Packard Forum Index » General

William Margolin, (91) former engineer for the Packard Motor Car Company passed away earlier this week.

His tenure at Packard lasted from 1952 until 1956. We was part of the Advanced Engineering Department and helped to develop the Ultramatic transmission - more specifically, the torque converter and gearset design.

Bill described his days at Packard this way: "It was in the early days of the automatic transmission and all the designs were still evolving...a great time to be there. I would never have left. I was there the last day there was a Packard company."

He went on to work at Ford Motor Company and Ford New Holland and was earning patents for transmission parts in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Margolin spent thirty-six years as a mechanical engineer mainly in the automotive industry and received nine patents in American and Europe.

Was he the keynote speaker at what--Perrysburg??? a few years ago. I remember he was quite proud of having designed turbine blades that got an ultramatic equipped car to 60 in under ten seconds....

Is there any info on who he worked for prior to Packard???

I wish I had had the opportunity to hear Margolin speak, I hope someone recorded it. I often think what a shame that some of the ex-employees at the 1999 Centennial weren't recorded.

I just browsed my list of those Packard engineers between 1900 and 1954 who were awarded U.S. Patents. Of course this isn't necessarily a measure of contributions to a company or even of inventiveness, but I don't see Margolin's name among the 207 or so names. Just for those with curiosity, the leaders in terms of number of patents are J. Vincent with 163, L. Woolson with 148, A. Moorhouse with 121 and M. Tibbets with 117. All of these except Woolson had patents spread out over 4 decades of employment. Most (all?) of Woolson's patents were non-automotive (aircraft related), and a fair number of Vincent's were marine-related.

If you've got a favorite Packard engineer, I'd be glad to see how many patents he was assigned and in what decades. I've been working this data up for a future article, though not making much progress and wondering if there really is much interest in the topic. The total # of Patents assigned to Packard between 1900 and 1954 is 1736, the majority of them in the decades of the 20s and 30s.

OK, I will try and answer a few questions here.

To PatGreen: Yes, Bill spoke at the 2009 Perrysburg Meet and you have a good memory regarding the blade design.

To PackardV8: Sorry, no info of his employment prior to Packard. He did graduate from Cass Technical High School in Detroit (my alma mater) class of 1940. He went onto graduate from Wayne State University (again my AM) College of Engineering 1948.

To Owen: At the Perrysburg Meet in 2009 we were not set up for AV and we did not record his speech - sorry. As to his patents, I don't believe he had any with Packard, but the following shows these patents:google.com.mx/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=ininventor:%22William+Margolin%22

Bill was a great guy to talk to and an avid sailor - was winning long distance (235 mile) yacht races on his 33 foot boat "Cadenza" when he was in his late 70's.