(first posted 11/25/2014) Flight has always been a major fantasy attached to driving. Since the first cars shimmied over dirt roads and cobblestones, motorists have imagined themselves at the controls of flying machines. And if they weren’t already of that mindset, advertisers and dealers made sure to drive the point home. They still do. Who among us hasn’t been told by a salesperson to “check out the cockpit” of a ride they were trying to sell us?
In the 1950s, many an American kid riding shotgun with his father learned the legend of How the Cadillac Got Its Tailfin. “See that?”, Dad would say, taking a hands-free drag on a cigarette while making an upshift. “The guy who designed that was inspired by the rudders on the P-38 fighter.”
Some manufacturers actually did make airplanes at one time or another, like Ford, Piaggio, Voisin, SAAB. Many others produced aero components: BMW, Rolls Royce, Packard. When I bought a repair manual for my ‘63 Imperial, I was pleased to find that inside the back cover was an intact pocket and card from the Chrysler Missile Branch library.
However tenuous the connection a carmaker’s products might have to aircraft, few were shy about using aeronautic (and aerospace) references to spice up whatever land bound bucket of bolts they had to offer. Having no established design idiom for rocket ships, Hudson were free to employ art deco fantasy when fashioning a hood ornament for their aptly named Terraplane in the late ‘30s. A prospective buyer who slid behind the wheel sighted over a translucent ruby orb that appeared to have landed on Planet Terra after escaping a Buck Rogers film short.
During WWII, the German V-2 set the standard for popular ideas of rocket design that would persist through the early 1950s. The Nazi wonder weapon‘s form was transcribed directly into chrome for the finned cigar heading toward a golden postwar world on trunk of an Oldsmobile Rocket 88. But the cold warriors–and war of the worlders–worried: If the rocket is flying TOWARD Earth, where did it come FROM?
New designs for military aircraft proliferated as Cold War fears kept aeronautical designers busy. Aero technology advanced so fast and new warbirds arrived so often that they were sometimes mistaken for alien craft, or worse: secret Soviet super planes. These sleek weapons made their presence felt in automakers’ studios, where assorted side spears, light pods, fender crowns and hood ornaments took on swept wings and rocket fins, selling American Might to Americans. GM cast a modern Phoenix when they grafted an accipiter’s head to the nose of an F-7 Cutlass fighter and perched it on the hood of the mid-century Chevy, evoking a wartime propaganda animation in which an American bomber was transfigured into an arrow-wielding eagle.
As late as 1959, Cadillac’s design brief included parking light pods lifted directly from the intakes of Boeing B-52 bombers.
And its tail lamps suggested hot gases shooting rearward to help push 2 1/2 tons forward on low pressure tires. It brought the spaceship look to a place where geometry’s most magical shape, the circle, looked almost ungainly formed into wheels that broke he long sweep of a Caddy’s bodyside.
By now, John Q. Public had an idea of what a real rocket looked like, and it didn’t resemble a winged cigar. The elongated cylinders atop the haunches of ‘59 Pontiacs and Fords would be among the last of the escape velocity styling cues. They referenced the dark side of rocketry: the intercontinental ballistic missile.
But ICBMs cast dual shadows. Not only could they carry destruction, they also transported human explorers into space. Automakers certainly didn’t shake hands with warmongers in their boardrooms over a deal to sell symbols of nuclear annihilation. As before, they sifted through timely imagery to proffer symbols of power, speed, security–and hope.
Your last picture makes an interesting point. Real outer-space stuff, whether satellites or capsules, is not aerodynamic at all. It doesn’t need to be. It tends to show ungainly bare mechanisms without any outer case or body.
In other words, automobiles of the 1890-1905 era looked more like real space stuff than any later cars!
Good point! I now remember the classic VW ad ca. 1969:
http://designarchives.aiga.org/entries/%2Bid%3A13055/_/detail/relevance/asc/0/3/13055/its-ugly-but-it-gets-you-there/1
Yeah, it only needs to be slippery to escape the atmosphere. And here’s a another space question for you guys: If you are in in battle, wouldn’t there have to be an open mic between warring ships in order for a combatant to hear the enemy’s weapons? Photons don’t make noise, right?
Right, there is no atmosphere in space so there’s no sound. A lot of the spaceship sounds when they shoot or fly around in sci-fi movies and TV shows are not realistic.
Blast effect is no good, either. This is why for weapons, you need hit-to-kill kinetic rounds, fragmentation near-miss, or a nuke close enough to fry.
If you think about it, it might be even more frightening to see a round coming at you silently. Some day, some movie maker should do it right.
Having never been in air combat, I would guess that even in piston planes, the only guns you hear are yours, since the enemy’s guns are washed out by your engine and prop noise.
