Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow

by Steve Lehto

  As for Henry Ford, the experience scared him away from auto racing. He died in 1947, and Ford Motor Company would not return to auto racing until 1952.31 Miller and Tucker, on the other hand, were convinced their cars were spectacular and would have done much better if only they’d had a little more time. Their partnership dissolved, and Miller returned to working on cars by himself.

  Miller eventually sold his company, and ran into financial difficulty again. Meanwhile, his cars continued showing up at Indy. In 1941 the field of the 500 contained three cars of his design, with the engine in the rear powering all four wheels.32 However, when the United States entered World War II, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway shut down for four years.33 Many racers and car builders returned to more mundane professions. Miller established a shop in Detroit and hoped to work with the auto industry, but his ventures away from the race tracks never did well.

  The Tucker Combat Car

  Back in Michigan, Tucker and his family moved to Ypsilanti, thirty-five miles west of Detroit. It was there that he started a company called Ypsilanti Machine and Tool in 1939. Some of it occupied a wooden barn that stood behind the family home on Park Street; a larger two-story metal building a little farther back was where production took place. The business did well, and soon the small facilities were crowded with workers. Joe Butcko, a tool and die maker, worked for Tucker at the facility starting in 1943, after apprenticing in nearby Plymouth, Michigan, when he was sixteen. He remembers the barn as unbelievably busy and crowded. Two shifts of workers kept it running around the clock, seven days a week. “That barn was so damn crowded, even the mice were hunchbacked.”1 Whenever Tucker came through, he was always wearing a suit and a tie, even if he was spending time working in the shop.

  Tucker’s universe was geographically quite small. He would walk from his house to his shop out back, meaning he was never very far from his family. The house they lived in was huge and left in the able hands of wife Vera to run. Whenever Tucker went into town he came home with fresh-cut flowers for Vera. And when Preston traveled, he would bring back even bigger gifts for her. One time he returned with fifty rosebushes, which he planted all around the yard and down both sides of the driveway.2

  The Tuckers frequently invited others over, and the large house was often packed, with plenty of food for anyone who stopped by.3 Tucker also loved classical music and listened to it whenever he could, furthering the welcoming feel of the Tucker home.

  At work, Tucker began exploring the possibility of furnishing goods to the military. He envisioned an armored vehicle driven by a powerful engine, racing around a battlefield faster than the lumbering army tanks of the day. Working with Harry Miller, he developed a prototype, which he called the Tucker Tiger Tank. The vehicle was wheeled, not tracked, so it would more properly be considered not a tank but an armored car. It was also fast, powered by a Packard V-12 engine Miller had modified for this application.4

  Tucker got good publicity for his project. He showed it to Mechanix Illustrated, which ran an article titled “Armored Tank Attains Speed of 114 M.P.H.” According to the piece, published in February 1939, the vehicle’s body was welded together and weighed ten thousand pounds. Heavy by automobile standards, it still weighed a ton less than similar armored vehicles and was faster than other vehicles in its class. Tucker claimed that it attained speeds of 78 mph over rough ground and 114 mph on “level road.” The accompanying photograph showed the camouflaged car, bristling with machine guns, while Tucker, whom the magazine called “an armament manufacturer,” stood inside it, pointing at the gun turret on the roof. The vehicle’s main punch was delivered by a 37 mm cannon mounted in it.5

  Although World War II had not started by this point, many people thought a European conflict was likely coming. But the US Army had already decided against buying armored vehicles like Tucker’s, opting instead for lighter reconnaissance cars.6 However, the main gun turret Tucker had designed for his armored car was of interest.

  During World War I, the air forces of the world had experimented with airplane-mounted machine guns to shoot at other planes. Shooting accurately from a moving target proved difficult. Airplane designers developed turrets to allow gunners to swivel, but as the planes moved faster and the guns got larger and heavier, accuracy became a problem. Tucker’s gun turret used electric motors to rotate the gun, allowing the gunner to aim more swiftly and track a target in flight.

