The 1930s asked carmakers to do two things at once: dazzle and survive. The decade that produced Duesenbergs, V-16s and wind-tunnel streamliners also emptied showrooms, closed famous factories and put horses back in front of family sedans. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments that came out of it.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1930s 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 V8 developed in Edison's old laboratory
On the tile: Ford V81932
Henry Ford wanted eight cylinders at a four-cylinder price, and he wanted the work done quietly. A picked group of engineers got their seclusion inside Thomas Edison's Fort Myers laboratory, which Ford had moved to Greenfield Village. The trick was casting the block as a single piece, which kept a 1932 Ford V-8 between about $460 and $600. Perfecting that casting took time; the millionth V-8 did not appear until 1934.
To keep sixteen cylinders a secret, Cadillac marked the blueprints as work on a General Motors bus engine and let the press chase a rumor about a V-12. The real thing arrived at the New York Auto Show on January 4, 1930, and nearly 2,900 buyers took one that year. Then the Depression reached the top of the market: 364 cars in 1931, and 296 in 1932.
The supercharged Duesenberg SJ of 1932 made about 320 horsepower, so the belief that the marque gave English the word doozy sounds plausible. It is not so. Etymologists record doozy as an adjective in 1903 and as a noun in 1916, years before the Model J made the name a byword for luxury, and they point instead to daisy or to the Italian actress Eleonora Duse. The famous car reinforced the word; it did not invent it.
Jean Bugatti's Aerolithe show car was skinned in Elektron, an aviation alloy that is ninety percent magnesium and cannot be welded. His answer was to rivet the panels together, leaving a raised seam that runs the length of the body. The four Type 57 SC Atlantics built between 1936 and 1938 used ordinary aluminum, which welds perfectly well, and Bugatti kept the seam anyway. Three of the four still exist.
The loom works that built Japan's Model AA passenger car in 1936 was named for the founding family, Toyoda. A public contest for a new emblem drew some 27,000 entries, and the winning design spelled the name Toyota instead: simpler to draw, and written in eight strokes, a count associated with good fortune. The trademark was registered in April 1937, and Toyota Motor Company was founded that August.
In 1935 Chevrolet bolted an all-steel wagon body onto a commercial truck chassis, fitted three rows of seats for eight people, hooked it to a sixty-horsepower six, and called it the Suburban Carryall. The wagons of the day had wood sides and canvas tops, versatile enough but too easily damaged for steady commercial work. Chevrolet reckons the name has run longer than any other in the industry, which makes a Depression work vehicle the ancestor of the family sport utility.
In 1936 Carl Mayer walked into his uncle Oscar's office with a plan for a hot dog on wheels. Oscar Mayer gave the project a green light. The General Body Company of Chicago built the thing with open cockpits in the center and at the rear, and it went out onto the streets of Chicago advertising German-style wieners. A glass enclosure was added by 1940 to shelter the driver. Gasoline rationing during the Second World War finally parked it.
Powel Crosley Jr. was turning out 500 radio sets a day by the end of 1922, put a shelf in a refrigerator door and called it the Shelvador, and owned the Cincinnati Reds. In 1939 he applied the same instincts to automobiles: tiny, plain and sold where his other goods were, in appliance and hardware stores. The two-cylinder Crosley made twelve horsepower, weighed under a thousand pounds, and sold for somewhere between $325 and $365.
Hudson's inexpensive new model of 1932 borrowed its glamour from the air, down to the name Terraplane, so the company hired the most famous flier available. In July, with more than two thousand dealers gathered in Detroit, Amelia Earhart christened the first one using a bottle of gasoline instead of champagne. A ceremonial Terraplane later went to Orville Wright, and Hudson gave Earhart a car of her own.
Fitting one of Paul Galvin's first car radios in 1930 meant ripping out the headliner, drilling the floor for batteries and rigging a complete electrical system by hand. Galvin had no budget for a booth at the radio industry's convention in Atlantic City that June, so he parked at the entrance to the pier and turned the volume up. The brand joined motor to the era's favorite suffix, ola.
Chrysler's engineers were blowing air over models in a wind tunnel as early as 1930, with the cooperation of Orville Wright. The finding was humbling: the ordinary two-box car of the day slipped through the air better pointed backward, and a reversed DeSoto appeared on Detroit streets to prove it. The streamlined Airflow that followed in 1934 was hailed by the motoring press as revolutionary and spurned by the public as too radical.
