With Lincoln celebrating its 100th birthday, we look back at the brand’s highlights and milestones.
Before the Lincoln Motor Company, there were at least three other unrelated Lincoln-branded automakers. The Chicago-based Lincoln Motor Car Works produced components for the Sears Motor Buggy, and after Sears dropped out of the car business, the Lincoln Motor Car Works sold the vehicle on its own in 1912 and 1913. An earlier effort was the Lincoln Automobile Company of Lincoln, Illinois, which also had a two-year run, in 1908–1909. The first was Cleveland’s Lincoln Electric; its battery-powered car appeared and disappeared in 1900. The Standard Catalog of American Cars also lists three others: the Lincoln Auto Company (1908, Jersey City, New Jersey), the Lincoln Carriage & Automobile Company (1905, New York City), and the Lincoln Square Garden Company (Mineola, Long Island), none of which ever produced an automobile.
Today’s Lincoln was launched as the Lincoln Motor Company in 1917, by Henry Leland. Leland was a brilliant engineer who had previously founded Cadillac. He left Cadillac after clashing with GM president Billy Durant over Durant’s unwillingness to let Cadillac build Liberty aviation engines in support of the World War I effort. Leland’s reputation was such that immediately upon forming Lincoln, he received a $10 million advance from the government to build Liberty aviation engines. Unfortunately for Leland, Armistice Day came soon thereafter. With the war-production work ended, Leland decided to switch to automobiles.
Lincoln debuted its first car, the Model L, in late 1920. Its engineering was impressive, with a 60-degree L-head V-8 making 71 horsepower and a top speed of 70 mph, but its styling was homely. It arrived on the market just as the postwar recession was taking hold. Sales were slow. These 1921 models are shown at Lincoln’s factory.
In late 1921, the Lincoln Motor Company went into receivership. On February 4, 1922, Henry Ford purchased it for $8 million. A photo of the signing of the purchase agreement shows Edsel Ford and Henry Ford along with Henry Leland and his son Wilfred. There was, however, no love lost between the two Henrys, and the Lelands left the company four months after Ford bought it. Leland and his son later sued Ford over the terms of the purchase.
Edsel Ford became the president of Lincoln, and sales soon picked up. The car was improved with a longer wheelbase (136 inches), as well as engine and cooling updates. Edsel, who unlike his father had a keen design sense, also set about making Lincolns more stylish.
In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge switched from Pierce-Arrow to a new Lincoln. Silent Cal’s Lincoln marked the brand’s entrée to the White House motor pool, and its presidential presence would grow in the coming decades.
The Model K supplanted the Model L for 1931, and the K-series cars became Lincoln’s ultra-luxury flagships through the 1930s. The top KA models rode on a grandiose, 145-inch wheelbase. Atop the radiator shell was Lincoln’s running-greyhound hood ornament, which first appeared in 1929.
In 1932, Ford adopted a V-8 engine, and Lincoln kept its distance by introducing its first V-12. The brand went exclusively V-12 starting the next year. For 1934, all Lincolns used a 414-cubic-inch V-12 with aluminum cylinder heads, good for 150 horsepower.
In 1936, Lincoln added the lower-priced Zephyr model, and the brand’s sales leaped five-fold over the previous year. The streamlined styling was modern but not too out there. Much of the credit for the design goes to John Tjaarda, who worked for Briggs Manufacturing, which engineered and assembled the Zephyr bodies for Ford. The Zephyr was powered by its own L-head V-12 engine, giving the Zephyr a brag point over other medium-priced cars, but the V-12 unfortunately earned a reputation for overheating.
President Franklin Roosevelt personally drove Fords (including a Model A phaeton and a ’36 Deluxe convertible sedan), but in 1939 he ordered a Lincoln Model K for White House duty. Christened the Sunshine Special, it was modified by Brunn & Company and had a 160-inch wheelbase, widened rear doors, forward-facing jump seats, and seating for up to 11 people. In 1942, it was fitted with new front-end styling, armor plating, and bulletproof glass, and it remained in service for 11 years.
