The Lincoln Motor Company didn’t survive long under its original owners, but the car they created remained in production for a decade.

When the Lincoln Model L was introduced in August of 1920, the Lincoln Motor Company was already a going concern. In 1917, founders Henry Leland and son Wilfred Leland, unhappy with Billy Durant’s management of General Motors, resigned from Cadillac and formed a new company to produce Liberty aircraft engines for the allied war effort.

The new company was named after President Abraham Lincoln, the man Henry Leland revered above all others. A bronze statue of the Great Emancipator stood in front of the big new factory on Warren Avenue in Detroit, over the inscription “Let Man Be Free.” When the aircraft engine contract was wound up in January of 1919, the Lelands went to work creating a new luxury automobile, also bearing the Lincoln name.

Leland’s Lincoln was not so different from the Cadillac, produced by the company he’d  helped to found in 1903. Of roughly the same size and price range, Lincoln was a bit more conservative in its engineering, while it aspired to higher quality with only the best materials and components. Cadillac had introduced a V8 engine in 1915, developed  under Leland’s direction by D. McCall White. The Lincoln Model L featured a V8 as well, developed by the company’s talented engineer, Frank Johnson. The two engines were similar but with one remarkable difference.

Both V8s featured an aluminum crankcase with cast-iton cylinder banks, fork-and-blade connecting rods, and a single updraft carburetor. At 357.8 cubic inches, the Lincoln was significantly larger than the 314 CID Cadillac. But here’s the real departure: While Cadillac used a conventional 90-degree bank angle for its V8, Lincoln chose a 60-degree V-angle that is unorthodox to this day.

Why? With a single-plane crankshaft, a V8 has a problem. The unbalanced reciprocating forces of the eight working cylinders are focused at right angles to the combined angle of the two banks—in other words, parallel to the ground.  Their magnitude is equal to the vector sum of the forces of the two banks, producing a noticeable and unpleasant vibration commonly known as horizontal shaking force.

But early on, it had been recognized that if a V-engine’s bank angle is narrowed to 60 degrees, now the shaking force is equal in every plane while rotating at two times crankshaft speed. (See the 1915 diagram by P.M. Heldt above.) Problem solved, but now there’s another one. Instead of firing in even 90-degree intervals, now the eight cylinders fire at 60-120-60-degree intervals, introducing their own form of roughness. “Odd-fire,” we call it today. Leland saw this as a worthy tradeoff, comparing the uneven firing sequence to soliders breaking cadence as they marched over a bridge to control the bouncing. Perhaps. Cadillac supplied a more popular solution with its two-plane crankshaft introduced in 1924.

While the Model L was an engineering success, it was a commecial failure for the Lelands. Beset by supply shortages and tax problems with the federal government over the Liberty engine contract, the company struggled to generate revenue and was forced into receiversehip in late 1921. With no other options, Henry and Wilfred Leland appealed to Henry and Edsel Ford for help, and on February 22, 1922, Henry Ford purchased the company for the court’s minimum price of $8 million.

Unfortunately, the Lelands soon discovered that in Ford they had found not the savior they hoped for but simply a buyer. They were forced out of the company only a few months later. Feeling utterly betrayed, they pursued legal action against Ford for another decade, losing at every turn. But meanwhile, Lincoln’s new president, Edsel Ford, more than proved the worth of the car the Lelands created, as the Model L remained in production through 1930.