I got this idea from watching "I love the 70's, 80's and 90's" with my wife. I was thinking to myself, how great it would be to get something similar to that on here, but with automobiles.
Every week, over the next 80 weeks, i will make a "Automobile flashback series" thread. Where, we will cover "that" year of the automobile. The good, the bad and the ugly. Interesting facts, outrageous opinions, and amazing feats will be posted.
Please keep all of these threads free from flaming, as it will be not be tolerated. I have been informed by a moderator, all flames will be deleted, and those users will be docked points.
I also want to let everyone know, if you have any questions at all, about the cars in these upcoming threads, do not be afraid to ask. We have lots of automotive knowledge here in the Car Lounge. These thread will be great, if we can get input (Questions/Answers) from everyone of you.
Without any further a do, i present you the year 1920...
(VH1 Jingle)I love the 20's.... I love the 20's.... I love the 20's!!!!!(VH1 Jingle)
I found this write-up to be entertaining, so i am going to use it, to start things off....
Phil Bailey talks about the Model - T
"I don’t write about old cars as a general rule because I don’t see the point. Anything with a gearlever mounted on the outside is as relevant today as a black and white television and a clothes tub. Driving a Mr Toad-mobile with its weird controls and its wooden wheels is like cooking on an open fire. No, really. You don’t write on a typewriter any more, or hand-crank your phone to get a line, so why have an old car? If it was any good, they’d still be making it.
Old houses are different. With an old house you can fit central heating and a PlayStation and then you have the best of both worlds: charm, coupled with a nice La-Z-Boy easy chair.
Sure, you can do this with an old car too — fit a modern engine and power steering — but then you are a hot-rodder. And there is nothing on God’s earth quite so peculiar as that. Not even a coelacanth. Not even a turbocharged coelacanth with alloy gills and a straight-through arse.
That said, I wish I’d been doing this job 70 years ago. Back then every single new car — and there were hundreds of them every month pouring out of every back alley in the land — was completely different.
There was no sense of standardisation as everyone tried something new:
Who says a car has to have a steering wheel?
Why not a tiller?
Who says the accelerator has to be on the floor next to the brake?
And who says a car has to have four wheels. Why can’t it have three? Or 17?
These were the glory days of motoring journalism, when you really did have something to get your teeth into every week. “Right, the new Farnsworth Hopper. Runs on steam. Has metal tyres. And the front seats face backwards so the driver doesn’t get rain in his eyes.”
Occasionally something would come along that made sense. The electric starter motor, for instance, developed by Cadillac. Or the De Dion with its gearbox mounted on the rear axle — a trick still being used by serious sporting cars today. Imagine road testing the first ever car to have windshield wipers, or a roof.
You’d have been amazed.
And imagine what it must have been like when you first tripped over the Model T Ford, a car you could acquire for less than it cost to buy a horse and run it for a year. And now you may be wondering what on earth I’m doing.
Well, I’m breaking a general rule and writing about an old car because last week, for the first time ever, I drove a Model T, and I thought you ought to know what it was like.
There was an advance and retard lever on the left side of the steering wheel, which didn’t seem to do much, so I ignored it. Down in the footwell were three pedals, none of which was the accelerator or brake. The throttle was to be found on the right side of the steering wheel, where you would normally expect to find the flasher stalk. There was no flasher stalk because there were no flashers.
My driving lesson, from the owner, had been a simple affair. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it,” he’d said, not having explained what it was I had to get the hang of.
It was like sitting an eight-year-old in the space shuttle and expecting them to get it around Saturn. Nothing made any sense, but by jiggling various levers and stabbing away at a selection of pedals, eventually the Model T lurched off into the countryside — with a satisfying bout of wheelspin.
The exuberant start didn’t break it, however. And nor did my subsequent and noisy attempts to select high gear.
You have to remember that when the Model T was designed back in 1908 there were only 200 miles of road in all of America, so it was designed to go off road. That’s mildly interesting.
But what’s amazing is that the car I was driving was 85 years old and it still could.
The toughness of the thing, however, is only the second most important part of the story. The most important part is the sheer number of Model Ts that rolled off the production lines in Detroit, Manchester and Canada.
