PastImperfect: 'Barney' Roos and the Jeep:Delmar "Barney" Roos was not a man to be trifled with: a brilliant engineer with boundless energy and a temper to match, he was someone who got things done.
Born in the Bronx in 1888, Roos went to work for Studebaker but joined Rootes in England in 1936 where he successfully adapted his Planar independent front suspension for a wide range of cars. A year later he returned to the US to join Willys-Overland.
In 1940 the US army issued a specification for a "light command and reconnaissance car" which was to have four-wheel drive, a minimum power output of 40bhp, weigh no more than 1,300lb and be able to carry 600lb. Additionally, the prototype had to be built in 49 days. American Bantam, Crosley, Ford and Willys-Overland all bid for the contract which was for an initial 4,500 vehicles.
Willys-Overland felt it had a real chance of winning, using an engine designed by Roos. Legend has it that when told that a 1,300lb weight limit had to be achieved Roos stormed out of a meeting.
He soon returned, however, and set about reducing the weight of the Willys-Overland prototype which weighed in at 2,423lb.
Ford produced a proposal based around what was effectively half a Ford tractor engine, which failed to find favour with the army.
Now it was all down to Roos. The army had accepted that the weight limit of 1,300lb was impractical and declared the contract was Willys-Overland's if it could reduce the weight of its prototype by 263lb without in any way sacrificing strength - a tall order. Roos found a lower gauge but higher strength steel while pruning away weight from all the unstressed components. It was claimed that he even weighed the paint to find the lightest.
In the end, when the US army weighed Roos' work they found that it was under the weight limit by just a few ounces. By now the prototype had acquired the name Jeep, which the Willys-Overland president had liked when it was used in an article about the vehicle in the Washington Post in March 1941.
Ford was ordered to tool up for production of the new Jeep alongside Willys-Overland, and with all parts interchangeable the new machine began to roll off the production lines in large numbers.
During the second World War the companies produced 600,000 Jeeps and it stayed in production for some 50 years. Civilian versions, better equipped and cheap, continued the success story for many years.
Roos turned his attention to independent suspension and automatic transmissions: but perhaps no work of his was more significant than his paring of 263lb off the Willys-Overland Jeep.