The Weirdest Non-Car Stuff Ever Made by American Car Companies

Automotive entrepreneur Walter P. Chrysler was also an avid boater, so it’s no surprise his company began adapting its engines for marine use in the 1920s. By the onset of World War II, the company had built an impressive market share. In 1965, Chrysler expanded the business beyond inboard engines with the purchase of West Bend’s outboard motor lineup and Lone Star Boats. Through the 1970s, Chrysler Marine offered a comprehensive lineup encompassing powerboats and sailboats up to 30 feet—many sharing names and components with Chrysler’s cars—as well as trailers to tow them.

Chrysler’s fortunes soured in the wake of the energy crisis, and by the late 1970s the company was facing bankruptcy. Lee Iacocca secured $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the federal government, initiating a restructuring that included selling off businesses not directly related to the building and selling of cars. Six Chrysler Marine execs formed Texas Marine International to purchase the boat business, while the outboard motors went to Bayliner, which sold them under the Force brand.

Open-heart surgery is routine today, but until the early 1950s, it was all but impossible. Dr. Forest Dodrill, a cardiac surgeon in Detroit, was trying to devise a way to temporarily bypass the heart so surgeons could operate inside it. In 1949 he shared his sketches with the Michigan Heart Association, whose chairperson was Charles Wilson, president of General Motors. Wilson connected Dodrill with the GM Research Laboratories (GMRL). Edward Rippingille, Sr., GMRL’s assistant general manager, said, “We have pumped oil, gasoline, water, and other fluids one way or another in our business. It seems only logical we should try to pump blood.”

Dodrill and GM created a device that bore a passing resemblance to a Cadillac V-12 engine, and on July 3, 1952, the machine—nicknamed the Michigan Heart—pumped the blood of Henry Opitek for 50 minutes as Dr. Dodrill operated. GM ultimately built four Michigan Hearts, which Dodrill used in at least 17 operations. More sophisticated heart-lung machines were soon developed, though not by GM. Today, one of the pioneering Michigan Hearts is preserved in the Smithsonian.

From the 1950s until the Berlin Wall fell, Americans lived with the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. A hallmark of the duck-and-cover era was the air raid siren. Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Bell Telephone, began working on engine-driven air raid sirens during World War II. The Office of Civil Defense connected Bell Labs and Chrysler, which initially supplied a 140-hp straight-8 engine.

The final version of the Chrysler Air Raid Siren arrived in 1952. In the ultimate act of “Put a Hemi in it,” the siren was powered by Chrysler’s new 331-cubic-inch (5.4-liter) FirePower V-8, which used the hemispherical cylinder head Chrysler had developed for use in World War II aircraft. The 180-hp engine drove a compressor that blew air through six horns at nearly 400 mph. Billed as the world’s loudest siren, its blast was measured at 138 dB from 100 feet, about as loud as standing next to a Top Fuel dragster. The entire 5,500-pound siren assembly rotated, and in rural areas, its wail could be heard up to 16 miles away. Chrysler built the sirens until 1957, and many served into the 1970s.

Henry Ford was a country boy at heart, and in 1941, when he overheard doctors from the Henry Ford Hospital discussing the lack of portable incubators in the countryside due to their high cost, he decided to get involved. Henry connected the doctors with engineers at his Rouge Plant, who set out to build a small, inexpensive portable incubator. The Ford incubator used a light bulb for heat, specially insulated so oxygen could safely be pumped into the incubator without the risk of fire.

In 1948, Ford responded to the polio crisis by developing an improved iron lung for children ages 7 to 12, reportedly in just 10 days. Ford engineers made subsequent improvements, including a full-length Plexiglas inspection window, allowing medical staff to see the patient without removing them from the machine, and a mechanism that rocked the chamber to maintain blood circulation.

In 1929, GM purchased the Allison Engineering Company, a manufacturer of aircraft engines, and began work on what would eventually become the V-1710, a 12-cylinder piston engine that would power several World War II fighters including the P-38 Lightning, P-39 Airacobra, and early P-51 Mustangs. During the war, the Army charged General Electric with development of Frank Whittle’s jet engine. GE could not keep up with production demands, so the government turned to Allison, cognizant of its parent company’s experience with mass production.

Allison produced and refined the J-33 and J-35 engines that powered America’s first-generation jet fighters, and it went on to create a full line of turbine engines for military and civilian aircraft. By 1949, Allison was America’s most prolific jet engine supplier. Allison also built a GM-designed hydraulic drive for tanks, which led to a market-leading line of heavy-duty automatic transmissions for trucks and buses. GM sold the jet engine business in 1993, while the Allison transmission division remained part of the corporate family until 2007.

Once Henry Ford finished putting the world on wheels, he tried to put it on wings. After building Packard-designed aircraft engines during World War I, Ford purchased the Stout Metal Aircraft Company in 1925. Henry promoted Stout’s triple-engine 3-AT as the future of air travel, but the 3-AT could barely get itself off the ground. After a mysterious fire destroyed the sole prototype, Ford put its own engineers on the project. They designed the greatly improved 4-AT Trimotor, nicknamed “Tin Goose” for its then-rare all-metal construction. With three engines and new luxuries including cabin heat and lavatories, the Trimotor made flying safer and more tolerable.

