognize Earl for what he was - a pioneer that could lead their business into a largely undiscovered venue of the automotive industry - Automotive Design.

Alfred P. Sloan, who was president of GM at the time, established a new division within his corporation - The Arts and Colour Section of General Motors - and named Earl to be its first director. For Earl, accepting this new position would mean leaving Hollywood, California, where he had already established himself as a leader in automotive design. Given the extensive Hollywood client base that had become part of his customer base - (a list that included such names as Cecille B. DeMille, Fatty Arbuckle, and Al Jolson (to name but a few)) - Earl's decision to leave carried with it a fair amount of uncertainty. Still, seeing the potential historic opportunity ahead of him, Earl packed his family and headed to Detroit, Michigan in late 1927.

Early on in his tenure with GM, Earl's concepts and ideas were not readily accepted or well received. Many of the top executives at General Motors - including engineers, sales executives, and division heads - viewed Earl's ideas as flamboyant and unfounded. Many of his ideas were met with ridicule and scorn. However, given the sudden and dramatic shift that was occurring within the automobile industry (due almost solely to Earl's design practices), their reactions were understandable. After all, prior to Earl's arrival on the automotive scene, design had never played a significant role in the automobile industry. The bodies of the automobiles of that time were designed by engineers and built to provide maximum functionality at minimum cost. The idea of advancing a design for the sake of anything other that cost savings or mechanical functionality was foreign and, like any new idea, met with more than a little resistance.

Despite this, Earl persevered, struggling to validate his design approach to the production-oriented executives at GM. Steadfast in his approach, Earl did eventually win out over those that would see him fail, and began establishing design practices within GM that would eventually set the standard for automotive design around the world. Earl pioneered the idea of rendering detailed, colorful, two-dimensional design drawings that he later rendered in 3D with the use of scale-and-full-size clay models. Earl's design innovations were so effective that, over the next decade, they helped catapult General Motors ahead of Ford Motor Company to become the number one automobile manufacturer in the country.

By 1937, with the Art and Colour division of General Motors now well established, it was decided that the division would be re-named to simply "The Styling Section" and Sloan, still immensely impressed by Earl's demeanor and unrelenting work ethic, led him to promote Earl to the position of Vice President - making Earl the first styling person to be a VP within any large corporation. Earl's successes proved time and again the importance of design as an integral part of the automotive engineering process. So much corporate emphasis was eventually put on design that Earl, together with Alfred Sloan, developed and leveraged the concept of "Dynamic Obsolescence" - a concept that convinced car owners that they "needed" to purchase a new car each year based on the newest design changes that accompanied each successive model year - to further the sales success of GM automobiles. This approach was so successful that by the end of the 1930's, General Motors had a 50% Market Share in the American Automobile Industry, meaning one out of every two American automobile owners owned a GM product.

In 1939, GM's Styling Division, under Earl's instruction, designed and built the Buick Y-Job, the automobile industry's fist ever concept car. While many custom automobiles had been designed and built prior to the Y-Job (including many by Earl himself before he joined General Motors), this was the first vehicle ever built by a major manufacturer that had been designed solely to gauge customer opinion to a new design concept. The reactions the car received would be used to guide the future design elements implemented on many of General Motors products. While a common practice today, this approach was considered ground-breaking within the industry at that time.

The Buick Y-Job itself was a two-seater sports car based on a standard Buick chassis. An open-air roadster, the Y-Job measured just two inches short of twenty feet in length and sat a mere fifty-eight inches high. The car featured a "bombsight" hood (which would become a staple of later Buick models), concealed headlights, recessed tail lights, flush door handles, and bumpers that closely wrapped around the bodywork. Additionally, the front end of the car featured GM's first-ever horizontal radiator grille, a styling cue that was inspired by Mercedes W154 Grand Prix race car.

While the car did makes it way across the country to all of the major automobile shows, it remained in the possession of Earl for many years, who used the car regularly as his personal vehicle. Earl recognized that by driving the unique, one-of-a-kind automobile in public, he could generate far more interest in it than any auto show ever could. Earl would continue to drive the Y-Job until 1951.

At the onset of World War II, General Motors, like most major manufacturing companies in the United States, was pulled into supporting the war effort. For his own part, Harley Earl established a camouflage research and training division of General Motors. Earl, aided by his team of designers, researched and eventually wrote a 22 page book called the "Camouflage Manual for General Motors Camouflage." William Earl, Harley's youngest brother (born 1908), aided the elder Earl in writing the book. In early 1942, at the time the book was being written, William was serving as a Junior Lieutenant in the Signal Corp. (which would later become known as the United States Air Force). He aided older brother Harley by serving as a trusted liaison between General Motors and the various branches of the United States military.