The Volkswagen Beetle, made for 65 years when car sales were exploding around the world, found over 21m homes. But the Model T, made for only 19 years when there were few roads, still managed to find 15m buyers. That I find truly astonishing.
To keep a car rolling off the lines every 10 seconds the main plant in America needed 1.5m spokes for the wheels every day. And 8.5m bolts. Imagine sorting that out in a horse-drawn world.
And imagine the money.
Within five years of making the first Model T Henry Ford was the richest man in the world, a title he held until the day he died. If you had invested $5,000 in the company in 1907 you’d have walked away, as a handful did, in 1917 with $12m.
Of course, this enormous success was down to the production line.
It wasn’t invented by Ford — Sam Colt was using such a thing to make guns 30 years earlier, and Oldsmobile was first in the car industry— but there’s no doubt that the Model T, the most important car ever made, would have foundered without it.
The problem is that as we wave goodbye to yesteryear and arrive with a crunching rumble of cogs in the 21st century, the pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap mentality simply doesn’t work any more.
The philosophy that made Ford and sustained it right the way through the 20th century no longer applies. Nobody wants a car that’s exactly the same as their neighbour’s.
Niche marketing is now king as motorists drift away from the supermarket mentality and into the boutique.
You absolutely, positively have to have it. The latest, hippest, hottest car, that is, the one that is flying out of dealerships so fast that it's hard to get hold of one. What if the local dealer doesn't have the Honda Pilot sport utility vehicle or the Toyota Sienna minivan or the Nissan350Z sports car — all in demand right now — or will sell it only for a premium over the sticker price?
What is a lusting buyer to do?
In an industry long based on fanning customers' cravings, automakers have traditionally had the upper hand when a car was hot. There wasn't much choice for buyers but to swallow hard and pay the full price — or more — or to wait, typically for a year or so, until the demand cooled.
Now, the automakers have undermined their own advantage, competing with so many new models and flooding the market with them so fast that even a car that creates a lot of excitement is unlikely to be scarce for long. (A notable exception, the Hummer H2, was on fire for a year, with dealers only now quietly offering deals to get rid of leftover 2003's.)
This is not good for the production line and it’s not good for Ford. It’s why it has spent the past 10 years buying Jaguar, Aston Martin, Volvo and Land Rover — to give itself some badge prestige.
The problem is that I’m talking to myself. You’d rather eat your weekly wash than swap your Beemer for a Ford because you know all about the Ford mentality.
You can have any colour you like so long as it’s black.
Well, you might be interested to hear that all the early Model Ts made in Britain were blue.
And that BMW started out by making Austin Seven vans under licence, just like this one:
Dig through your history books and you’ll find they upset all your preconceptions about today’s cars.
Take a test drive of a modern Ford, and it’ll have exactly the same effect."
Modified by Gateway at 11:33 PM 1-27-2005
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Some Car Lounge mods/members look for everyone else’s faults because they have lost track of all their own. They see criticism where there is none, and their defense against recognizing their own self-criticism is to sermonize over the trivial habits of others. ....they think they have a responsibility to interfere in others' lives because only they know best.
Starting in 1922, this stout vehicle carried passengers from the Chamber of Commerce in Grants Pass up to the Oregon Caves along a newly completed narrow dirt road. Image probably taken in May 1923. Note the condition of the tires, and two-wheel brakes! The cylindrical structures on the front are extra-duty hydraulic shock absorbers. Friends of the Oregon Caves works to preserve Oregon Caves history. Thanks, Jay Swofford. (Hit F11 to enlarge view.)
"I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object."
Not to be picky, but Stanley automobiles actually DID use gasoline as their fuel, albeit to fire the burners that heated the boiler. They were fairly tricky to operate, too. One time, at an outdoor car-show in Champaign, IL about 8 years ago, I had a chance to observe a Stanley owner preparing his car for driving, and also was lucky enough to take a short ride with him in it. It was a '21 touring car, and I was completely amazed at the number of valves, burner controls, and gauges peppering that ordinary-looking car. The dashboard alone looked for all the world like it was formerly part of a steam locomotive! And underneath the car was an equal number of valves and spigots that demanded the owner's attention before we (silently) steamed away on our ride.
