The Three Musketeers (Studebaker engineers)

The Three Musketeers is a nickname given to a team of three Studebaker engineers, Frederick Morrell Zeder, Owen Ray Skelton, and Carl Breer.

Later, he would lead a consulting firm specializing in power plant design, and join the EMF Company (which was taken over by Studebaker in 1912).

[3][4][5] Owen Ray Skelton, the third member of the team, had started his career at Pope-Toledo in Ohio, and later came to work as a design engineer with Packard Motor Car Company as a transmission specialist.

[10] Walter P. Chrysler, in January 1920, was working for Willys-Overland in Elizabeth, New Jersey as vice president and general manager.

Their new design, to be released in 1920, was to be called a "Chrysler"; a colossal sign of incandescent lights spelling that name out was erected on top of the Willys plant.

[13][14] These plans were halted, however, when funds set aside for the Chrysler Motors Division of the Elizabeth plant were discovered to have been depleted by Willys' Toledo branch.

[4] Zeder, Breer and Skelton were embarrassed, as they had coaxed a complete team of engineers to go to Willys with them from Studebaker.

[23] One of the first things he did as their new chairman was to ask engineers Zeder, Skelton, and Breer to close their consulting firm in New Jersey and come to Detroit with him.

[30] In 1931, Zeder and Skelton's design of the Floating Power Plymouth (which used advanced rubber engine mounts to reduce vibration) came about in part from Zeder's friendship with Charles and William Mayo (the founders of the Mayo Clinic), with whom he observed numerous surgeries and studied the function of cartilage and connective tissue in the human body.