The 1920s turned the automobile from a rich family's toy into something most American households could finance. Closed, weatherproof bodies became the norm, credit buying spread fast, and manufacturers fought over paint, brakes and horsepower. Endurance racing was born at Le Mans, and land speed records fell on the sands of Daytona and the mountain roads of Sicily. By the decade's end, roughly one American in five owned a car, and the numbered highway signs that replaced named auto trails still mark American roads today.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1920s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The last Model T rolls off the line
On the tile: Model T's End1927
Starting in 1914, nearly every Model T left the factory painted black, and it took until the 1926 models for Ford to offer colors again. By then the car's long run was nearly over. On May 26, 1927, Henry and Edsel Ford drove the fifteen-millionth Model T out of the Highland Park plant, with "The Fifteen Millionth" painted along its side. It was the ceremonial last one after 19 years and some 15 million cars, and Ford turned to its replacement, the Model A.
When Ford unveiled the Model A on December 2, 1927, after a five-day run of full-page ads in 2,000 newspapers, the New York Herald Tribune figured that one million people tried to get into Ford's New York headquarters to see it. Mounted police patrolled the crowds in Cleveland, and more than nine million Americans visited Ford dealers that week. Within two weeks there were 400,000 orders, more than Ford could build. After nineteen years of the Model T and its foot pedals, buyers got a conventional three-speed gearbox, more colors and more body styles.
In May 1927, Ford shut down Model T production for six months to prepare the Model A. Chevrolet seized the opening, selling more than a million cars and finishing 1927 as America's best-selling make, knocking the Model T from its perennial first place. General Motors president Alfred Sloan had bet that buyers would pay a little more for comfort, features and style, and the new Chevrolet Capitol, with an overhead-valve engine and a conventional three-speed transmission, proved him right. Ford won the crown back with the Model A, but only briefly.
Walter Chrysler had run Buick and then been hired to rescue the struggling Willys-Overland before taking a controlling stake in the ailing Maxwell Motor Corporation in 1921. In 1924 he put his own name on a new Maxwell-built car, the Chrysler Six, with a high-compression six-cylinder engine and four-wheel hydraulic brakes. It sold more than 32,000 in its first year, so well that on June 6, 1925, Maxwell was reorganized as the Chrysler Corporation. Buying Dodge Brothers in 1928 made Chrysler the third of Detroit's Big Three.
Until the 1920s, most cars had no permanent roof, and buyers put up with rain, noise and dirt because open cars were cheaper than closed ones. In 1922, Hudson's Essex brand priced its new Essex Coach, a fully enclosed body, at $1,495, just $300 more than its open touring car and a much smaller premium than any rival charged. Buyers snapped it up. Hudson kept cutting the price, and by 1925 the closed Coach actually cost slightly less than the open Essex, helping set off an industry-wide shift to closed bodies.
Frederick and August Duesenberg built racing engines before they built a passenger car, and it showed. Their Model A, introduced in 1921, was the first production automobile with four-wheel hydraulic brakes. That same year their racers carried hydraulic brakes to the French Grand Prix at Le Mans, where Jimmy Murphy outbraked the European cars and beat Ralph DePalma's Ballot by nearly fifteen minutes, the first Grand Prix win for an American car. Every automaker eventually adopted four-wheel hydraulic brakes, though some took more than a decade to follow.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans was only in its second year in 1924 when a Bentley 3 Litre driven by John Duff and Frank Clement won it, the first of six Bentley wins there. In 1927, all three works Bentleys were caught up in a single pileup at White House corner that put two of them out. The third, a 3 Litre nicknamed Old Number 7, carried on with a bent chassis and a broken headlamp, and Sammy Davis and Dudley Benjafield nursed it home twenty laps ahead of the next car. The marque's gentleman drivers became famous as the Bentley Boys.
Sir Herbert Austin's company was in receivership in 1921, and his board opposed building a tiny economy car. So Austin designed one anyway, putting his own money into the project and working at his home with an 18-year-old draftsman, Stanley Edge. The Austin Seven was revealed in July 1922 and was soon selling for 165 pounds, billed as "the motor for the millions." Aimed, like the Model T, at people who had never been able to afford a car, it killed off Britain's cyclecars and badly dented sales of the motorcycle and sidecar.
