Chevy small-block V8 -- original engineering team?

[Can_Handle_the_Truth]

In 1955, Ed Cole and a group of engineers got together and developed the original Chevy small-block V8. As of its 40th anniversary in 1995, more than 63 million small-block Chevrolets had been produced. Untold millions of them are still on the road.

You have to understand just how far ahead of its time this engine was when it was introduced. Thin-wall castings, stamped-steel rocker arms on spherical pivots, hydraulic lifters that metered oil to the cylinder heads by way of hollow pushrods, slipper skirt aluminum pistons, interchangeable cylinder heads with wedge-type chambers and an intake that sealed the lifter valley. Cole’s sales pitch to the Chevrolet hierarchy went along the lines of, “high-performance doesn’t have to mean high price.” To this day, all small-block Chevy V-8 engines share their basic geometry with the original 265-cid engine produced in 1955.

I remember reading an editorial in an engineering magazine around 1995 that gave the Chevy small-block V8 as an example of “true American ingenuity”. This editorial claimed that many of the advanced engineering features of the engine were worked out by Ed Cole and an “unnamed engineer” who had a “machine shop and foundry in his basement”. Apparently they did R&D in this guy’s basement to make sure the concepts worked before presenting them to Chevy brass. Does anyone know anything about this, especially the name of the basement engineer?