Teletouch is the
trade name
A trade name, trading name, or business name, is a pseudonym used by companies that do not operate under their registered company name. The term for this type of alternative name is a "fictitious" business name. Registering the fictitious name w ...
for the
transmission
Transmission may refer to:
Medicine, science and technology
* Power transmission
** Electric power transmission
** Propulsion transmission, technology allowing controlled application of power
*** Automatic transmission
*** Manual transmission
** ...
controls found on many
Edsel
Edsel is a discontinued division and brand of automobiles that was marketed by the Ford Motor Company from the 1958 to the 1960 model years. Deriving its name from Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry Ford, Edsels were developed in an eff ...
brand automobiles manufactured by the Edsel and Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln (M-E-L) Divisions of the
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobi ...
. The significance of the Teletouch systems lies in its conception, design and symbolism for American automobiles produced in the 1950s, and the gadgets designed into them. The main distinguishing feature of the system was its use of push buttons on the steering wheel to shift gears as opposed to a gear stick.
Conception
Conception of the Edsel began in the early 1950s when Ford Motor Company attempted to outflank industry leader General Motors through altering its production, pricing and its make and model ranges. One of the results of this plan was the E-car program that resulted in the ill-fated Edsel.
From the beginning, the Edsel was promised to be something very different from the cars that Detroit was turning out at the time. However development costs required that Edsel share the basics of other established Ford brands on the market. In this climate, the Edsel emerged as a five-model, three-wheelbase automobile line. Senior Edsels would share their chassis with
Mercury, junior models would share their chassis with
Ford
Ford commonly refers to:
* Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford
* Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river
Ford may also refer to:
Ford Motor Company
* Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company
* Ford F ...
passenger vehicles, and station wagons would share their chassis and body structure with Ford's station range.
The distinction offered by the Edsel, therefore, was in the styling details. While the famed 'horse collar' grille and 'boomerang' tail lights made the Edsel visually unique, the Teletouch transmission and saucer-like spinning speedometer emerged as two of the better-remembered interior details.
Design
The first electrical gear shift mechanism sold on new automobiles was the Vulcan electric gear shift system, a solenoid-driven transmission shift device for a standard sliding gear
gearbox
Propulsion transmission is the mode of transmitting and controlling propulsion power of a machine. The term ''transmission'' properly refers to the whole drivetrain, including clutch, gearbox, prop shaft (for rear-wheel drive vehicles), diff ...
introduced in the summer of 1913. Among the
automakers to offer the Vulcan system were the
Haynes Automobile Company
The Haynes Automobile Company was an American automobile manufacturing company that produced automobiles in Kokomo, Indiana, from 1905 to 1924. The company was formerly known as the Haynes-Apperson company, and produced automobiles under tha ...
of
Kokomo, Indiana; the S.G.V. Company of Reading, Pennsylvania; and the Norwalk Motor Car Company of Martinsburg, West Virginia. While the Vulcan shifter was often advertised as standard equipment on the Haynes car, a common floor shift was also available for $200 less. Norwalk made the Vulcan system available on their products, such as the Underslung Six, as an option; approximately 25 of those cars were so equipped. A large nickel-plated box was attached to the right side of the steering column which housed the push button mechanism. It utilized six buttons – first through third gear, reverse, neutral and park. There was also a "signal" button which was the horn. A housing containing four large solenoids was mounted at the transmission which acted on the steel transmission shift control rods. The driver was free to select any gear at will, enabling the bypassing of gears, such as jumping from first to third gear without going through second gear. There was a cautionary advisory with the car that one must use care when placing the selector into reverse, only doing so when the car was completely stopped. Pushing a button on the shift control preselected the chosen gear. The electrical circuit was closed only after the driver fully depressed the clutch pedal. This energized the appropriate transmission mounted solenoids necessary for returning the transmission to neutral and then completing engagement of the preselected gear; the driver would then release the clutch pedal to continue onwards. These seemed to have been very advanced automotive systems. The Vulcan Electric Shift Company was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and was eventually bought out by Cutler-Hammer. The model year 1914 was the only year that Norwalk used this system. Only one known Norwalk Motor Car survives today, which is owned by the friends of the Norwalk Foundation, Inc. in Martinsburg. Haynes was evidently the only
automaker
The automotive industry comprises a wide range of companies and organizations involved in the design, development, manufacturing, marketing, and selling of motor vehicles. It is one of the world's largest industries by revenue (from 16 % suc ...
of note to place the push-buttons in the center of the steering wheel. The Vulcan electric gear shift system probably didn't survive past the early 1920s, since nothing regarding it has been found in the automotive engineering literature past 1921, and a 1919 Haynes
print ad
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
has been found with no mention of the electric shifting system.
Chrysler Corporation automobiles introduced pushbutton automatic transmission controls for their
PowerFlite
PowerFlite is a two-speed automatic transmission engineered and produced by the Chrysler Corporation and used in their passenger cars from 1954 to 1961. Production began in late 1953 and the simple and durable PowerFlite remained available on P ...
and
Torqueflite
TorqueFlite (also seen as Torqueflite) is the trademarked name of Chrysler Corporation's automatic transmissions, starting with the three-speed unit introduced late in the 1956 model year as a successor to Chrysler's two-speed PowerFlite. In t ...
transmissions for the 1956
model year
The model year (sometimes abbreviated "MY") is a method of describing the version of a product which has been produced over multiple years. The model year may or may not be the same as the calendar year in which the product was manufactured.
...
