The 1950s were the decade of the tailfin and the V8, when Detroit's cars grew longer, lower and brighter and a new Interstate System began to stretch across the country. It was also the decade of the Corvette and the Thunderbird, of Beetles, Isettas and Minis, and of the first Toyotas sold in America. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments of that decade.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1950s 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
1America's sports car started with a six and an automatic
On the tile: Corvette1953
The Corvette first met the public as a show car at General Motors' Motorama, held at New York's Waldorf-Astoria in January 1953. Production began on June 30, 1953, in Flint, Michigan, and only 300 were built by hand that first year. Every one had a fiberglass body, Polo White paint, a red interior and a black canvas top, and every one came with Chevrolet's Blue Flame six-cylinder engine and a two-speed Powerglide automatic. Sales disappointed, and GM considered dropping the car. A V8 finally arrived for 1955.
Ford's answer to the Corvette needed a name, and some 5,000 were suggested, among them Beaver, Detroiter and Runabout. A Ford executive offered a $250 suit for a better one. The official story goes that stylist Alden Giberson won with Thunderbird, a figure from Native American mythology. Designer George Walker later claimed that executive Ernie Breech suggested the name, having just joined the posh Thunderbird Country Club near Palm Springs. Whatever its origin, Ford called the car a personal car rather than a sports car, and for 1955 it sold 16,155 Thunderbirds against 700 Corvettes.
Cadillac's 1957 Eldorado Brougham started at $13,074, more than a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud of the same year. It was built largely by hand, with a brushed stainless steel roof and self-leveling air suspension. The extras were the real surprise. The glove compartment held six metallic drinking tumblers with magnetic bases and a leather vanity case with a powder compact, a comb and a lipstick holder. The rear armrest hid a notepad, a sterling silver pencil and an atomizer of Lanvin's Arpège perfume. Only 400 were built for 1957.
4Soaring fins that began with a peek through a fence
On the tile: 1959 Cadillac1956-1959
In 1956 GM designer Chuck Jordan looked through a chain-link fence at Chrysler's coming 1957 models, fresh from Virgil Exner's studio. All he could see, he said later, were fins, fins, fins. Soon designers from the GM Technical Center were rushing over for a look. Jordan brought Bill Mitchell and a group to the fence, and that afternoon, with design chief Harley Earl away on a trip, they started a second design for 1959. Earl came back, looked it over without a word, and days later backed it. The result included the soaring, bullet-tipped fins of the 1959 Cadillac.
The Mercedes-Benz 300 SL's doors swung up like wings for a practical reason. Its lightweight frame was a web of tubes that made the sills so high and deep that ordinary doors would have been almost unusable, so the doors opened upward instead. The car existed largely because of Max Hoffman, the company's Vienna-born U.S. importer, who persuaded the Daimler-Benz board in 1953 to build a road version of its racing coupe for American buyers. It was unveiled at the New York show in February 1954, and about 1,400 of the coupes were built through 1957.
6A refrigerator maker's car with a door for a nose
On the tile: Isetta1955
The Isetta came from Iso, an Italian refrigerator maker owned by Renzo Rivolta, and its name means small Iso. The whole front of the car was its door. It swung open to the side, and the steering wheel and column moved with it so that two people could step in. Rivolta entered seven Isettas in the 1954 Mille Miglia, and they won the economy class. BMW bought the rights and the body tooling, fitted a single-cylinder motorcycle engine of its own making, began production in April 1955 and built more than 160,000 by 1962.
When the Citroën DS 19 was unveiled at the Paris Motor Show on October 6, 1955, visitors placed 12,000 firm orders on the first day and 80,000 during the show. Spoken aloud in French, its initials sound like déesse, goddess. The car rode on hydropneumatic suspension that corrected its own ride height, and it had power steering, front disc brakes and a hydraulically operated clutch and gearshift. Building it was another matter. Citroën made fewer than 200 in 1955, and even in 1956, its first full year of production, only about 10,000 to 11,000.
8Toyota's first export Crowns for America had no headlights
On the tile: Toyopet Crown1958
Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. was founded in California on October 31, 1957, and set up shop in a former Rambler dealership in Hollywood. Exports began in June 1958, when 30 Toyopet Crowns were shipped without headlights, because their lamps did not meet California standards and General Electric units had to be installed. On American highways the Crown lacked power at high speeds and suffered from extreme noise and vibration. By the end of 1958 Toyota had sold 287 cars and a single Land Cruiser, and in December 1960 it suspended Crown exports to the United States.
