The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers is a nickname given to a team of three Studebaker engineers, Frederick Morrell Zeder, Owen Ray Skelton, and Carl Breer. They would become instrumental in the founding of the Chrysler Corporation, and were hand-picked by Walter Chrysler to come with him when he started the new company. History The nucleus of the engineering team initially formed when Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company selected twenty-five university graduates in mechanical engineering to go through their two-year apprenticeship course. Frederick Morrell Zeder and Carl Breer were two such students, picked in 1909; they became close friends during the course. Zeder, the "front man for the team", was born in 1886; he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1909 with a degree in mechanical engineering and became an erecting engineer for the Allis-Chalmers Company in 1910. 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). Breer, the oldest of the Musketeers, was born in 1885 as the youngest of nine children; he worked in his father's carriage and blacksmith shop, and built his own steam-powered car in 1901; he would work at Toledo Steam Cars, Spalding, Northern and White, and designed a two-cylinder opposed-cylinder car called the Duro. When Zeder became Chief Engineer of Studebaker's Detroit operations, he asked Breer to join him in 1913. 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. Zeder asked Skelton to join him at Studebaker in 1916, which completed the trio; they became the Zeder, Skelton and Breer Engineering (ZSB) group. Breer went about fixing mainline engine flaws and high oil consumption. Skelton worked on a new transmission, after discarding their existing transmission design. Zeder was in charge of redesigning existing models, and creating designs for new models. The three designed Studebaker's successful Light Four, Light Six and Big Six models.