A New Profession

The Photo Standalone news story from The New York Times, directly below, shows the progressive direction Hitler's Teutonic Engineering muscle was headed in. Clearly this German train lacked one central ingredient of "futuristic engineering" muscle: The delicate seed and/or germ that Harley Earl first developed into a new mechanism that he alone introduced inside Detroit's engineering world. It laid the will of power allowing GM to radically change and modernize all its products above and beyond any other manufacturer in the world. Call it what you may, but Harley Earl's "new profession" enabled GM a sophisticated new edge of technology to build the best quality mass produced products in volume production...far faster than any other company or country. Earl's juggernaught was a giant explosion inside Detroit's engineering world that entirely smashed Henry Ford's paradigm. But the reason nobody knows about it now, is because GM's largest share holders loved the fact Engineer-Earl wanted to keep it a secret. After all, Earl always believed that if his company had a golden goose, why on earth would they ever tell anybody about it? So, no one outside a small cadre of GM's largest shareholders ever knew. Naturally, GM's greatest leaders highly respected and loved the fact Harley Earl didn't want to get all the credit for his new invention. From the very beginning of Earl's Detroit story...GM's leaders ganged on board and backed this unusual renaissance man enabling this spirited new designer to go on and build his dream: Creating a new profession, that of Automobile Design. Which, by the early 1930s offered up an entirely new body of laws and principles to create all sorts of sophisticated self propelled transportation products. 

Essentially, Harley Earl's "new profession" was the keystone behind America's Arsenal of Design...a.k.a. the "Detroit Arsenal" or the "Arsenal of Democracy" to quickly ramp up for wartime building faster than any of our nation's war mongering adversaries could humanly believe possible. In other words, Mr. E's dramatic new technicalities of engineering design, such as using full-size clay models and his revolutionary new styling bridge made it possible for GM to devise a whole new system (production method) to take the critical math-based measurement points off all GM's new creations blossoming forth in Earl's secret design studios buried deep within the heart of GM's thorny engineering world. Of course, GM's greatest leaders, along with a small cadre of U.S. military commanders and a few top government officials in Washington kept this information highly classified going into the Cold War. All the while, this naturally included keeping the inventor's name a secret, too. Especially since this phantom American war designer, Harley Earl, never wanted to be associated with the central universe of his contributions [while he was alive] created before, during and after WW II...since all these products were aimed at killing people on a large scale.

Put another way, if Harley Earl had never moved to Detroit from California to explode his advanced methods of body development engineering inside GM's labyrinth...the outcome of WW II would have been dramatically different. Why you might ask? Among other things, Mr. Earl invented "Graphic Engineering" which was an offshoot of his automobile design profession (click link below). So, one can begin to better understand the domino effect of technological advancements that came directly from Earl. Detroit's war building machine was able to flex a much more powerful technologically sophisticated muscles, quickly pumping out revolutionary new war products that allowed the U.S. of A. a distinctive edge over our enemies. Think about it, we fought and conquered over two separate formidable opponents over giant oceans! Also, it's highly likely if Germany and Japan had ever had any advanced warning or knowledge as to how quickly America could ramp up for WW II (swiftly become the larger predator), they would have never dared risking taking the challenge.