East Germany's Trabant rolled off the line at Zwickau in November 1957. Its name, German for satellite or companion, was inspired by the Soviet Sputnik, launched that same year. Steel was scarce, so the body panels were made of Duroplast, a resin plastic reinforced with waste cotton from the Soviet Union, and a small two-stroke engine drove it. The Trabant stayed in production for decades, and in later years buyers often waited ten years or more to get one. More than 3 million were made before production stopped in 1991.
In 1926 Francis W. Davis, an engineer in Pierce-Arrow's truck division, demonstrated a practical power steering system. He took it to General Motors, which judged it too expensive to offer the public. World War II brought a need for easier steering on heavy military vehicles. Then, for 1951, Chrysler put power steering on its Imperial and called it Hydraguide, a system based in part on Davis patents that had expired. GM followed on the 1952 Cadillac. DeSoto's ads said steering with it was as easy as dialing a telephone.
The accepted wisdom held that a safe car had to be rigid. Mercedes-Benz engineer Béla Barényi questioned it. He divided the car body into three sections: a rigid passenger compartment that should not deform, with crumple zones at the front and rear built to give way and absorb the force of a crash. His patent for the safety body, applied for in January 1951, was granted in 1952. It went into series production in the 1959 Mercedes W 111 sedan, known for its small tailfins, and that autumn Mercedes ran its first proper crash test with a car.
For 1956 Chrysler offered a record player that mounted under the dashboard. Highway Hi-Fi was developed by Peter Goldmark of CBS Laboratories, the inventor of the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing album. Its seven-inch discs turned at 16 2/3 rpm, the speed of Talking Book spoken-word records, and one side held up to 45 minutes of music. Columbia made the records, mostly light classics, show tunes and easy listening, sold through Chrysler dealers and by mail. Poor reliability, high warranty costs and a thin catalog doomed it after 1959.
At the end of 1956, after the Suez Crisis brought fuel rationing to Britain, BMC chairman Leonard Lord told Alec Issigonis to get a small car into production as quickly as possible. Issigonis turned the engine sideways to drive the front wheels and put the gearbox in the engine's sump, where the two shared the same oil. Tiny ten-inch wheels kept the wheel arches from eating into the cabin. Launched on August 26, 1959, as the Morris Mini-Minor and the Austin Seven, it became known as the Mini, and more than five million were made.
For 1956 Ford decided to sell safety. General manager Robert McNamara championed a package called Lifeguard Design, shaped by crash research at Cornell. It brought a steering wheel built to bend away from the driver, a recessed steering post, stronger door latches and a rearview mirror backed to resist shattering. Buyers could add nylon seat belts, priced at $9, and a padded dash and sun visors. Ford even promoted the package with crash-test films, but few buyers ordered it. Safety would become a much bigger concern for carmakers and regulators in the decade that followed.
In 1958 Ford's stylists imagined a car powered by atomic energy. The Nucleon would have carried a self-contained nuclear reactor at the rear, and it was meant to travel 5,000 miles between fueling stops. It never went beyond a 3/8-scale model about 75 inches long, because the concept simply assumed that the problems of nuclear safety and the size and weight of reactors would be solved someday. They were not, and the Nucleon was never produced. The model survives in the collection of The Henry Ford.
For the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans, Jaguar and Dunlop fitted the C-type with disc brakes, drawing on wartime innovations for aircraft and tanks. Drum brakes trapped their heat and faded under repeated hard stops, but most of a disc stays exposed to the cooling air. Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton won, with another C-type second, and they were the first winners to average more than 100 miles an hour for the race. Jaguar's engine had gained only about 20 horsepower since its 1951 win, yet the 1953 winner covered 477 kilometers more.
8Wearing out roads on purpose to design the Interstates
On the tile: Road Test1958-1960
While the first Interstates were being built, highway engineers needed to know how pavement would hold up under heavy traffic, so they wore some out on purpose. Near Ottawa, Illinois, they built seven miles of two-lane test road: six loops and a straightaway, half concrete and half asphalt, divided into 836 test sections with 16 short bridges. From October 15, 1958, to November 30, 1960, heavy vehicles and drivers supplied by the Defense Department pounded it relentlessly. The results shaped pavement design in the Interstate era, and many of the concrete sections later became part of Interstate 80.
Chevrolet's 1955 V8, designed under Ed Cole with Harry Barr, displaced 265 cubic inches and weighed less than the Stovebolt six-cylinder engine it joined in the lineup. It had five main bearings, aluminum pistons, individual rocker arms and a bore and stroke that let it rev high and reliably. Chevrolet sold its 1955 cars with the slogan The Hot One. The small-block grew to 283, 327 and 350 cubic inches and beyond, and it is still built as a crate engine for hot rods and replacements.