  Tucker applied for a patent on his “Gun Control Mechanism” on July 18 1939, and demonstrated it to US Army Air Corps representatives who visited his Ypsilanti shop.7 They were impressed. The chief of the air corps called the turret “ingenious” and invited Tucker to a conference at Wright Field to discuss the needs of gun turrets with the military.8

  A postwar report noted that Tucker’s turret had shown promise by solving one particular problem other turret designers had encountered: when his electric motors were suddenly reversed during tests, they did not arc as those of other manufacturers had. His turret’s motor was better insulated and less prone to burning out from excessive use. Air corps officials thought Tucker’s turret moved too slowly but were curious to know if it could be improved. They gave Tucker a $10,000 development contract to work on it.

  But in the end the military did not care for the results. Part of the problem had been caused by delays in getting parts from the government, so Tucker earned some sympathy from the decision-makers, but nevertheless they passed on his design.9

  Tucker was undeterred. In 1940 he started a new company he called Tucker Aviation Corporation, hoping to build airplanes for the military. He envisioned a small plane—built around a powerful Miller engine, of course—cheaply made and mass-produced. His plane, the XP-57, would be rear-engine with a driveshaft running through the single-seat cockpit to the propeller at the front of the plane. Although unusual, this configuration was not unheard of. Bell manufactured the P-39 Airacobra with an engine behind the pilot and a driveshaft to the propeller. The P-39 first flew in 1939 and was in mass production by 1941.10

  Tucker’s XP-57, nicknamed the Peashooter, had some novel features that could have made it attractive for mass production. The airframe was to be made of metal tubing and its fuselage from aluminum. Plywood wings meant it would not use much aluminum, in short supply during the war. Officials liked the idea enough on paper to ask Tucker to build one, but the contract expired without a prototype being built. A US Air Force fact sheet on the XP-57 claimed that the project failed because of “financial problems” at Tucker Aviation.11

  Another part of the problem may have been that the rear-engine design was not optimal for an airplane. Pilots noted that the Bell P-39 had strange “spin characteristics” because of the plane’s odd balance. The design never caught on, and most P-39s built during the war were given to other countries; the United States continued to use airplanes with front-mounted engines.12 But the root of the issue may have been something simpler: Tucker was not an aeronautical engineer, and airplanes were beyond his realm of expertise.

  So he returned his focus to his terrestrial designs. He heard that the government was having a hard time getting turrets made for B-17 bombers. He met with air corps representatives and left believing they would buy turrets from him, even though no contract had been signed. The turret he proposed was capable of handling the .50 caliber machine guns on the B-17. Tucker built a prototype, but it was deemed “unsatisfactory.”13

  Perhaps the biggest problem facing Tucker was the size of his company, or lack thereof. He had allies—several companies had agreed to manufacture the turrets for him if he got the contract—but none of them were the size of Bendix, Westinghouse, General Electric, and Sperry, the giants who were bidding on this project.14

  Tucker continued working on the prototype and in 1941 filed for another patent on a “Gun Mounting and Control Mechanism,” which looked much like the ball turrets eventually used in American airplanes during the war. The primary claims Tucker made about his electrically driven ball
turret were that the gunner could swing the guns quickly and the turret would prevent the gunner from accidentally shooting his own plane.15

  Then Tucker decided to revive his armored car concept to create a platform for his gun turret. In 1942 Mechanix Illustrated once again ran a piece on the vehicle, now described as a “mobile anti-aircraft fortress.” The magazine said it was being manufactured “for the U.S. Army by a Michigan firm.” It did not mention Tucker by name but said the car would chase after airplanes flying overhead and, because of its amazing speed, would be able to fire thousands of rounds at them before they got away.16 Again, it came to nothing. Tucker’s combat car was never purchased by the US military.

  Nor did he land any big contracts with the government to make his gun turrets—though stories persist that he did. Some of the claims began quite early, but it is unclear who started them. One 1946 newspaper article detailing Tucker’s life story noted that he held a variety of patents, which was true, but then it added, “His wartime royalties on the gun turret alone would probably have run more than $100 million—if the government hadn’t confiscated the patents. Tucker got around $200,000.”17

  The story may have been encouraged by the public relations department of Tucker’s company. According to its 1948 film Tucker: The Man and the Car,18 Tucker “turned the patents over to the United States during the war.” No mention was made of the value of the patents or whether Tucker was compensated for them, however, and it sounded more like he had given them up willingly as an act of patriotism than had them confiscated.19

  Even more pervasive is the myth that the Tucker turret was widely used by US forces during World War II.20 There is little evidence to support the story, and authoritative sources debunk it. In 1947 the US Army Air Forces commissioned a report on gun turret procurement before and during the war. Titled Development of Aircraft Gun Turrets in the AAF, the report was declassified in 1959, almost three years after Preston Tucker passed away. It described the methodical approach military planners had used in acquiring turrets for warplanes:

  In the hectic early days of the war in Europe, the Materiel Division sought to accelerate experimental work on fire control equipment by breaking the whole problem into separate components, each to be a project within itself. Tentatively, and as a point of departure, the major industrial concerns interested in turret development were assigned specific airplanes to arm. In this way it came about that Sperry designed equipment for the B-17, Bendix for the B-25, Martin for the B-26, and General Electric for the A-20.21

  When Tucker received the $10,000 in development money, other planes’ turrets were already assigned to Sperry, Bendix, Martin, and GE. A plane no one was designing a turret for was the B-18, and it was assigned as Tucker’s project. The B-18 Bolo airplane would see little use during the war and was “already obsolescent” when Tucker received the assignment. As such, his turret project was “doomed to failure.”22 The government did not order any Tucker turrets for its airplanes. In addition, the report noted that Tucker’s turret was too slow and never had much hope of success.

  Andrew Higgins

  In March 1942 a man named Andrew Higgins announced that he had bought Tucker Aviation Corporation. Higgins’s claim to fame was supplying boats to the US military. He had built boats in New Orleans before the war, and when the war started, he focused on boats for the navy and the marines. He became known for patrol torpedo boats, commonly called PT boats, and smaller boats designed to bring soldiers ashore and let them disembark quickly on a beach. These “Higgins boats” would be instrumental in many Allied wartime operations. News reports at the time said Tucker’s company held contracts with the government worth $250 million,1 but it is unclear where that story originated and it most likely was not true. It is possible that reporters confused Tucker’s contract with one Higgins had received around the same time for “200 freighters, said to be the largest single order for shipbuilding ever made in the United States.”2

  Preston Tucker told the press that his negotiations with Andrew Higgins had taken only ten minutes. The men had known each other for a couple years and had simply written an agreement on a piece of paper and signed it. Though Higgins became the owner of Tucker Aviation, the arrangement constituted a joint venture between the two men, focusing on “airplane and boat armament production.”3 Tucker would become vice president of Higgins Industries, “overseeing the new Higgins-Tucker division.”4 He would move his operation down to New Orleans, into a new plant Higgins promised to build for it.

  The following year, Tucker did indeed move his entire enterprise to New Orleans, with perhaps a hundred workers in tow. Joe Butcko was one of the Michigan workers transplanted. Though it was Tucker’s then eighteen-year-old son, Preston Jr., who had hired Butcko as a tool and die maker for his father’s company in January 1943,5 the employee got to know Preston Sr. well, something quite common for the workers there. “He was easy to get to know. Very few people called him Mr. Tucker. He was referred to as Pres.”6

  When the Tucker contingent first arrived in Louisiana, they began work on engines for landing craft.7 Though the Tucker turret had not been purchased and the XP-57 project had evaporated, perhaps Higgins believed Tucker could make a military contract materialize now that a large manufacturer had acquired his operation.