On December 17, 1922, five Citroen half-tracks, cars fitted with Adolphe Kegresse's flexible tracks in place of rear wheels, left Touggourt in Algeria bound for Timbuktu. Led by Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, they covered about 2,000 miles of desert in 21 days and reached Timbuktu on January 7, 1923, the first crossing of the Sahara by motor vehicle. Andre Citroen, who had sent them, turned the feat into a huge publicity campaign, and the explorers did not get home to Paris for months.
Early automobile tires were narrow and pumped hard, to around 60 pounds per square inch, so every bump in the road reached the passengers. In 1922, Firestone developed a fatter, softer tire that ran at roughly half that pressure and smoothed out the ride. In September 1923, Cole Motor Car of Indianapolis became the first large-scale automaker to offer these "balloon tires" on all of its models. The balloon tire eventually became standard on most American automobiles.
Through most of the 1920s, a crash could turn a car's windshield into a spray of glass shards. Ford changed that for ordinary buyers when the new Model A arrived in December 1927 with a laminated Triplex safety windshield as standard equipment: layers of glass bonded to a clear inner layer, so that it cracked but held together instead of shattering. Laminated glass had been used in windshields since World War I, but in the low-priced field it was unheard of. The Model A also brought another first for Ford: hydraulic shock absorbers.
Henry Ford was against going into debt for a car. Under his weekly savings plan, buyers deposited five or ten dollars a week with a Ford dealer and took the car home only once it was paid for. General Motors disagreed. In 1919 it created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation to lend buyers the money, often with 35 percent down and the rest due within a year. Sewing machines had been sold on time for decades, but cars made installment buying a habit: by 1930, more than two-thirds of all automobiles were bought that way. Ford started its own loan company in 1928.
In 1919, only about one new American car in ten had a closed body. The rest were open touring cars and roadsters with canvas tops, more a seasonal pleasure vehicle than year-round transportation. After the war, buyers wanted a car for all weather, and advances in making plate glass and steel helped deliver it. The closed share climbed from 16 percent in 1920 to 34 percent in 1923, and in 1925 closed cars passed half of production for the first time. By 1929, roughly nine new cars in ten had a roof, a complete reversal within a single decade.
Many cars of the 1920s had no temperature gauge on the dashboard, yet their unpressurized cooling systems could boil over with little warning. The solution rode outside, in plain sight: a Motometer, a thermometer set into the radiator cap, which let a driver check the temperature at a glance through the windshield. Introduced in the early 1910s, it grew so popular that automakers offered it as standard or optional equipment, and dealers handed them out as incentives, often topped with a maker's emblem. Dashboard temperature gauges arrived around 1930, and the Motometer's era ended.
Painting a car the old way meant brushing on varnish in more than a dozen steps, with long drying periods between coats. The only durable, inexpensive finish was the baked black enamel on Henry Ford's Model T, while luxury cars came in hand-painted colors that still faded and chipped. In December 1923, Oakland introduced DuPont's Duco, a quick-drying spray lacquer adapted from a pencil finish, painting its show cars in two shades of blue with red or orange stripes. DuPont said Duco cut finishing time from two weeks to two days, and by mid-1925, GM divisions from Chevrolet to Cadillac were switching to it.
Nickel plating had covered automobile trim for years, but it tarnished and carried a faint yellowish tinge. Chromium, which Columbia University researchers learned to electroplate commercially in 1924, was harder, resisted scratches, did not rust or tarnish, and gave off a bright blue-white shine. Oldsmobile was the first automaker to make the switch, advertising the change for months beforehand, and by March 1927 its radiator shells and caps, bumpers, door handles and window cranks were chromium. Other General Motors divisions soon followed, and in October 1927 Studebaker announced it would switch too.
Shifting gears in most early cars meant matching engine and gearbox speeds by feel, then sliding two spinning gears together and hoping they did not clash. Oregon engineer Earl Thompson patented a synchronized transmission in 1922 and became a Cadillac consultant. After 1.5 million miles of testing, Cadillac kept the heart of his design: cone clutches that used friction to match gear speeds before the teeth met. Synchro-Mesh reached production in August 1928, standard on every 1929 Cadillac and LaSalle, though only second and third gears were synchronized.