At its completion, the Camouflage Manual provided detailed instruction on the design, implementation, and usage of camouflage for both military and civilian applications. To quote Earl himself, "The object of this booklet is to outline the general principles of the art and practice of camouflage as simply and as concisely as possible so that, with some experience in the handling of materials and with the ingenuity necessary, the camouflage designer will be able to apply his knowledge successfully to any problem which arises, be it of a military or civil nature."

By the late 1940's, as GM returned to the design and manufacturing of automobiles, Earl began bringing many design elements to his cars that were reminiscent of the aircraft used by the U.S military during the height of World War II. Earl had a fascination with many of the fighter planes that were utilized in the war effort, and much of the conceptual design work he continued to propagate featured key design elements from aircraft like the P-51 Mustang and the P-38 Lightning. The later of these aircraft actually served as a key basis of design for the 1948 Cadillac Series 62. This car was unique in that it was the first car to feature tail-fins - but it would most certainly not be the last.

The Cadillac was so well received that, for the next twenty years following its introduction, GM would incorporate tail-fins (and other key design elements) into almost every vehicle design that rolled off the production line. Each of Earl's designs refined the concept and represented the era from which it was derived. In the 1940's and 50's, the tail-fin design cues reflected Earl's fascination with military aircraft. By the 1960's, the sharper edges and bolder lines of the tail-fins were akin to the rockets and spacecraft being launched by the NASA space program. In all instances, Earl's design cues spread like wildfire throughout Detroit, and his influences could readily be seen in most of the major automotive designs that emerged from that era.

In addition to his interest in military aircraft, Earl shared a passion for automobile racing. While the European automobile market had produced a number of exciting sports cars - including models like the Jaguar XK-120, the Triumph TR and the Austin Healey, Earl recognized that there was not an American equivalent available. Further, as young service men returned home from the War, he saw an in-flux of these European two-seater roadsters gaining a greater presence on the U.S. roadways. It was with these realizations that Earl approached General Motors about designing his own two-seat roadster.

It was decided that the project would be developed in secret. Because of GM's real concern that a breech in security would expose the design to the competition, the as-yet-unnamed vehicle design was given the code name "Project Opel." Earl selected an elite team of some of his most trusted designers to aid in the development of "Opel", and he requested the talents of Edward Cole and Robert McLean - a pair of GM engineers who shared Earl's passion for racing - to help fully implement his design cues into a viable prototype.

Earl decided early on that the "Opel" prototype should be manufactured out of a fiberglass resin. He made the choice so that he would not be limited by the design restrictions imposed when using steel. While many (including Earl himself) believed that using fiberglass was a risky proposition at best, Earl stood firm behind his decision. When testing an early prototype made out of the fiberglass material, the driver accidentally rolled the car and, to everyone's astonishment, the car suffered almost no damage at all. Any lingering doubt was alleviated.

Earl's aim was to have the "Opel" prototype ready for the 1953 Motorama. The Motorama was an all-out automotive extravaganza that showcased GM's latest automobile products and helped bolster public interest in future GM vehicles. Having had previous successes at earlier Motorama events, Earl recognized that positive public response to his prototype would serve as the catalyst to take his two-seater roadster to production.

In late 1952, as the prototype neared completion and that 1953 Motorama approached, Chevrolet executives began the process of selecting a name for Earl's new concept car. It was Myron Scott, Chevrolet's assistant advertising manager, that suggested the name "Corvette" to Earl (and management.) Named after a 19th Century Naval Frigate, the Corvette name captured the performance and maneuverability that Earl had envisioned for his newest design.

When Earl unveiled his Chevy Corvette at the 1953 Motorama, the response to the car was overwhelmingly positive - so much so that, within days of its unveiling, GM prepared to take the car to production. The rest, as they say, is history.

For the next several years following the unveiling of the Chevy Corvette, Earl continued working as part of the Corvette design and development team. He made the decision to retire in 1958, but not before overseeing the design revisions of the 1959 model. Upon his retirement from GM's Design and Styling department, he was succeeded by Bill Mitchell who would continue to oversee the evolution of the Corvette for many years following Earl's retirement. Before his retirement, General Motors became recognized as the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, and it was acknowledged and widely accepted that automotive design was the key contributing factor for GM's success.

Harley Earl died in West Palm Beach, Florida at the age of 75. He is remembered as being one of the most influential automobile designers in the history of the automotive industry.