It was amazing, and memorable.
(BTW, the Stanley brothers were v. aware of the public's fear of boiler explosions, and heavily advertised the fact that their car's boilers were girded with hundreds of feet of piano wire, wrapped around-and-around the boiler chamber, which would contain the force if a boiler were to over-pressurize and explode. In fact, during Stanley's entire lifespan as a carmaker, NO boilers were ever reported to have exploded or otherwise injured anyone. They believed in QUALITY.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
The nitrous joke is pretty apt, really. Stanley steamcars were, in their time, fast mofoes. Think of it; 100% of power and torque available instantly off the line, no waiting. You don't even need to rev the thing up...just open the steam valve and hang on!. I've seen movies of Stanley cars doing burnouts. A Stanley landspeed-record car was run at Ormond Beach, Florida, in 1906, almost a hundred years ago, and it reached an unofficial top speed of nearly 200mph!! This at a time when it was the rare automobile that could even reach, let alone maintain, 50 or 60mph.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
Yes - back in the teens and twenties Steam cars were considered the muscle cars of that era - they were usually considerably faster than their gasoline-powered counterparts. But they were also more complex and prone to fires.
Even into the 1930's, some Steam cars were considered serious exotics - like the Doble, the fastest car in the world when it was new - even faster than a Duesenburg SJ. But the hard-to-manage nature of a steam car meant it was never really going to be accepted by the buying public as an alternative to lower-priced, more user-friendly gasoline cars.
Great pics and info everyone. Looking forward to some more great ones in the upcoming years ahead.
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Some Car Lounge mods/members look for everyone else’s faults because they have lost track of all their own. They see criticism where there is none, and their defense against recognizing their own self-criticism is to sermonize over the trivial habits of others. ....they think they have a responsibility to interfere in others' lives because only they know best.
Back then all an engineer needed was talent and a tangible product. Not like today where you have to get a PhD in Nuclear Physics so that you can go design tail-lights for a Chevy Malibu.
how large were the displacements of car engines during the 20's? any specs how much hp and torque they make?
I'd like to know as well. Good question.
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Some Car Lounge mods/members look for everyone else’s faults because they have lost track of all their own. They see criticism where there is none, and their defense against recognizing their own self-criticism is to sermonize over the trivial habits of others. ....they think they have a responsibility to interfere in others' lives because only they know best.
how large were the displacements of car engines during the 20's? any specs how much hp and torque they make?
The engines were big back then.
The V-12 in the 1920 Packard Twin-Six displaced 7.0 Litres and it produced 90hp @ 2600rpm. Can't find a torque number for it.
You need to keep in mind that gasoline back then had a very low octane and engines used a very low compression thus the low horsepower. Though that was certainly enough power for the time given the roads at the time and those skinny little tires.
Quote, originally posted by rosskoss »
I'd love to know how you determined the soul coefficient of a car through online photos.
gateway, I'm closing in on yoru post count per day
"And the sky is blue and righteous in every direction. The Sun is total and burning and just right there, and today is a beautiful day. Testing, testing, one, two-"
The point above about the power of cars of the '20s being v. adequate for the times is an important one to note. Driving an automobile then was so totally different from the experience today. The steering, roadholding, and especially, the braking ability of cars of that decade were so awful, in hindsight, as to be ludicrous. I've studied this era pretty in-depth, and although I wasn't around (I ain't THAT old! ), I can relate to the stories from the time of drivers who pushed their cars into the 70, 80, or sometimes even higher speed realm. It must have been v. "butt-puckering" to do. If you've ever driven a Ford Model A, for example (a good example of a competent late-twenties popular car), you'll know what I mean. They're SCARY at anything over about 40mph, but they will touch ~60-65mph, if you're brave enough, and can stand to listen to that three-main-bearing four-banger beat itself to death.
I don't have access to my reference materials r. now, but from memory, a few displacements and power figures come to mind. The Ford Model T (the A's predecessor), had a four-cylinder flathead engine of 160 cubic inch displacement and 20 horsepower. (The Model A got a new-design 200 cubic inch flathead four with 40 horsepower. Duesenberg's Model A, which was the twenties predecessor to the Model J, had a single overhead cam straight-8, and IIRC, was something like 6 liters in displacement, with an even 100 horsepower (only the Model J had the option of supercharging).