In 1917, the Buffalo company that became Trico began selling its Rain Rubber: a rubber blade on a handle that a driver pushed through the gap in a split windshield and worked by hand. In the early 1920s it introduced an automatic wiper powered by the partial vacuum in the engine's intake manifold, and Cadillac adopted it as standard equipment in 1922. It had a quirk: the wiper's speed depended on how hard the engine was working, and it might stop altogether on a steep climb. Electric wiper drives appeared on luxury cars in 1926.
In 1921, General Motors was a jumble of car brands competing with one another, and only Buick and Cadillac were making money. Alfred Sloan, who led a committee reviewing GM's products that year and became company president in 1923, sorted the brands into a price ladder, Chevrolet at the bottom and Cadillac at the top, so a family could start with one GM car and trade up to a nicer one as its fortunes improved. A 1925 GM advertisement summed up the idea as "a car for every purse and purpose," the opposite of Henry Ford's one-size-fits-all Model T.
General Motors researcher Thomas Midgley Jr. spent about five years hunting for an additive that would stop car engines from "knocking." On December 9, 1921, he tried tetraethyl lead, and the knock disappeared. The additive went on sale in Dayton, Ohio, in February 1923 as "Ethyl" gasoline, a name chosen to avoid the word "lead." The cost came quickly. Within a few years, more than a dozen workers had died at plants making it in Ohio and New Jersey, and Midgley himself took a long vacation to recover from lead poisoning.
Gaston Chevrolet won the 1920 Indianapolis 500 in one of seven race cars his brothers built in Indianapolis, going all 500 miles without a single tire change. By then, the family had no stake in the automaker that carried its name; Louis had sold his stock in 1915. Gaston did not get long to enjoy his big year. On Thanksgiving Day, 1920, his car collided with another at the Beverly Hills board track in California, and he was killed at age 28. He was crowned that season's national champion on points after his death.
On March 29, 1927, British racer Henry Segrave drove a Sunbeam nicknamed "the Slug," powered by two aircraft engines, across the sands of Daytona Beach at an average of 203.79 miles per hour. No one had ever driven a car past 200 miles an hour before. Two years later he was back at Daytona with a new car, the Golden Arrow, and on March 11, 1929, he raised the land speed record again, to about 231 miles per hour.
5A rookie wins Indy, then chases one record too many
On the tile: Frank Lockhart1926-1928
Frank Lockhart came to Indianapolis in 1926 as a potential relief driver, then got a car of his own when its owner, Peter Kreis, fell ill just days before the race. Starting 20th in his first Indianapolis 500, Lockhart was two laps ahead when rain halted the race, making him the fourth rookie ever to win it. Chasing bigger records, he built the Stutz Black Hawk Special, powered by two small Miller engines joined together. On April 25, 1928, a tire failed at about 200 miles per hour on Daytona Beach, and Lockhart was killed at age 25.
6The engines that owned the Indianapolis brickyard
On the tile: Harry Miller1923-1929
Harry Miller dropped out of high school at 15 to work in a machine shop, yet by the mid-1920s his racing engines were the ones to beat. When the Indianapolis 500 limited engines to 91.5 cubic inches in 1926, Miller answered with a small supercharged engine that dominated the new formula. By 1929, 27 of the 33 cars starting the race were Miller-powered, and cars Miller designed won the Indianapolis 500 in 1923, 1926, 1928 and 1929.
Garrett Morgan, an inventor and businessman in Cleveland, received a patent for a traffic signal on November 20, 1923. His hand-operated, T-shaped signal did more than flip between stop and go. It had a third position that halted traffic in every direction before letting any one direction proceed, giving cars already in the intersection time to get through safely. Morgan sold the rights to General Electric for $40,000, and the company developed an electric version of his signal.
Eddie Rickenbacker, America's top flying ace of the First World War, spent much of the 1920s building cars under his own name. In 1923 his company began fitting four-wheel brakes, a first in its price range. Rivals struck back. Studebaker was among the automakers claiming that four-wheel brakes were dangerous, even warning they could throw passengers through the windshield. The scare campaign hurt Rickenbacker's sales, and the company went bankrupt in 1927. Four-wheel brakes eventually became standard anyway.
C. Harold Wills was Henry Ford's chief engineer and metallurgist, and he championed the vanadium steel that helped make the Model T famously tough. After leaving Ford in 1919, Wills built a car under his own name and turned to another alloy, molybdenum steel, for nearly every part under stress, from the crankshaft to the frame. The first Wills Sainte Claire rolled off the line in Marysville, Michigan, in 1921, powered by an overhead-cam V8 at a time when many luxury cars still used simpler side-valve engines.
