Harley Jarvis Earl (November 22, 1893 – April 10, 1969) was an American automotive designer and business executive. He was the initial designated head of design at
General Motors
The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...
, later becoming vice president, the first top executive ever appointed in design of a major corporation in American history. He was an
industrial design
Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advan ...
er and a pioneer of modern transportation design. A
coachbuilder
A coachbuilder or body-maker is someone who manufactures bodies for passenger-carrying vehicles.Construction has always been a skilled trade requiring a relatively lightweight product with sufficient strength. The manufacture of necessarily ...
by trade, Earl pioneered the use of freeform sketching and hand sculpted clay models as
automotive design
Automotive design is the process of developing the appearance (and to some extent the ergonomics) of motor vehicles - including automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, coaches, and vans.
The functional design and development of a modern moto ...
techniques. He subsequently introduced the "
concept car
A concept car (also known as a concept vehicle, show vehicle or prototype) is a car made to showcase new styling and/or new technology. They are often exhibited at motor shows to gauge customer reaction to new and radical designs which may or ...
" as both a tool for the design process and a clever
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
device.
Earl's
Buick Y-Job was the first concept car. He started "Project Opel", which eventually became the
Chevrolet Corvette
The Chevrolet Corvette is a two-door, two-passenger luxury sports car manufactured and marketed by Chevrolet since 1953. With eight design generations, noted sequentially from C1 to C8, the Corvette is noted for its performance and distinctive ...
, and he authorized the introduction of the
tailfin to automotive styling. During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, he was an active contributor to the Allies'
research and development
Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...
program in advancing the effectiveness of
camouflage
Camouflage is the use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see, or by disguising them as something else. Examples include the leopard's spotted coat, the ...
.
Early life
Harley Jarvis Earl was born in
Hollywood, California
Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles, California. Its name has come to be a shorthand reference for the U.S. film industry and the people associated with it. Many notable film studios, such as Columbia Pictures, ...
.
His father, J.W. Earl, began work as a
coachbuilder
A coachbuilder or body-maker is someone who manufactures bodies for passenger-carrying vehicles.Construction has always been a skilled trade requiring a relatively lightweight product with sufficient strength. The manufacture of necessarily ...
in 1889. The senior Earl eventually changed his practice from
horse-drawn vehicle
A horse-drawn vehicle is a mechanized piece of equipment pulled by one horse or by a team of horses. These vehicles typically had two or four wheels and were used to carry passengers and/or a load. They were once common worldwide, but they have m ...
s to custom bodies and customized parts and accessories for automobiles, founding Earl Automobile Works in 1908.
[Harley Earl 1893~1969]
Earl began studies at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, but left prematurely to work with, and learn from, his father at Earl Automotive Works. By this time, the shop was building custom bodies for Hollywood movie stars, including
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle
Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle (; March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter. He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked w ...
and
Tom Mix
Thomas Edwin Mix (born Thomas Hezikiah Mix; January 6, 1880 – October 12, 1940) was an American film actor and the star of many early Western films between 1909 and 1935. He appeared in 291 films, all but nine of which were silent films. He w ...
.
General Motors
![La Salle Phaaeton 1928](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/LaSalle_1928_Phaaeton.jpg)
Earl Automotive Works was bought by Cadillac dealer
Don Lee, who kept Harley Earl as director of its custom body shop.
Lawrence P. Fisher, general manager of the Cadillac division who was one of the brothers who started
Fisher Body
Fisher Body was an automobile coachbuilder founded by the Fisher brothers in 1908 in Detroit, Michigan. A division of General Motors for many years, in 1984 it was dissolved to form other General Motors divisions. Fisher & Company (originally Allo ...
, was visiting Cadillac dealers and distributors around the country, including Lee. Fisher met Earl at Lee's dealership and observed him at work. Fisher, whose automotive career began with coachbuilder
Fisher Body
Fisher Body was an automobile coachbuilder founded by the Fisher brothers in 1908 in Detroit, Michigan. A division of General Motors for many years, in 1984 it was dissolved to form other General Motors divisions. Fisher & Company (originally Allo ...
, was impressed with Earl's designs and methods, including the use of
modeling clay
Modelling clay or modelling compound is any of a group of malleable substances used in building and sculpting. The material compositions and production processes vary considerably.
