Cadillac
Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company. After a dispute between Henry Ford and his investors, Ford left the company along with several of his key partners in March 1902. Ford's financial backers William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland of Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company to appraise the plant and equipment in preparation for liquidating the company's assets. Instead, Leland persuaded the pair to continue manufacturing automobiles using Leland's proven single-cylinder engine. A new company called the Cadillac Automobile Company was established on 22 August 1902, re-purposing the Henry Ford Company factory at Cass Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was named after French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701.
James E. Winner Jr.
The inspiration for the Club came after his Cadillac was stolen, and he remembered back to his time serving in the Army when the steering wheels of jeeps would be protected using chains. Charles Johnson. a mechanic who said he had worked on developing the product with Winner before the incident in which the Cadillac was stolen claimed that he had not been properly credited for the development of the device and that the two men had made a verbal agreement in 1985 under which they would split any profits from the sale of the Club. Winner acknowledged that Johnson had been paid a fee to work on developing the device, but that the basic design, such as the pronged hooks that secure it to the steering wheel, were part of Winner's original design. A lawsuit that Johnson filed to pursue the claim was settled in 1993 for what was reported to be $10.5 million.