1A poet's names for a Ford, including the Utopian Turtletop
On the tile: Marianne Moore1955-1956
In the fall of 1955, Ford marketing executive Robert B. Young wrote to the poet Marianne Moore asking for help naming a new car line, hoping for a name as evocative as Thunderbird. Moore took on the job but would accept payment only if she proved of specific help. She sent the Ford Silver Sword, the Mongoose Civique and the Ford Fabergé, and on December 8, 1955, the Utopian Turtletop. In November 1956 Ford wrote that it had chosen from more than 6,000 candidates. The name was Edsel. The New Yorker later published the letters.
Ralph Teetor lost his sight in a childhood accident, earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912, and later became president of his family's Perfect Circle company. In 1936 he rode with his patent attorney, Harry Lindsey, whose speed rose and fell with the conversation. The rocking set Teetor to work on a speed control device, and he filed his first patent for it in 1948. Perfect Circle called it the Speedostat. Chrysler offered it on 1958 models as Auto-Pilot, and in 1959 Cadillac gave it the name that stuck: Cruise Control.
In 1959, an age of chrome-laden gas guzzlers, the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency set out to sell Americans the little Volkswagen Beetle, and it did not hide the car's size. Copywriter Julian Koenig and art director Helmut Krone ran a small photo of the car in a sea of white space above two words: Think small. In 1999 Advertising Age ranked the campaign the best of the 20th century. Koenig had another famous name in him. In 1970 he urged the organizers of a national environmental event to call it Earth Day. It fell on his 49th birthday, April 22.
In the mid-1950s Harley Earl, head of styling at General Motors, recruited women designers, many from Pratt Institute's industrial design program. GM's publicists called ten of them the Damsels of Design. Six worked on car interiors, and four designed for GM's Frigidaire appliance division and created exhibits. Earl believed women were making more and more of a family's buying decisions. A 1958 Feminine Auto Show displayed ideas such as lighted makeup mirrors, child-proof doors and retractable seat belts. After Earl retired that year most of them left GM, though Suzanne Vanderbilt stayed on until 1977.
George Romney became president of American Motors in 1954 and went to war with Detroit's big cars. He called them gas-guzzling dinosaurs, and Time reported that he carried a green china triceratops to make the point. For 1958 AMC dusted off the dies and tooling of the little Nash Rambler, dropped in 1955, and brought it back as the Rambler American. That year U.S. auto sales fell more than 30 percent, yet American Motors made its first annual profit since its 1954 merger. By early 1959 Rambler ranked fifth in U.S. sales.
Carroll Shelby, born in Leesburg, Texas, in 1923, was a flight instructor and test pilot in World War II and raised poultry after it before he turned to racing. On June 21, 1959, he and British driver Roy Salvadori won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in an Aston Martin DBR1, a car thought slower than Ferrari's Testa Rossa on the long straight. Salvadori was recovering from flu. Aston owner David Brown had been trying since buying the company in 1947 and had finished second three times. Shelby later built the Cobra.
7A swerve into a ditch and a patent for the air bag
On the tile: John Hetrick1952-1953
In 1952 John Hetrick swerved to miss a rock in the road and ended up in a ditch. His wife and young daughter were in the car, and the parents threw out their arms to keep the girl from hitting the dashboard. Hetrick had worked on torpedoes in the Navy during World War II, and compressed air gave him an idea. On August 5, 1952, he applied for a patent on a cushion that would inflate when a car slowed suddenly, and it was granted on August 18, 1953. Carmakers did not offer air bags widely until after his patent had expired.
In the summer of 1951 Memphis builder Kemmons Wilson drove his family, including five children, to Washington, D.C. The motels were cramped, many lacked air conditioning, restaurants or pools, and they charged extra for each child in the room. Wilson came home vowing to build 400 motels where children stayed free. On August 1, 1952, the first Holiday Inn opened on Summer Avenue in Memphis, with 120 air-conditioned rooms, a restaurant and a pool. Architect Eddie Bluestein suggested the name, from a 1942 Bing Crosby film. The 400th opened in 1962.
9A letter after Motorama, and a life with the Corvette
On the tile: Arkus-Duntov1953-1956
Zora Arkus-Duntov, born in Brussels in 1909 to Russian parents, saw the new Corvette at GM's Motorama in New York in 1953 and wrote to Chevrolet's chief engineer, Ed Cole, with ideas for improving it. Cole's team invited him to Detroit, and he started at Chevrolet on May 1, 1953, as an assistant staff engineer. He was a racer too, driving Porsches at Le Mans in 1954 and 1955 and winning his class both years. He later drove a Corvette 150 miles an hour at Daytona Beach and became known as the father of the Corvette.
