Ford introduced the Fordomatic automatic transmission in 1951, and its sound basic design served the company well for years.
You’ll notice we dropped a qualifier into the title of this story: first successful automatic transmission. In 1942, the Ford Motor Company had introduced Liquamatic for the Mercury and Lincoln brands, but it proved to be a failure and was quickly withdrawn from the market. (See our feature here.) In 1949, the Lincoln division offered an automatic transmission, but this was a Hydra-Matic supplied by General Motors. Not until 1951 did Ford offer an automatic of its own design and manufacture—sort of, as Borg-Warner had a lot to do with it.
Ford director of engineering Harold Youngren was an auto industry veteran who’d served as chief engineer at Borg-Warner before Ernie Breech, Henry Ford II’s second in command, brought him to Ford in 1946. Quickly recognizing that Ford’s pending automatic design, the Livermore ALT developed by the Detroit Gear division of B-W, was already obsolete, Youngren urged the company to acquire a more modern transmission from Detroit Gear.
However, Studebaker already held the rights to the rather sophisticated unit, so Ford contracted B-W’s Warner division to create a more streamlined design, and this became the 1951 Fordomatic (also rendered as Ford-O-Matic). Under their original agreement, Borg-Warner was to produce 50 percent of the units, while Ford produced the other half, constructing a giant plant in Fairfax, Ohio for the purpose.
Unlike the Studebaker/Detroit Gear automatic, Fordomatic was simplicity itself. While Studebaker used two planetary gearsets and the GM Hydra-Matic had three, Fordomatic incorporated a unified compound gearset with one carrier and two sun gears, one inside the other. This Ravigneaux gearset (patented by French engineer Pol Ravigneaux) could supply three forward gears by alternately holding the two sun gears.
The simple three-element torque converter dispensed with the lockup feature of the Detroit Gear unit, and the electro-hydraulic anti-creep function was eliminated as well. Additionally, the six-cylinder version of the Fordomatic was air-cooled. There was no vacuum modulator as with the Chevrolet Powerglide—hydraulic control pressure was regulated by the throttle valve and linkage.
Fordomatic introduced another familiar feature to the automotive world: the PRNDL. Previous automatic gear selectors had no integrated Park selection, or reverse was at the bottom of the pattern. Here Ford established the industry standard. While Fordomatic had three forward gears, it started in second gear in normal operation. To use first gear, the driver selected L for low on the “Semaphore Drive Selector,” as Ford called it, on the steering column. A throttle kickdown feature forced a third-to-second downshift when the gas pedal was mashed at speeds below 50 mph.
Simultaneously with Fordomatic in 1951, the Mercury division introduced Merc-O-Matic (same transmission, different branding). For 1955, Lincoln dropped the GM Hydra-Matic and adopted a beefed-up Fordomatic marketed as Turbo-Drive. Meanwhile, in 1956 Studebaker dropped its version of the B-W automatic in favor of the less expensive Ford/B-W design, labeled Flight-o-Matic. In 1958, Ford introduced a refined, dual-range version of the Fordomatic called Cruise-O-Matic, with a green dot on the selector to indicate the normal range. Through steady evolution, Cruise-O-Matic begat Ford’s FX, which begat the MX, FMX, and AOD transmissions, remaining in production through 1993.