Billy Durant founded General Motors in 1908, lost control of it to bankers in 1910 and fought his way back to the presidency in 1916. Then 1920 undid him. As GM's stock slid, he bought frantically on margin to hold it up, and kept buying until it hit twelve dollars a share. By then he owed more than $20 million to twenty-one brokers and three banks. The du Ponts and the House of Morgan agreed to bail him out on one condition: he hand over control of GM. Durant resigned on November 30, 1920, and never ran the company again.
Jesse G. Kirby's Pig Stand, which most accounts date to 1921, sat on the highway between Dallas and Fort Worth and sold barbecued pork sandwiches to people who never had to leave the driver's seat. Its carhops took orders at the car and brought the food straight back, a service the Pig Stand is credited with introducing. Newspapers of the day explained the appeal simply: drivers were too lazy to get out. The idea caught on fast. A 1924 advertisement claimed ten Dallas Pig Stands were selling 50,000 sandwiches a week, with more stands in six other states.
3Detroit adds a yellow light between red and green
On the tile: Amber Light1920
Detroit police officer William Potts saw a problem with the red-and-green traffic signals of his day: nothing warned drivers that the light was about to change, and a car at speed could not always stop in time. His answer borrowed a color from the railroads. In October 1920, a signal tower on Detroit's Woodward Avenue began showing a third light, amber, between green and red, in all four directions. It was the first four-way, three-color traffic signal. The idea took time to spread, but by the mid-1930s the three-color signal had become the standard.
In 1929, Americans bought more than 5.3 million cars, trucks and buses, nearly a million more than the year before. The boom was already tiring, though. An economic slowdown began that summer, and auto sales were slipping by the time the stock market crashed in October. The crash deepened the slide. As demand fell away, automakers, Ford among them, slowed their assembly lines and furloughed workers. The decade that had put America on wheels closed with the industry heading into the Great Depression, which many smaller carmakers would not survive.
Henry Leland had already built one legendary automaker, Cadillac, before he and his son Wilfred founded Lincoln in 1917 to build airplane engines for the First World War. Its postwar luxury cars sold slowly, and by late 1921 the company was in receivership. Henry Ford offered $5 million, which the judge rejected, then raised his bid to $8 million, and on February 4, 1922, Lincoln was his. The Lelands stayed on to run it. Less than five months later, a Ford executive arrived to demand Wilfred's resignation, and Henry Leland quit on the spot.
Henry Ford began building his River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, during the First World War and kept expanding it for about a decade. When it was completed in 1928, it was the world's largest integrated factory: 93 buildings, a dredged river for ore freighters, its own power plant and steel mill, and more than 90 miles of railroad track. Raw iron ore could come in one end and leave as a finished Model A. The Model T never got that treatment; the Rouge made its parts, but final assembly stayed at Ford's Highland Park plant.
The Bugatti Type 35 made its debut at the 1924 French Grand Prix in Lyon, a light, elegant racer with a straight-eight engine and pioneering cast aluminum wheels. It lost that first race on badly made tires, then became one of the most successful racing cars ever built; Bugatti credits it with more than 2,000 victories. From 1926, a supercharger made it faster still. Its showcase was Sicily's Targa Florio, a grueling race over twisting mountain roads full of hairpin turns, where Type 35s won five years running, from 1925 through 1929.
At the end of 1919, the United States had about six registered cars for every hundred people. By the end of 1929, it had nineteen, roughly triple, or about one car for every five Americans. Registrations climbed from about 6.7 million passenger cars to more than 23 million over the same decade. The car had become an ordinary consumer good, though not evenly: California began the decade with twelve cars per hundred people and ended it with thirty-one, while Alabama went from two to nine.
By the mid-1920s, private trail associations had named more than 250 American routes, from the Lincoln Highway to the Dixie Highway, and marked them by painting signs and symbols on telephone poles, barns and rocks. Routes overlapped, rival boosters competed for travelers, and motorists often could not tell which road to take. On November 11, 1926, the American Association of State Highway Officials adopted a single national system of numbered U.S. highways, so that travelers could cross the continent following the same number. The named trails began to pass into history.