Also, as mentioned above, gasoline was of a different nature then, with something like 60 octane being normal, and even the newly developed "Ethyl" high-octane fuel only being about ~70 octane. Compression ratios on the engines of the twenties hovered around 4.0:1 because of this, and also because of the poor quality of bearings (poured babbitt mains etc, which could not take the impact of higher ratios), imperfect piston ring technology, weak gaskets, etc. Also, almost all makers were producing engines with L-head design, which is in itself a limiting factor when it comes to raising compression ratios. Walter Chrysler's new-for-1926 Chrysler automobile was the talk of the town when it appeared with its "high-compression" engine, and it was only something like 6.0:1.
Carmakers generally tended to discount horsepower numbers back then in favor of developing engines that produced a lot of "grunt", or low-end torque, for the driver's convenience and comfort while motoring. The reason behind this was to minimize the need to change gears. A car was judged on its ability to "lug" away from rest, or extremely low speed, in as high a gear as possible.
It was hard enough to STEER the damned things, let alone have to SHIFT through the non-synchromesh crashbox transmissions of the time. Cars were a whole different animal back then, that's fersure.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
"A car was judged on its ability to "lug" away from rest, or extremely low speed, in as high a gear as possible. "
I guess some things never change! What's up Gate?
I was watching "My Classic Car" on Speed the other day and noticed perfectly stiched leather belts on everythingunder the hood. It was a custom "coach" built bugatti coupe with a blower. Friggin leather belts on the blower! It was so beautiful under the hood I nearly spit oatmeal on my lap.
Was this the way back then? I can only imagine going on a road trip with cow skin holding the fragile parts of my drivetrain apart. Was cow hide the belt of choice in those days?
In 1918, the famous Charles Kettering was the head of Delco (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company) which had been absorbed by General Motors after Ketterings invention of the electric starter and electric lights as introduced on the 1912 Cadillac.
Kettering had a formidable engineering reputation, and as such, there were few at GM willing to oppose his ideas. Kettering was captivated by the idea of an air cooled automotive engine, and began work on the design in 1918. Aircooled airplane engines were common at the time, and used large cast iron fins on the cylinders to disipate heat. Kettering decided to use copper fins instead, since copper conducts heat 10 times better than iron. Despite the known issues of dissimilar metals, Ketterings design had the copper fins welded to the cast iron heads - Kettering was certain that all issues could be resolved as a simple engineering problem. A large fan drew air up and over the cylinders to cool the engine. The copper fins prompted GM to officially name the engine the "Copper-cooled engine", though Kettering himself still called it air cooled.
Chevrolet had introduced the "490" in 1915 as thier first challenge to the Ford Model T. It sold fairly well, but was still way behind the Model T's numbers. A new Chevy model was to be produced in the early 20's, and Kettering targeted the copper-cooled engine for it. It was thought that this would be just the technical edge needed.
Many in the company had doubts about the engine, however, so a parallel development effort was started without Kettering for a water cooled engine. The same car using the water cooled engine was dubbed the "Superior". In Ketterings view, air cooling was to become exclusive once the reliability of the engine was proven. Clearly though, doubts still remained. The 1923 sales catalog sounded as if it was holding judgement: "Chevrolet Motor Company announces an important development in economical transportation, consisting of a motor embodying new application of established principles governing the efficient control of motor temperatures under all weather conditions...Chevrolet cars, equipped with these new motors, are now being marketed in limited quantities...along with its present successful line of New Superior Models."
A Chevrolet with a four-cylinder, copper-cooled engine was finally introduced at the New York auto show in January, 1923. The two-door car was well accepted by the public, and the future looked bright. The cars had not been in the hands of the public long before complaints started. The engine overheated, causing all sorts of problems. The decisive William Knudsen (who had been hired from Ford to head Chevrolet production) recalled all the copper-cooled cars and had many of them dumped into Lake Erie. Kettering was humiliated.