Downtown Oklahoma City had more automobiles than curb space, so Carl Magee proposed a small wind-up timer for each parking place and filed for a patent in December 1932. A design competition run with engineers at the state college produced a working model nicknamed Black Maria. On July 16, 1935, 175 meters went in along fourteen blocks at a nickel an hour, and other cities copied the idea quickly.
The story goes that Percy Shaw was driving a dark road above Halifax on a foggy night when a cat sitting on a fence threw his headlights back at him. Another version credits the tram rails he had been steering by. What is documented is the 1934 patent and the company he opened in 1935: glass lenses in a rubber cushion that ducks under a passing tire and wipes itself clean.
Rolla Harger, a biochemist at Indiana University, wanted a roadside test for drivers who had been drinking. His Drunkometer, worked out in 1931 and patented in 1936, had the subject blow into a balloon. The captured breath met a chemical solution that darkened in proportion to the alcohol, and a formula Harger devised turned the shade into a blood reading. Indianapolis police used it on a case on New Year's Eve, 1938.
Wally Byam had been selling build-it-yourself trailer plans, and then ready-made wood and Masonite trailers, when he introduced the Airstream Clipper on January 17, 1936. It borrowed from aircraft practice: a riveted Duralumin skin and a kapok blanket for insulation, both standard in airplanes of the day. Admirers called it an airplane without wings. Aerodynamic, light and unmistakably modern, the riveted aluminum shell set the pattern Airstream has followed ever since.
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion of 1933 was twenty feet of teardrop on three wheels, driven by the front pair and steered by the single wheel at the back. It could carry as many as eleven people and returned about thirty miles to the gallon. Three were built. Car one burned in 1939, car three was cut up for scrap, and the survivor sits in the National Automobile Museum in Reno.
Look closely at a closed car from 1934 and the middle of the roof is fabric over wood and wire mesh, because no mill rolled sheet steel wide enough to stamp a roof in one piece. A 76-inch rolling mill fixed that, and for 1935 General Motors and Fisher Body offered one-piece steel tops on Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Chevrolet Master cars. The rest of the industry followed as soon as it could.
In March 1933 General Motors sat the heads of its five car divisions in a pair of Cadillacs fitted with two different independent front suspensions. They were sold on the spot, and Charles Kettering told them the company could not afford to skip it. Every division offered the idea for 1934 as Knee-Action, named for the way the arm folded like a joint. The cheaper version wore out alignments and exasperated mechanics.
Louis Meyer's mother had told him buttermilk was the thing for a hot day, so after winning the Indianapolis 500 for a third time in 1936 he asked for a bottle of it in the garage area. A newsreel camera caught him holding up three fingers and drinking. A dairy executive who saw the footage, and who took the buttermilk for milk, asked that a bottle be waiting for the winner every year.
Victor Hugo Green carried mail for thirty-nine years, and he knew what Black motorists met on the road: hotels that would not rent a room, lunch counters that would not serve, towns where stopping was unwise. With his wife Alma he began publishing a travel guide in Harlem in 1936, the early editions little more than a list of Harlem businesses. It grew into a national directory that stayed in print for three decades.
Through the 1930s Scuderia Ferrari ran Alfa Romeo's racing effort, and Enzo Ferrari ran the Scuderia. The arrangement ended in September 1939, when Alfa terminated his contract under terms that forbade him for four years from rebuilding his team or returning to racing under his name. He set up a workshop in Modena called Auto Avio Costruzioni instead, and quietly began building a car of his own.
Before she ever raced, Gwenda Hawkes drove ambulances on the Russian and Balkan fronts of the First World War and was decorated twice, with the Cross of St George and the Cross of St Stanislaus. In 1935 she and Kay Petre settled the women's lap record at Brooklands between them. Petre reached 134.24 miles an hour; Hawkes answered with 135.95 and became the Brooklands Speed Queen. The record still stands.
Daytona Beach had grown too short for what Malcolm Campbell wanted, so he took his Rolls-Royce-engined Blue Bird to the salt flats at Bonneville. On September 3, 1935, at the age of fifty, he ran 301.13 miles an hour, the first officially clocked car above 300. Timing trouble meant nobody could confirm it until the following day, when crews were already preparing another attempt.
General Motors' design chief built the 1938 Buick Y-Job to show where automobiles were going: headlights hidden behind panels, door handles flush with the body, windows raised by electric motors, a convertible top tucked away under a metal deck. The letter Y came from the way experimental aircraft were labeled at the time. Harley Earl then used the industry's first concept car to drive to work.