Ceramic clay
Ceramic clays are water-based substances made f ...
to develop the forms of his designs.
Fisher commissioned Earl to design the 1927
LaSalle for Cadillac's companion marque. The success of the LaSalle convinced General Motors president
Alfred P. Sloan to create the “Art and Color Section” of General Motors, and to name Earl as its first director.
Prior to the establishment of the "Art and Color Section", American automobile manufacturers did not assign any great importance to the appearance of automobile bodies.
Volume manufacturers built bodies designed by engineers, guided only by functionality and cost. Many luxury-car manufacturers, including GM, did not make bodies at all, opting instead to ship chassis assemblies to a coachbuilder of the buyer's choice.
The executives at General Motors at the time, including engineers, division heads, and sales executives, viewed Earl's conceptual ideas as flamboyant and unfounded. Earl struggled to legitimize his design approach against the tradition- and production-oriented executives. As head of the newly formed "Art and Color Section" in 1927, he was initially referred to as one of the "pretty picture boys", and his design studio as being the "Beauty Parlor".
[Cambridge, MIT Press (1995), 200-212 ''Design History: An Anthology''.]
In 1937, the "Art and Color Section" was renamed the Styling Section.
[Just Who Was Harley Earl?]
/ref> Sloan eventually promoted Earl to vice president, making him, to the best of Sloan's knowledge, the first styling person to be a VP at a large corporation. After the early 1930s, Earl seldom drew sketches or did design work himself, usually functioning as an overlord who supervised GM stylists, although he would retain ultimate authority over the styling department until his retirement in 1958.
Harley Earl and Sloan implemented "Dynamic Obsolescence" (essentially synonymous with planned obsolescence
In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that ...
) and the "Annual Model Change", tying model identity to a specific year, to further position design as a driver for the company's product success. At the same time, Earl was careful to not depart too radically from the previous year's styling to maintain a semblance of continuity. This practice also ensured that used GM cars had the highest resale values of any American automotive make. Earl also avoided extreme or radical styling choices that would become dated quickly and alienate conservative-minded customers.[Richard A. Wright, 1996.''First 100 Years of the Auto Industry in the U.S.''.] These ideas are largely taken for granted today, but were unusual at the time.
Buick Y-Job
In 1939, the Styling Division, under Earl's instruction, styled and built the Buick Y-Job, the motor industry's first concept car
A concept car (also known as a concept vehicle, show vehicle or prototype) is a car made to showcase new styling and/or new technology. They are often exhibited at motor shows to gauge customer reaction to new and radical designs which may or ...
. While many one-off custom automobiles had been made before, the Y-job was the first car built by a mass manufacturer for the sole purpose of determining the public's reaction to new design ideas. After being shown to the public, the Y-job became Earl's daily driver. It was succeeded by the 1951 General Motors Le Sabre
The General Motors Le Sabre is a 1951 concept car. Possibly the most important show car of the 1950s, it introduced aircraft-inspired design elements such as the wrap-around windshield and tail fins, which became common on automotive designs duri ...
concept car.
Camouflage research
In 1942, during World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Earl established a camouflage
Camouflage is the use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see, or by disguising them as something else. Examples include the leopard's spotted coat, the ...
research and training division at General Motors, one consequence of which was a 22-page document called ''Camouflage Manual for General Motors Camouflage''.[Lauve, Henry de S. (1942), ''Camouflage Manual for General Motors Camouflage School''. Detroit MI: General Motors.] A decade before, two former World War I camouflage artists, Harold Ledyard Towle (a U.S. Army camoufleur) and McClelland Barclay
McClelland Barclay (1891 – 18 July 1943) was an American illustrator. By the age of 21, Barclay's work had been published in ''The Saturday Evening Post'', ''Ladies' Home Journal'', and ''Cosmopolitan''. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in ...