The law that launched the Interstate System was signed without fanfare. On June 29, 1956, President Eisenhower was finishing a three-week stay at Walter Reed Army Medical Center after surgery for ileitis. That day he walked a flight of stairs, held three working sessions and signed 27 bills. One was the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which authorized $25 billion over 13 years toward 41,000 miles of Interstate highways. He was not photographed signing it and issued no statement. The pens were set aside for those who had helped pass the bill.
2No, one mile in five of the Interstate is not a runway
On the tile: Runway Myth1956Myth busted
A popular story holds that the Interstate law requires one mile in every five to be straight so military planes can land there in wartime. The Federal Highway Administration calls it a myth with no basis in any law, regulation, policy or design manual. The idea may trace back to 1941, when Congress authorized studies of flight strips next to public highways, and in 1944 Congress considered, then left out, a flight strip program. Planes do sometimes land on Interstates, but only in emergencies with no alternative, not because the roads were designed for it.
Federal Highway Administrator Bertram Tallamy preferred blue for the new Interstate signs. Other officials preferred green. To settle it, the Bureau of Public Roads and the state highway officials' association staged a two-week test on an unopened section of the Capital Beltway near Greenbelt, Maryland. Experimental signs in blue, green and black, some reflectorized, pointed drivers toward two imaginary towns, Metropolis and Utopia. Hundreds of drivers, all first checked for color blindness, took part, and 58 percent picked the green background. Tallamy approved white on green in January 1958.
Which state built the first Interstate? Missouri and Kansas both have a claim. On August 2, 1956, about five weeks after the Highway Act became law, Missouri awarded a construction contract for 13.3 miles of U.S. 66 in Laclede County, and on August 13 work broke ground on I-70 in St. Charles County, the first Interstate project under construction. Kansas got cars rolling first. On November 14, 1956, it opened eight miles of U.S. 40 west of Topeka, the first section of the new system opened to traffic.
On November 23, 1954, General Motors built its 50 millionth car, a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop painted gold, with more than 600 parts plated in 24-karat gold. It rolled off the line in Flint, Michigan, and into a parade downtown, while 25 GM plants held open houses and 65 cities held luncheons. GM actually built three gold Bel Airs: one for promotional use, one for filming and the real 50 millionth car. The burned remains of the first turned up years later in North Carolina. What became of the real one is unknown.
6Car 722 left at 7:22 and set the race's speed record
On the tile: Mille MigliaMay 1, 1955
In the 1955 Mille Miglia, cars were numbered by their starting time, so Stirling Moss's Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, number 722, left Brescia at 7:22 a.m. on May 1. Beside him sat journalist Denis Jenkinson with seventeen pages of route notes wound on a roller, and hand signals for each bend, from saucy ones to very dangerous ones. They covered about 1,000 miles of Italian roads in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, averaging nearly 98 miles an hour. No one beat that average before the race was stopped after 1957.
7A race the length of Mexico on a brand-new highway
On the tile: PanamericanaMay 1950
In May 1950 Mexico celebrated its finished section of the Pan-American Highway with a race along it, from Ciudad Juárez on the U.S. border to El Ocotal near Guatemala, about 2,000 miles. There were 132 entrants, mostly in stock American sedans, and the road climbed above 10,000 feet. The winner was 22-year-old Hershel McGriff in an Oldsmobile 88, and Johnny Mantz finished ninth. Later that year the two met again in the first Southern 500 at Darlington, and the order flipped: Mantz won, and McGriff was ninth.
8The first national drag champion worked his clutch by toe
On the tile: NHRA Nationals1955
The National Hot Rod Association's first national championship opened on September 29, 1955, on an 8,000-foot runway at the Great Bend, Kansas, airport, with a $5 entry fee. Then the worst rainstorm in 30 years washed out the finals, and the title was settled that fall outside Phoenix. There Calvin Rice, 25, of Santa Ana, California, met Fred Voight. On their third false start, Rice's transmission blew. His crew had 30 minutes to fit a reworked Ford one, with no time left to adjust the clutch linkage, so Rice worked the clutch with his toe. He won in 10.30 seconds at 141.95 miles an hour.
Chrysler's Norseman was meant to star in its auto show exhibit for 1957. Built for Chrysler by Ghia of Turin over 15 months, it had a roof held up with no side pillars and a glass roof panel that slid open. On July 17, 1956, it was loaded aboard the Italian liner Andrea Doria at Genoa, bound for New York. On July 25 the ship collided with the Stockholm south of Nantucket and sank some 11 hours later, a disaster that cost 51 lives and all the cargo. Most of the Chrysler stylists who designed the car never saw it.