The Lincoln Continental was born from a modified Zephyr created as a one-off for Edsel Ford by designer Bob Gregorie in 1938. The Continental went into production as a coupe in late 1939 and a convertible the following year. Lower than the Zephyr and with a longer hood, the Continental boasted a clean, modern design with no running boards and an exterior, trunk-mounted spare tire.
In the original, 1940 Green Hornet serial movies, the title character—a newspaper publisher who leads a double life as a masked crime fighter—drives a modified 1937 Lincoln Zephyr coupe, which he describes as his “super speedster.” His sidekick is his servant, Kato, who says the speedster can do “better than 200″—some Hollywood magic, there.
Among the notables who owned Lincoln Continentals was Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, he owned two and is said to have called the model “the most beautiful car in the world.” Wright’s Continentals (seen here at his Taliesin North estate in Wisconsin) were customized and painted in his signature color of Cherokee Red.
President Harry S Truman rode to his 1949 inauguration in a Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertible. The White House soon ordered a fleet of nine custom-bodied 1950 Cosmopolitans, which were modified with a raised roofline and body armor, as well as one Cosmopolitan convertible. The Cosmopolitans stayed on into the Eisenhower Administration, and President Eisenhower had a plexiglass roof fitted to the convertible. President Kennedy rode in that convertible to his inauguration.
Mexico’s La Carrera Panamericana was a grueling, multi-day road race covering 2000-plus miles. It was run in the early 1950s and divided into sports-car and stock-car classes. In the 1952 race, ’53-model Lincolns finished a remarkable 1-2-3-4 in the stock-car class, and they repeated that feat the following year. In the race’s final year of 1954, Lincoln took first and second place.
The Lincoln Futura was a 1955 concept car built by Ghia in Turin, Italy, at a cost of $250,000. The car was the work of Lincoln-Mercury designer William M. Schmidt and featured a dual-dome plexiglass top (which raised for entry and exit), wildly hooded headlamps, and an air scoop that cooled the rear brakes. The car made its debut at the 1955 Chicago Auto Show and was displayed also at the Detroit auto show. The Futura later was featured in the 1959 movie It Started with a Kiss, starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford. But it would go on to much greater fame.
Customizer George Barris purchased the Lincoln Futura concept from Ford Motor Company in the mid-1960s, reportedly for a dollar. For a time, the car sat neglected behind his shop. When Barris was approached to create a Batmobile for the 1966 TV series, he used the Futura as its basis. The Batmobile was completed in just three weeks. Barris later made three copies using fiberglass molds from the original car, each mounted on a stretched Ford Galaxie chassis; those cars were largely used for promotional purposes. In 2013, Barris sold the original Batmobile at Barrett-Jackson’s Arizona auction for $4,620,000.
The 1956 Continental Mark II wasn’t, strictly speaking, a Lincoln, but instead spearheaded the new Continental Division. The Continental Mark II carried a base price of $9966 ($102,152 in today’s money) and came fully loaded—air conditioning was the only option. The cars were even shipped to dealers in a fleece-lined bag. Alas, the upmarket push proved too much of a stretch, and both the car and the division didn’t last beyond 1957.
The compass hood ornament, the work of designer Bob Thomas, was created for the 1956 Continental Mark II. After that car went out of production, the design was adopted by Lincoln. Now referred to as the Lincoln star, it has been modified over the years but remains the brand’s logo to this day.
The 1958–1960 Lincolns were the largest unit-body cars ever produced, with the ’58 model stretching 229 inches in length. The over-the-top styling featured angled quad headlights, a pointed front bumper, scalloped front fenders, canted tail fins, and a reverse-slanted and power-opening back window. Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara felt those cars had gone too far, and Lincoln dramatically changed course with its 1961 model.