(who created the Fisher Body
Fisher Body was an automobile coachbuilder founded by the Fisher brothers in 1908 in Detroit, Michigan. A division of General Motors for many years, in 1984 it was dissolved to form other General Motors divisions. Fisher & Company (originally Allo ...
ads, and contributed to U.S. Navy camouflage during both World Wars) had worked as designers at General Motors. Among Earl's apprentices was English designer David Jones, who worked at its British division at Vauxhall Motors
Vauxhall Motors LimitedCompany No. 00135767. Incorporated 12 May 1914, name changed from Vauxhall Motors Limited to General Motors UK Limited on 16 April 2008, reverted to Vauxhall Motors Limited on 18 September 2017. () is a British car compa ...
and served in the camouflage section of the Royal Engineers
The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the ''Sappers'', is a corps of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is heade ...
during World War II.[Entries on "McClelland Barclay," "Harley Earl," "David Jones" and "Ledyard Towle" in Behrens, Roy R. (2009), Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books. .]
Tailfins
Harley Earl authorized the Frank Hershey design for the 1948 Cadillac, which incorporated the first automotive tailfin. Many of the new 1948-49 cars such as Hudson, Nash, and Lincoln adopted fastback or ponton "bathtub" styling. Although Earl considered this for Cadillac, he ultimately decided against it and went for a more sweeping aircraft-inspired look. This decision would prove a wise one as bathtub styling, a concept rooted in late 1930s-early 1940s design trends, quickly became dated. The styling of the 1948 Cadillac would prove far more predictive of 1950s trends and secured GM's place at the cutting edge of automotive design.
Inspiration for the fins came from the Lockheed P-38 Lightning
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning is an American single-seat, twin piston-engined fighter aircraft that was used during World War II. Developed for the United States Army Air Corps by the Lockheed Corporation, the P-38 incorporated a distinctive twi ...
, but it extended beyond the war, during the age when space rockets captured the popular imagination in the 1950s and 1960s. The style caught on throughout Detroit and eventually led to competition between Harley Earl and his counterpart at Chrysler
Stellantis North America (officially FCA US and formerly Chrysler ()) is one of the " Big Three" automobile manufacturers in the United States, headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan. It is the American subsidiary of the multinational automoti ...
, Virgil Exner
Virgil Max "Ex" Exner Sr. (September 24, 1909 – December 22, 1973) was an automobile designer for several American automobile companies, most notably Chrysler and Studebaker.
Exner is widely known for the "Forward Look" he created for the ...
, over the size and complexity of tailfins, culminating with those on the 1959 Cadillac models.
Chevrolet Corvette
Influenced by the English and European sports cars being raced on road racing
Road racing is a form of motorsport racing held on a paved road surface. The races can be held either on a closed circuit or on a street circuit utilizing temporarily closed public roads. Originally, road races were held almost entirely on publ ...
circuits after World War II, Earl decided that General Motors needed to make a sports car. Design work on "Project Opel" began as a secret project. He first offered the project to Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole
Edward Nicholas Cole (September 17, 1909 – May 2, 1977) was an American automotive executive for General Motors.
Career
Cole was the son of a dairy farmer. In his youth, he designed, built, and sold homemade radio sets, and as a teenager ...
. Cole accepted the project without hesitation, and the car was offered to the public in 1953 as the Chevrolet Corvette
The Chevrolet Corvette is a two-door, two-passenger luxury sports car manufactured and marketed by Chevrolet since 1953. With eight design generations, noted sequentially from C1 to C8, the Corvette is noted for its performance and distinctive ...
.
Succession
Earl retired in 1958 upon reaching the then-mandatory retirement age of 65. His final project was overseeing the design of 1960–62 models. He was succeeded as vice-president with responsibility for the Design and Styling Department by Bill Mitchell, under whose leadership GM design became less ornamental.
Before Earl retired, General Motors became the largest corporation in the world, and design was acknowledged as the leading sales factor within the automotive industry.
Death and legacy
Harley Earl suffered a stroke and died in West Palm Beach, Florida
West Palm Beach is a city in and the county seat of Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It is located immediately to the west of the adjacent Palm Beach, which is situated on a barrier island across the Lake Worth Lagoon. The populati ...
, on April 10, 1969. He was 75 years old.
He is remembered as the first styling chief in the United States automobile industry, the originator of clay modeling
Clay modeling (or clay model making) for automobile prototypes was first introduced in the 1930s by automobile designer Harley Earl, head of the General Motors styling studio (known initially as the Art and Color Section, and later as the Desig ...
of automotive designs, the wraparound windshield, the hardtop sedan, factory two-tone paint, and tailfins
The tailfin era of automobile styling encompassed the 1950s and 1960s, peaking between 1955 and 1961. It was a style that spread worldwide, as car designers picked up styling trends from the US automobile industry, where it was regarded as the ...