Ford built 199 Trimotors between 1926 and 1933, but the Tin Goose was soon outpaced by more modern planes like the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2. Henry lost much of his enthusiasm for aviation when a favorite test pilot was killed in the crash of a Ford Flivver, Henry’s pet project for a simple, affordable, single-seat airplane. Ford closed the Stout Aircraft Division in 1936, but the Trimotor remained in active service for the better part of 50 years. Eighteen survive today, with eight still airworthy.

General Motors founder William Durant was a conglomerate pioneer, and seeing parallels between the manufacture of cars and refrigerators, he purchased Frigidaire in 1919—this at a time when most people used iceboxes cooled by actual ice. Frigidaire became so ubiquitous that its brand name became synonymous with refrigerators, just as Kleenex is with tissue. Frigidaire made other appliances and designed air conditioning systems for GM vehicles.

Charles Nash, meanwhile, didn’t want his namesake company to tie up with refrigerator manufacturer Kelvinator so much as did the appliance maker’s president, George W. Mason, whom Walter Chrysler had recommended as Nash’s successor. Mason only agreed to the deal if Nash and Kelvinator merged. Kelvinator’s expertise later helped Nash develop the “All Weather Eye,” the first integrated climate-control system with all major components under the hood and dashboard. Nash-Kelvinator later merged with Hudson to form American Motors Corporation.

Chrysler designed its own air conditioning system for the Chrysler Building in New York City, then spun that expertise into the Airtemp Division, which sold home, industrial, and medical refrigeration systems. AMC sold Kelvinator in the late 1960s, while GM and Chrysler stayed in the cooling business until the 1970s.

Diversification was all the rage in post-WWII corporate America. Henry Ford II saw defense and aerospace as growth industries, so Ford founded Aeronutronic Systems in 1956 and acquired Philco in 1961. Philco was best known for radios, televisions, and batteries but by the mid-1950s had also become a well-established defense contractor thanks to its advanced transistor and electronics technology. Ford merged the two entities, and while Philco-Ford continued to produce consumer products, the Aeronutronic division specialized in government work, designing and developing satellite tracking systems, guided missiles, and communications satellites.

In 1963, NASA hired Philco-Ford to build the flight consoles and communications equipment for Mission Control in Houston. NASA used Philco-Ford equipment to direct every American-crewed space mission from Gemini IV through Apollo 17, including the first moon landing. Philco-Ford continued supporting Mission Control through Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and into the Space Shuttle era. Ford sold Philco’s consumer business to GTE in 1974 but kept the defense business, later renamed Ford Aerospace, until 1990.

Just as General Motors once dominated the automotive industry, it too dominated the locomotive business, at least for a while. GM purchased the Winton Engine Company in 1930, followed soon after by Winton’s primary customer, the Electro-Motive Company, which built self-propelled railcars. The Winton 201A diesel engine had to be completely reworked with help from Charles Kettering’s General Motors Research Laboratories, but EMC developed a successful lineup of switching and passenger locomotives. Winton and EMC were reorganized into the Electro-Motive Division, which introduced its seminal freight locomotive, the FT, in 1939.

Postwar, railroads were eager to replace their maintenance-hungry, labor-intensive steam locomotives with diesels, and EMD soon emerged as a market leader, eclipsing established locomotive manufacturers Baldwin, Lima, and the American Locomotive Company (Alco). In 1959, former Alco partner General Electric began producing its own line of mainline diesel locomotives, becoming GM’s primary locomotive competitor and surpassing EMD’s sales in the late 1980s. General Motors sold EMD in 2005. Incidentally, Alco, EMD’s strongest competitor in the 1940s and ’50s, also built automobiles from 1905 to 1913.

Several automakers built weapons for World War II, but Chrysler went a step further, not just building the M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks but also figuring out how to build them efficiently. Before the war, tanks were built in small batches and largely by hand. Chrysler developed a method of automotive-style mass production with subassembly and standardized tooling. The system was so efficient that the first tanks rolled off the assembly line while the factory was still being built around it.

Chrysler went beyond merely refining the assembly process. It established a tank testing facility at the Packard Proving Ground and answered an engine shortage with the A57 Multibank, a 30-cylinder, 20.5-liter, 370-hp behemoth made from five six-cylinder car engines arranged in a ring.

By war’s end, Chrysler had built 22,000 tanks, a quarter of America’s wartime production. Rather than exit the tank business, it developed and built several Army-designed models and designed the M1 Abrams in-house. Chrysler sold its defense division to General Dynamics in 1982 to raise cash for the car business, a move that gave Lee Iacocca pause. “I said to myself, ‘I must be crazy,’” he later commented. “I’m selling the only profitable business I have.”