Brothers James and William Packard of Warren, Ohio entered business together in 1890 by forming the Packard Electric Company, manufacturing carbon arc lamps. James had purchased a 1898 Winton car and was not a satisfied owner.
The brothers apparently shared their ideas for improvements with Alexander Winton, who was not at all receptive. He literally told the Packards to build their own car if they thought they could do better. They did, and they did!
The Packards not only secured financing through one of the Winton bankers, they also poached two of Winton’s engineers. The first Packard appeared in 1899 as the Model A. It had a 142.6cid single-cylinder engine making 9hp, chain drive and a two-speed planetary transmission. The automotive press and the public very well received it. The early Packard models featured automatic spark advance and an H-gate shifter.
Depression Market
Lincoln and Cadillac had the support of Ford and General Motors during the difficult market environment of the 1930’s, putting Packard at a disadvantage. The fact that Packard had a single assembly line did allow them to maintain additional efficiencies, though. Packard was able to bring to market lower priced models, which further helped them in this economy.
About sixteen months before Emperor Nicholas II and his family were shot to death by a firing squad, the photo above was taken. These were the literal and figurative ‘first shots’ of the revolution that killed millions of Russian citizens (‘enemies of the state’) outright or sent them to gulags in Siberia, where their life expectancies would be measured in months or weeks.
Murder of children became a norm after he ordered the extermination of Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children. Authorities forcibly relocated millions of families to remote and uninhabited regions in Siberia and Kazakhstan. During their journey into exile, hundreds of thousands of children died of starvation or disease and were buried in mass, unmarked graves.(https://fee.org/articles/the-staggering-toll-of-the-russian-revolution)