. He said in 1954, "My primary purpose for twenty-eight years has been to lengthen and lower the American automobile, at times in reality and always at least in appearance." The extremely low and long American cars of the 1960s and 1970s show the extent to which Earl influenced an entire industry and culture.
He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame
The Automotive Hall of Fame is an American museum. It was founded in 1939 and has over 800 worldwide honorees. It is part of the MotorCities National Heritage Area. the Automotive Hall of Fame includes persons who have contributed greatly to au ...
in 1986.
One of his concept car designs, the turbine
A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced by a turbine can be used for generating e ...
-powered Firebird I, is reproduced in miniature on the ''Harley J. Earl Trophy
The Harley J. Earl Trophy is the trophy presented to the winner of the premier – and season-opening – event of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), the Daytona 500. It is named after influential automobile designer H ...
'', which goes to the winner of the season-opening Daytona 500
The Daytona 500 is a NASCAR Cup Series motor race held annually at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. It is the first of two Cup races held every year at Daytona, the second being the Coke Zero Sugar 400, and one of three ...
NASCAR
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, LLC (NASCAR) is an American auto racing sanctioning and operating company that is best known for stock car racing. The privately owned company was founded by Bill France Sr. in 1948, and hi ...
race.
Harley Earl was used in a brief advertising campaign for Buick
Buick () is a division of the American automobile manufacturer General Motors (GM). Started by automotive pioneer David Dunbar Buick in 1899, it was among the first American marques of automobiles, and was the company that established General ...
, particularly during its reconstruction period between 2001 and 2002. Actor John Diehl
John Henry Diehl (born May 1, 1950) is an American character actor. Noted for his work in avant-garde theater, Diehl has performed in more than 140 films and television shows, including ''Land of Plenty'', ''Stripes'', ''City Limits'', ''Nixon' ...
, portraying Earl (or his ghost) was used to symbolize the importance of design in Buick's cars, or as the advertisements put it, the "Spirit of American Style". A fedora was often used as an Earl icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
in these advertisements.
In a December 1999 special section in the Detroit Free Press
The ''Detroit Free Press'' is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, US. The Sunday edition is titled the ''Sunday Free Press''. It is sometimes referred to as the Freep (reflected in the paper's web address, www.freep.com). It primari ...
, Earl was ranked the third most significant Michigan artist of the 20th century, behind Aretha Franklin
Aretha Louise Franklin ( ; March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Referred to as the " Queen of Soul", she has twice been placed ninth in ''Rolling Stone''s "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". With ...
and Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris ( Judkins; May 13, 1950), known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, who is credited as a pioneer and influence by musicians across a range of genres that include rhythm and blues, Pop musi ...
.[Detroit Free Press staff. "Michigan's 100 Greatest Artists & Entertainers of the 20th Century", '']Detroit Free Press
The ''Detroit Free Press'' is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, US. The Sunday edition is titled the ''Sunday Free Press''. It is sometimes referred to as the Freep (reflected in the paper's web address, www.freep.com). It primari ...
'', Detroit, Michigan, 12 December 1999.
See also
* NASCAR National Commissioner
*Eugene Turenne Gregorie
Eugene Turenne Gregorie (also E. T. "Bob" Gregorie, Eugene T. "Bob" Gregorie; pronounced "GREG-ree"; 1908–2002) was an American yacht designer and automobile designer. Gregorie and Edsel Ford worked closely together to design many automobiles ...
* 1950s American automobile culture
References
Bibliography
*
* Gartman, David (1994), “Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section: The Birth of Styling at General Motors,” Design Issues vol. 10, no. 2, pages 3–26
* Temple, David (2016), ''The Cars of Harley Earl'', Forest Lake, MN, USA: CarTech Inc., .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Earl, Harley
1893 births
1969 deaths
General Motors designers
American automobile designers
NASCAR commissioners
People from Hollywood, Los Angeles
General Motors people
Automotive businesspeople