A reaction to its oversized and overwrought predecessor, the 1961 Lincoln was 15 inches shorter in length but immeasurably greater in style and taste. The pared-down lineup consisted of a four-door sedan and four-door convertible, each with unique center-opening doors, and all taking the name Continental. The spare, restrained design is credited to Elwood Engel and stood in stark contrast to the excesses of the previous decade. The car was carefully evolved with only minor design changes that carried it through the end of the 1960s.
President Kennedy ordered a 1961 Lincoln convertible as a new presidential limousine, specifying a dark blue color. The car had the Secret Service code name X-100. Hess & Eisenhardt modified the car, adding extra length to the wheelbase and a power rear seat that could be raised 10 inches for viewing. A 1962-style front end was fitted the following year. Tragically, this is the car in which JFK was assassinated as he rode through Dallas in November 1963. It was the last time a sitting U.S. president rode in an open car.
Surprisingly given its infamy, JFK’s Lincoln limousine was refurbished for use by President Johnson and remained in service until 1977. A hardtop with bulletproof glass was added (the previous open car had a multi-piece top that could be installed), the car was repainted black, the interior was retrimmed, armor plating was fitted, and the output of the 430-cubic-inch engine was increased. The car is now on display at The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
In late 1965, a sleepless Lee Iacocca, then Ford Motor Company group vice president, placed a middle-of-the-night phone call to L. David Ash, a designer in the Special Development Studio. “Put a Rolls-Royce grille on a Thunderbird,” he reportedly said. Ash complied, and although design chief Eugene Bordinat wasn’t thrilled with the result, that seed of an idea became the ’69 Continental Mark III. Iacocca had a sense for what sells, and Lincoln’s entry into the burgeoning personal-luxury field proved a winner. The grille’s Rolls-Royce likeness would grow with the later Mark IV and Mark V generations, and sales soared.
The 1970 Lincoln Continental Mark III (together with the Ford Thunderbird) was the first car sold in the United States with anti-lock brakes, which were standard. Lincoln’s Sure-Track braking system, developed by supplier Kelsey-Hayes, could pump the rear brakes four times per second to prevent lockup. The following year, the ’71 Chrysler Imperial one-upped the Mark III with an anti-lock system that worked on all four wheels, but it was optional, and few buyers ordered it.
In 1971, Lincoln made air conditioning standard equipment on both the Continental and the Mark III. Lincoln was the first American brand to include A/C at no extra cost. This was not a terribly bold move, however, as better than 99 percent of buyers had opted for air conditioning the previous year.
The Car, a late-’70s horror flick about a driverless, possessed car that terrorizes a desert town, featured a 1971 Lincoln in the starring role. Viewers might not recognize it as such, since it was heavily customized by George Barris. The movie’s critical reception was typified by Variety, which said: “The Car is a total wreck.” Nevertheless, it spawned a 2019 sequel, The Car: Road to Revenge. This time, however, the title character was based on a Chrysler 300.
The Town Car and Town Coupe designations surfaced in 1972 as an option package on Lincoln’s four-door and two-door Continentals. In 1981, the big Lincoln became known simply as the Town Car and Town Coupe—although the two-door body style was dropped in 1982.
For a time in the 1970s, Lincoln buyers could get personalized plaques with their initials on them. They were mounted just above the outside door handle. These were for Bob and Dolores Yeager.
In 1976, Lincoln introduced a group of four Designer Series trim packages for the Mark IV. The Bill Blass, Cartier, Givenchy, and Pucci Editions each had cast-aluminum wheels and their own specific color scheme as chosen by the designer, whose signature appeared on the oval opera window and on a dashboard plaque. The option price was $1500 or $2000, depending on whether cloth or leather upholstery was chosen. The Designer Series returned with the 1977 Mark V and for years thereafter, and it eventually included other designers and migrated to the Town Car as well.
Keyword: Lincoln's Centennial: A Mega Gallery of Continentals, Presidential Limos, and More