Errett Lobban Cord had sold cars in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago before Auburn offered him the running of its automobile company in 1924, and he was president within two years. Around it he built a holding company: Duesenberg, Lycoming engines, Checker Cab, Stinson aircraft, a shipyard, roughly 150 businesses by 1937. That year, with federal regulators pressing him over his stock dealings, he sold his interest for $2.5 million and left the automobile business.
At the Nurburgring in 1935, Tazio Nuvolari's Alfa Romeo was about twenty miles an hour slower than the nine German cars entered against it. A tire burst on the leader in the closing miles, and Nuvolari won in front of some 250,000 spectators. The story goes that the organizers had no recording of the Italian anthem and that Nuvolari produced his own copy. The victory itself is beyond argument.
The Traction Avant shown in Citroen's Paris showroom on April 18, 1934 drove its front wheels and carried its body without a separate frame, two departures from ordinary practice. Paying for the new factory that built it was more than the company could carry. Citroen went bankrupt that year, and Michelin, a major creditor, took control. Andre Citroen died the next year, aged 57.
On December 30, 1936, autoworkers in Flint, Michigan stopped their machines and refused to leave the Fisher Body plants that stamped General Motors' car bodies. Supporters outside arranged for food to be carried in. Forty-four days later, on February 11, 1937, the company recognized the United Auto Workers. Within a year the union grew from about 30,000 members to 500,000, and sit-down strikes spread across Detroit.
General Motors' pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair sat visitors in moving chairs and carried them above 35,000 square feet of model landscape: the America of 1960, laced with express highways. The queues ran more than a mile, in sun and in rain. Around five million people took Norman Bel Geddes' ride, and each one came out wearing a pin that read I Have Seen the Future.
When a Prairie farmer could no longer pay for gasoline, oil or a license, the family car did not go to the scrap dealer. Out came the motor, on went a hitch at the front bumper, and a team of horses pulled the thing to town. Canadians named it a Bennett buggy for the prime minister who held office through the first five years of the Depression. Americans called their version a Hoover cart.
Peerless built expensive automobiles in Cleveland until the Depression took away the customers, and the last car left the plant in 1931. Prohibition then ended, and president James Bohannon had a better use for eight idle acres. He bought the American rights to a Canadian ale brewed since 1840, converted the works and reopened in 1934 as a brewery. Beer was still being made in the old car plant in 1984.
Walter Chrysler's tower in New York does not merely belong to a car company, it is dressed like one. At the thirty-first floor, steel ornaments modeled on Chrysler radiator caps crown the corners, spanning about fifteen feet, beside a brick frieze of stylized racing automobiles with polished steel hubcaps. At the fifty-ninth story the gargoyles take the form of eagle heads. The 185-foot spire was assembled in secret inside the building and raised in November 1929, and the tower opened in 1930 as the tallest in the world.
Everyone knows how German racing cars turned silver: a Mercedes came in a kilogram overweight before the 1934 Eifelrennen, so the crew scraped the white paint off overnight. The tale comes from team manager Alfred Neubauer's memoir, published in 1958. Historians point out that the weight limit was not enforced at that race, that no report or photograph from the weekend supports it, and that Auto Union had already run silver.
Germans who wanted the people's car presented in 1938 could not simply buy one. They bought a five-Reichsmark stamp each week and pasted it into a booklet until the pages added up to the price of 990 Reichsmarks. About 330,000 people joined the scheme, and some 60,000 had paid in full by 1941. None of them received a car; the factory had been given over to military production.
For its first dozen years much of Route 66 was gravel and dirt. From 1933 to 1938 thousands of unemployed young men worked the road gangs that surfaced it stretch by stretch, and by 1938 the whole highway from Chicago to Los Angeles was paved. It was already carrying families out of the Dust Bowl, an estimated 210,000 of them to California. John Steinbeck named it the Mother Road.
Myron Scott, a photographer for the Dayton Daily News, came across boys racing homemade cars down a hill in 1933 and decided the idea deserved a championship. His first race drew nineteen boys; a second one that summer drew 362. On August 19, 1934, the first All-American Soap Box Derby ran in Dayton, and eleven-year-old Robert Turner won it in a machine built from the wood of an old bar and a set of stroller wheels. The race moved to Akron the next summer.