I spent some time earlier to day trying to track down what came before the Spicer 18 transfer case.  Unfortunately, I can’t find anything such as a Spicer 12 or a Spicer 3 anywhere.  If the Spicer 18 was the Dana Corp’s first try at a transfer case, then it’s entirely reasonable to say they hit a homer with it, as it stayed in the jeep (though ratios and other minor changes were made) from 1941 to 1971, when the jeep started using a center pumpkin and the Dana 20 transfer case.

So, here’s some interesting facts I learned during my searches.

• The Dana Corp was originally founded as the Spicer Corp by Charles Spicer in 1904 when he was 29 to manufacture universal joints.  Here’s an 83 page PDF book of the first 100 years of the company.
• The Spicer Corp’s success seems to be the result of the industry standardization around their products due to their high quality and competitive pricing.
• In June of 1940 during a meeting between Bantam, government, Spicer and Timken representatives, Bantam and Spicer worked out the details of the drive train, for which Spicer received 130,000 for the tooling costs. (from the m38a1 site).  The front end was also worked out during this meeting by an engineer from Spicer.
• While the Willys used the passenger side drop transfer case (a spicer 18), the Ford Pygmy (Ford’s prototype jeep) and the Bantam BRC Mark I (the very first jeep prototype) and the BRC-60/Mark II (Bantam’s 2nd prototype) relied on a driver side drop transfer case from spicer that was also a Spicer 18. (Here’s more about it)
• I could only find 4 spicer transfer cases.  The Spicer 18, 20, 23 (for Chevrolet 4wd conversions) and 24 (for Ford 4wd conversions) (see Napco history).  There’s likely more, I just didn’t find any info about them.
• Charles Dana joined in 1913, injecting money into the company.  In a couple years, Charles assumed the presidency.
• In 1946, the company was officially renamed the Dana Corp, which by that time was a holding company for Spicer as well as Parish, Salisbury, Brown-Lipe and others.  The idea was to continue using the brand Spicer for the drive train products due to the strong brand name.  For some reason, that’s not clear to me, over time the Spicer brand name seemed to disappear in favor of the Dana name.

Here’s some other links about this early history:

• The 100th year aniversary book about the Dana Corp
• The Dana Company timeline
• Jeep by Jim Allen at Google Books
• Here’s some history form Novak Conversions
• History from the m38a1 site
• The history of Napco and Spicer