  “When we went to New Orleans, [Preston] really treated the people swell,” Butcko remembers. He would stop and talk to the workers on the plant floor, always dressed impeccably in business attire. Still, Butcko never saw Tucker lingering on the plant floor. “He always walked like he was going someplace in a hurry.”

  Tucker was also a heavy smoker, although few people thought much of it in that era. Seemingly everyone smoked cigarettes. Tucker often kept a pack inside his suit jacket and would reach in and retrieve a cigarette without removing the pack from his pocket. It was a helpful maneuver during the years of wartime scarcity, when people might be inclined to ask for a cigarette from someone brandishing a pack, but Tucker would continue to employ it even after the war was over.8 As a result, many people noticed he had a lit cigarette in his hand as he spoke, often waving his hands to make a point, but no one could tell where the cigarette had come from.

  For an eighteen-year-old like Joe Butcko, working for Higgins-Tucker was an adventure. He kept his toolbox next to that of Arthur Chevrolet, brother of one of the founders of the car company of that name. Arthur seemed a natural fit for Tucker’s business, since he had spent time in Indianapolis building race engines. Now he was in charge of testing the engines being built on a dynamometer, which measures their mechanical force.9

  The Higgins-Tucker collaboration started well. “They used to throw parties for us, Higgins and Preston,” Butcko recalls. “It was pretty damn classy.” Dinner parties at the nicest restaurants in town could not save the partnership once trouble started, however. Higgins had an ego. Butcko once heard Higgins say, “I am Andrew Jackson Higgins, the Henry Ford of the South.”10 A little over a year after they started working together, Higgins and Tucker had a falling out. Higgins said nothing publicly and Tucker returned to Ypsilanti. Higgins-Tucker quietly became Higgins Engines. Neither partner ever commented officially on the breakup, but Higgins’s daughter later said her father came to believe that Tucker was “all fluff and no substance.”11 It might just have been that the two men’s personalities clashed.

  Around this same time, Harry Miller was running a machine shop in Detroit. He was working on a monstrous aircraft engine that he said would generate more than 3,000 horsepower—an obvious frontier for the engineer to conquer, since he had done so much with marine and automotive engines. But in 1943, after six weeks of hospitalization, he died of a heart attack. He was sixty-five.12

  Tucker’s Automobile Plans

  Harry Miller was gone and the partnership with Andrew Higgins had crumbled, but Preston Tucker remained determined to make his mark. He returned to the realm of automobile manufacturing, studying the recent advances in hydraulics. Hydraulic systems,
using fluid to drive accessories on an automobile, had been gaining more widespread use before the war. Power steering was already in development, and people wondered to what other uses hydraulics might be put.

  Tucker saw the advantages hydraulics offered over typical mechanically driven systems. For example, the fluid in a hydraulic system cushioned the movement of mechanical parts so there was no jerky start at the beginning or harsh stop at the end of an action. Tucker theorized that the same drive technology might be used to actually propel cars, by replacing the automotive drivetrain with a fluid drive system.1 He studied other advances made recently in automobiles as well, particularly the high-performance components and aerodynamic styling used on race cars. He imagined that an all-new line of cars, packed with the latest improvements, would be the easiest thing he’d ever had the chance to sell. And he’d build them himself.

  He would have the opportunity due in large part to the changes in American industry brought about by World War II, which was now in its final years. As the United States was drawn into the conflict, the bulk of American manufacturing had been commandeered for the war effort.2 By far the most important sector to be harnessed was the automobile industry. Spread over most of the country, in practically every city, were more than a thousand industry contractors and at least ten times as many subcontractors. Half a million Americans were producing vehicles before the United States started sending forces overseas, and the industry employed more than seven million.3 The US government switched that production capacity over to manufacturing weapons of war, particularly tanks and airplanes for the army.