Auto quiz bowl: Who has oldest logo?

Which company logo came first: the Chevy bow tie…or the Ford oval? Both automakers have interesting stories to tell…offering more than a century of memories. Ford is the correct answer.

Henry Ford created his motor company in 1903, and the distinctive Ford script came along in 1907, preceding the oval. It was not the handwriting of the founder. Rather, it was the handiwork of a trained calligrapher – Childe Harold Wills. He was a graphic designer as well Ford’s chief engineer/designer.

Wills was Henry Ford’s first partner in the car business. They squabbled a lot, as strong-willed individuals who become business associates are often prone to do. But Ford was also quick extend a compliment. He said Wills is “the man the public thinks I am.”

Llewellyn Hedgbeth of Second Chance Garage, a classic car restoration website, described Wills as being “gruff, impatient, hard to get along with and a perfectionist who often thought a little more tinkering could make things, even very good things, better.”

Hedgbeth said Wills would tell friends (more than 100 years ago): “If it’s in a book, it’s at least four years old, and I don’t have any use for it.”

The Ford oval was introduced in 1907, first appearing in Great Britain to identify Ford dealers in the United Kingdom. The Ford symbol was Americanized in 1912.

For a time, beginning in 1950, Ford vehicles featured a different emblem – a red, white and blue heraldic crest, reminiscent of the Ford family’s authentic coat of arms from 18th century England.

The lead designer on the project, L. David Ash, filled the new badge with traditional heraldic imagery. The shield was divided into three colored sections by a chrome-edged black chevron that contained five chrome bezants, for ornamental effect. Each section depicted a chrome “passant lion,” in the familiar “right-forepaw-raised position.”

Ford’s blue oval logo was reinstated globally in 1982 appearing on nearly all Ford vehicles worldwide.

Ray Wert of the Jalopnik website said Chevrolet’s bow tie emblem was created in 1913 by William C. Durant, a co-founder of the company.

Wert reported that Chevy’s archivist once said the symbol “originated in Durant’s imagination when, as a world traveler in 1908, he saw the pattern as a design on wallpaper in a French hotel. He thought the shape would make a good nameplate for a car.”

Nice story…but pure fiction. Wert cited research by author Lawrence R. Gustin, who interviewed William Durant’s widow, Catherine Durant, in 1973. She said the symbol was seen by her husband in a newspaper advertisement while they vacationed in Hot Springs, Va., around 1912.

“We were in a suite reading the papers, and he saw this design and said, ‘I think this would be a very good emblem for the Chevrolet.’”

Wert credited automotive historian Ken Kaufmann with finding “the key that unlocked the truth. Kaufmann, while reading old issues of The Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, came across an advertisement for Coalettes,” a product of the Southern Compressed Coal Company of Atlanta.

Interestingly, the Coalettes newspaper ad ran on Nov. 12, 1911, just nine days after Durant incorporated the Chevrolet Motor Company, along with co-founder Louis-Joseph Chevrolet, a Swiss race car driver.

(Durant and Chevrolet had met in Detroit, Mich., where Durant was working for carmaker David Dunbar Buick. Durant recruited Chevrolet in 1909 to drive Buick race cars. Together, Durant and Chevrolet decided to form their own company.)

In the mid-1950s, Chevy and Ford began to rock the automotive world, with the introduction of two new models that developed into iconic brands, the legendary Chevrolet Corvette sports car and the Ford Thunderbird personal luxury car.

The Corvette hit the market first in 1953. The car was named by Myron E. Scott, assistant director of public relations at Chevrolet. Management said it wanted a “c” word, but not an animal. Scott suggested “Corvette,” a speedy-pursuit, small warship in the British navy.

Scott was lavishly praised but unfazed. He already had a personal “claim to fame.” While serving in 1933 as the chief photographer at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, he came across a few boys racing down a hill steering vehicles they had made of orange crates and soap boxes, and he snapped their pictures.

Scott became the “Father of Soap Box Derby” in 1934. Dagnabbit. Is that not good stuff?