. Instead of the traditional placement of a gear selector on the column, Chrysler's system mounted the gear buttons in dashboard pods to the left of the steering wheel, becoming the first U.S. carmaker to offer such a system. This system was mechanical.
Packard also introduced a steering-column-mounted electro-mechanical pushbutton transmission control pod in its "Touch Button
Ultramatic
Ultramatic was the trademarked name of the Packard Motor Car Company's automatic transmission introduced in 1949 and produced until 1954, at Packard's Detroit, Michigan East Grand Boulevard factory. It was produced thereafter from late 1954, thru ...
" in 1956, placed off to the right of the column about . Using technology that it purchased from a Packard supplier, Auto-Lite, this
push-button system proved problematic as the electric motor was insufficient to move the car out of Park on a steep hill, and would pop the circuit breaker; electrical contact problems, wiring problems and other issues were prevalent even when new; and the problems worsened with age.
The Mercury Division of Ford Motor Company (later, in 1957, the Lincoln-Mercury Division), followed suit with its purely mechanical push-button transmission control system in 1957 called "
Keyboard Control" then in 1958 it was revised and called "Multi-Drive".
When the 1958 Edsel launched in the late summer of 1957, the Edsel became the first and only Ford division to launch an electro-mechanical push-button transmission system, which it trademarked as Teletouch. Teletouch placed the transmission buttons in a ring within the center of the steering wheel. Edsel's marketing department promoted the Teletouch as a logical progression in the process of making the steering wheel the central command center for controlling cars. Marketing also pointed out that more of the dashboard view was unrestricted to the driver with the gear handle removed. Edsel even issued a Teletouc
"face-mask"for dealers to wear and pass out as an advertising premium promoting the system to would-be buyers.
While a standard gear selector was available as a reduced-cost option for the automatic transmission on the
Edsel Ranger
The Edsel Ranger is an automobile that was produced and sold by the newly formed Edsel Division of Ford for the 1958–1960 model years. It was built on the shorter, narrower Edsel platform, shared with Ford and Edsel Pacer models.
The Ranger ...
,
Pacer and station wagon models,
Corsair and
Citation models came standard with Teletouch.
Execution
In theory, the idea of the Teletouch system made sense, but in its execution, the system quickly became the bane of the Edsel and its owners. Many new car buyers, and most automotive writers, found Teletouch to be a gimmick, while others found it distracting or confusing. Despite its marketing
talking points
A talking point, often used in the plural, is a pre-established message or formula used in the field of political communication, sales and commercial or advertising communication. The message is coordinated ''a priori'' to remain more or less inv ...
, it required the driver to remove a hand from the steering wheel rim to push a center-pod button.
Reliability proved poor due to the servo motor's hot, wet and dirty operating environment between the
bell housing
Bell housing or bellhousing is a colloquial/slang term for the portion of the transmission that covers the flywheel and the clutch or torque converter of the transmission on vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. This housing is bolte ...
and the exhaust pipe just above the road surface, and the somewhat troublesome associated relays, switches, wiring and connectors. On the other hand, the wiring inside the steering column did not move and was extremely reliable, since the pod containing the buttons did not turn with the wheel. The electric control current flowed through a set of slip rings and brush contacts, while the Teletouch buttons were held in the correct position with Neutral at 12 o'clock through a set of planetary gears in the steering column. The steering wheel was directly coupled to the steering linkage as with conventional steering columns.
Eventually, all push-button transmission selectors became a safety issue due to lack of industry-wide standardization. In addition, since the 1920s the center of the steering wheel had typically held the
horn
Horn most often refers to:
*Horn (acoustic), a conical or bell shaped aperture used to guide sound
** Horn (instrument), collective name for tube-shaped wind musical instruments
*Horn (anatomy), a pointed, bony projection on the head of various ...
button. While some cars of the late 50s had horn rings, some drivers instinctively hit the steering wheel center in an emergency, sometimes causing them to either damage the controls or cause an unexpected, hazardous gear change (occasionally causing transmission damage). The Edsel's system included an electro-hydraulic inhibitor switch activated by transmission fluid pressure which virtually eliminated the possibility of this happening.
The single circumstance under which a Teletouch could be put into gear with the car moving at greater than three to five miles per hour was if the neutral button was depressed first, thereby removing hydraulic pressure from the inhibitor switch, and then the reverse or park button pushed. These actions would, as a result, either shear off the parking pawl or suddenly set the rear wheels turning in the reverse direction, effectively locking them up against the road surface and possibly damaging the reverse bands in the transmission. Ironically, the failed Autolite Packard system protected against this set of circumstances by locking out not only reverse and park, but also neutral while the car was moving with any significant speed.
For the 1959 model year, Edsel dropped Teletouch as an option, and began the process of abandoning the automotive market by dropping its Mercury-based cars, and eliminating the Citation, and Pacer cars as well as the Bermuda and Roundup station wagons.
Steering wheel-mounted transmission controls have made a comeback since the mid-1990s introduction of
Porsche's
Tiptronic
The modern usage of the automotive term manumatic denotes an automatic transmission that allows the driver to select a specific gear, typically using paddle-shifters, steering wheel-mounted push-buttons, or "+" and "-" controls on the gear sele ...
system, although the controls for the selection of park, reverse, and neutral are almost always located elsewhere. They also invariably have the buttons or "paddles" for the functions that are on the steering wheel quite near the rim, for true "both-hands-on-the-wheel" functionality.
References
Old Car Weekly News page 1 Vol. 37 No. 42
References
{{Edsel
Automatic transmission tradenames