Rolls Royce: The silent and powerful car born out of a lunch

Ever since it was founded on March 15, 1906, Rolls Royce became a superlative for luxury - despite a chequered history that involved a bankruptcy, followed by nationalisation and a split between its automobile and aircraft engine division.
This was a car that wasn't just about the comfort of getting from Point A to point B - it was about noiseless luxury coupled with power that still helps it accelerate from 0-100kmph in 5 seconds or less.

The story of Rolls-Royce is the story of a tech tinkerer, Frederick Royce and car dealer Charles Rolls, who met on May 4, 1904 at Manchester's Midland Hotel. The duo, who couldn't have been more disparate if they tried, hit it off instantly, setting the stage for the formation of the company nearly two years later.

For a brand that pays attention to each detail, the hyphen between Rolls and Royce would have hardly gone unnoticed. True to its brand's character, the hyphen in Rolls-Royce is believed to stand for Claude Johnson, Rolls' partner, who was instrumental in arranging the historic lunch meeting between the company's two founders.

Ironically, for a luxury brand that had its Britishness written all over it, it was the Indian royalty, of the various princely states pre-independence, which first took a fancy to this car. The largest fleet, of 44 Rolls-Royce cars, was owned by the erstwhile Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh - with an apocryphal story of how, the royal, when snubbed by the company's staff, decided to buy and use the car for garbage collection till the company apologised. Of the 20,000 Rolls-Royce cars built before World War 1, 20 per cent or 4,000 cars were sold in India.
In contrast, the British royalty started using it only after the ascension of Queen Elizabeth 2 to the throne in 1953 - prior to which British royalty was ferried in a Mercedes Benz.

Handcrafted in detail, a Rolls-Royce takes upto six months to make, with even its assembly line operated manually. Each upholstered interior of the Rolls-Royce requires the hides of 15 adult bulls - cow hides won't do as as their pregnancy tends to leave stretch marks on their skin.

The brand's emblem, the Spirit of Ecstasy, was designed by British sculptor Charles Sykes, inspired by his muse Eleanor Thornton, the secretary and paramour of Lord Montagu, a British politician. The initial emblem had a finger on the lips, to signify silence - both of car's engine and the love affair between a married politician and his secretary, who tragically died on her way to India when the ship she was travelling on was torpedoed by the Germans in World War 1.

India's love affair with Rolls-Royce, which earned close to $2 billion in revenues last year, continued from the erstwhile maharajas to the Bollywood celebrities. It is believed that Nadira was the first Bollywood female star to own a Rolls-Royce - whose owners today include Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan.