In May 1939, General Motors started production on the Hydra-Matic on the Oldsmobile cars.This invention was only the first step towards Thompson’s goal of designing a fully automated transmission. In 1928, with Thompson’s help offered a refined version of it as the Synchro-Mesh Transmission in 1928 Cadillacs.Cadillac also purchased Thompson’s patents. They were interested in the idea, and Thompson was retained as a consultant while the transmission was perfected. In 1924, he finally met with Lawrence Fisher, managing director of Cadillac Motor Car Division under General Motors, and Ernest Seaholm, Cadillac's chief engineer.Thompson received his patent for his automatic gear shifting mechanism. On 9 October 1923, the engineer Earl A.After several trips between Oregon and Detroit, and months spent improving the design, he had a better design patented. In April of 1922, Earl Thompson, a young engineer, armed with drawings and data for a prototype synchromesh transmission, set out for Detroit to sell it to the automobile industry.īut the automobile manufacturers were not impressed their customers were satisfied with manual transmissions as they were.Alfred Horner Munro ended up with the patent to back-up his claim, a Canadian patent in 1923 followed by similar in the UK (1924) and United States (1927). Munro designed his device to use compressed air rather than hydraulic fluid so it lacked power and never became sold commercially. In 1921, the first automatic transmission was invented by a Canadian steam engineer, Alfred Horner Munro.You can find a Hydra-Matic Drive transmission, produced between 19, on display at the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum (see below).īelow is a history of automatic transmission collated in chronologically order from various sources, including the patent, on the Internet:. Did you know automatic transmission was patented in the same year as insulin in 1923? It was also used in World War II M-5 Stuart tanks created by General Motors in 1942.Īdvertised as the greatest advances in car since the self-starter in 1940s, the automatic transmission had a longer history than expected.
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