Precise production figures for the Copper-Cooled Chevy are no longer available, but as many as 3,000 may have been built. All but one or two of these were returned to the factory, and either destroyed alltogether or had their engines scrapped, and then resold as ordinary Superior models. In hundreds of cases GM had to buy the cars back from individual owners. One crusty doctor in New England refused to sell — no big corporation was going to tell him what to do — and his car now resides in (of all places!) the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.
In addition to the humiliating recall, the matter revealed a GM management flaw. The different opinions held by the advisory committee (Sloan), research (Kettering), and the car divisions had led to confusion, and allowed an under-developed product to reach the public.
As it turned out, everyone involved survived the catastrophe in fine shape. Knudsen went on to take Chevrolet to low-priced sales leadership before the end of the decade. Sloan settled in for a stellar career at the top of GM that was to extend for another thirty-five years. Kettering, too, was far from finished. Even before the ruckus had died down he had scored another historic landmark achievement in automotive engineering with the introduction by Cadillac of his double-plane crankshaft, the development that gave the final refinement to the V-type engine and made it the predominant configuration in the industry for generations to come. (Shown above, Kettering in 1930 with a Cadillac V16 engine.)
So, in the end, the Copper-Cooled Chevrolet turned out to be one of those rare disasters that have no lasting consequences and are soon all but forgotten. Still, it must rank as perhaps the greatest product fiasco in the long history of General Motors.
A Stanley landspeed-record car was run at Ormond Beach, Florida, in 1906, almost a hundred years ago, and it reached an unofficial top speed of nearly 200mph!!
HOLY CRAP!!! ARE YOU KIDDING!?!? that's unbelievable!
It's indeed true about the Stanley record car of '06. It was a pretty advanced-looking thing too, with a midship-mounted driver, the boiler and engine behind him, and the bodywork in basically the shape of an upturned canoe; pointed at both ends.
Thanx above for the Copper-Cooled Chevrolet piece. These cars belie the neverending and ignorance-fueled common wisdom that America is not an innovator when it comes to automotive technology and design. On the decided contrary, if one takes ALL of automotive history, decade upon decade, into the account, instead of zeroing in on just the past few, the United States is far and away the primary "engine of innovation" in the world of automobiles.
Yurrup doesn't even come close.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
my father has a 1929 frankin that has been in the family since it was new.
Wow, do you guys take it any of the national meets? What model is it, do you know? I'm originally from Syracuse, NY and have been raised on Franklin history. All of the innovations of HH Franklin and John Wilkinson are truly amazing. Unlike the copper Chevy, their air cooled cars were masterfully engineered and the favorite of all sorts of celebrities of the day, especially pilots. Lindbergh had a Franklin shipped to France so that he would have it at his disposal on his arrival. There was a big reunion in downtown Syracuse a few years ago, a real treat. I'll have to see if I can find some pics somewhere...
"I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object."
I also have read that Franklins were "engineer's cars", with an image of rigorously careful design that took "the road less travelled". Also, Franklins, for many years, featured framework of wood...ash to be specific. They were of the belief that the wooden framework, which had an inherent amount of flex in it, made their automobiles ride with more suppleness, considering the cart-spring suspension of the day.
It was a different world, with different roads, different driving needs, and a whole different mindset towards automobile design, 85 years ago.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
I also have read that Franklins were "engineer's cars", with an image of rigorously careful design that took "the road less travelled". Also, Franklins, for many years, featured framework of wood...ash to be specific. They were of the belief that the wooden framework, which had an inherent amount of flex in it, made their automobiles ride with more suppleness, considering the cart-spring suspension of the day. When one takes into account the scarcity of paved roads at that time (The Lincoln Highway was only a few years old at that time, and was the ultimate in highway engineering.), and the really primitive roads that cars had to travel on, such thinking made perfect sense.
It was a different world, with different roads, different driving needs, and a whole different mindset towards automobile design, 85 years ago.
Please read my first published article in the February 2010 Chevy Enthusiast magazine (page 37; "Zora Arkus-Duntov And Five Easy Corvettes"). Link: http://www.amosautomotive.com/ Thanx!
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” - St. Thomas Aquinas
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