The Rocket 88 reminded me of this: “The rockets go up, but where they come down, that’s not my department, says Wernher Von Braun,,,”
All this ties into music history too. Some say Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats song Rocket 88 was the first Rock & Roll song. It almost certainly was not but it sure is fun.
Former Saturn Owner: I’m curious about your statement that ‘Rocket 88’ “almost certainly was not” the first Rock ‘n’ Roll song. Could you tell us, then, which song you DO think holds that distinction, and why?
The P-38’s vertical stabilizers are similar to those of the earlier Model 10 Electra (flown by Amelia Earhart), & were retained in the Model 49 Constellation. Nothing jet-age about these!
BTW, those mass balances in the middle of the horiz. stabilizer were put there at the insistence of the Army, not Lockheed, who already concealed mass balances inside the fins. Kelly Johnson claimed the Army ones did nothing but kill a few pilots trying to bale out.
Love it! The P38 tail lights are brill. As is the rest. Thank you for making my day.
I dream stuff like this, but can never quite remember all the details in the morning. And I haven’t made the time to learn PS. But now I don’t have to.
BTW, I missed the “Bel Air” in the contrail the first time around. Nice.
“BTW, I missed the “Bel Air” in the contrail the first time around. Nice.”
Me too. That is fabulous!
Fantastic post. I’d never noticed the B-52 nacelles were dupes for the Caddy turn signal pods. And I’ll never be able to look at a 59 Ford without seeing the ICBM launchers now.
amazing work.
Great illustrations! The jet-age styling elements are ubiquitous in the 50’s but I’d never noticed certain ones, like the ’59 Ford’s fins.
Thanks for the props, everybody. I’ve always wanted to do this story, but never found an outlet for it until CC.
This is terrific – it really drives the point about the inspiration the aerospace industry provided the automotive industry.
These pictures are awesome! You have captured the 1950s automotive design ethos.
Great fun, and also very true.
It still goes on – here in the UK, the recently deceased Jaguar X type had headlamps clearly modelled on a pioneering British aiercraft.
Of course, being a late 90s Jag, it was from an aircraft produced nearly 50 years previously – the de Havilland Comet
Good catch. Several other early, large Brit jets had embedded engines, like the V-bombers. Slick looking, high ground clearance, & more centered thrust, at the expense of maintainability & more difficulty in upgrading – note that there was no trouble converting KC-135s to high-bypass turbofans.
BTW, a Handley-Page Victor & a VC-10 were displayed at a March AFB airshow back in the ’80s. Surely the Victor is as close as any real aircraft could be to Flash Gordon spaceship styling.
Also, when a turbine wheel comes apart, uncontained, which does happen, the damage is much more severe.
Yes, that’s a good argument for podded engines, though to be fair I’ve not heard of many cases of turbines grenading like that. The Me-262 introduced pods, but I suspect Boeing, who with Douglas popularized podded jets, was paranoid after what they went through with the B-29, in which early versions of the Wright R-3350 radial often caught fire (being made partly of magnesium) & burned through the main spar, causing the plane to fatally spin in.
“The only time you can have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.”
Another reason for podded engines on big jets like airliners and heavy bombers is that you can actually use the engines as damping weights for the wing, which is a handy way to manage wing flex while keeping the wing thin for lower drag.
It remembered me to “something”… Now that’s IT!
And in the Terraplane picture we have an early design model of the Death Star!!! LOL
Great fun. I’d never realized that the Cadillac’s tribute to the design included the ability of the tail light to flip open (for gasoline, in the automotive case).
This kind of brilliant scientific discussion is what we have been missing here at CC. Who knew that all of those features we grew up seeing on old cars started out as the high tech products of the military-industrial complex! Groundbreaking stuff.
The final picture is a brilliant depiction of a rarely seen astral phenomenon, which astronomers have dubbed the Continentus Insignium. This is the perfect opportunity to show off a picture I once took of the same formation in its beginning, or Premier, stage. Some day, one of our amateur CC astronomers should get around to documenting the entire process of transformation.
There was undoubtedly a supernova involved.
Shhhhhh, JP, don’t wake him….
Ha! That guy is lucky – getting speared by one of those pointy ends would surely be fatal. 🙂
Very, very nicely done Barry.
The other piece of aerospace-industry design that found its way into the automotive world in a big way is the wasp-waisted (“Coke bottle”) shape.
The wasp-waist form was introduced on aircraft in the early ’50s after the discovery of the area rule: that transonic drag (and the violent buffeting that occurs when some aircraft approach the speed of sound) can be greatly reduced by minimizing changes in cross-sectional area. If you look at an “area-ruled” aircraft from above, you can see that the fuselage is sort of pinched in around the wing roots. (This isn’t always as noticeable on modern supersonic aircraft, I assume because computer-aided design allows far more sophisticating aerodynamic modeling.)
This eventually carried over into automotive design, one of the most dramatic production examples probably being the C3 Corvette. It was a major break with the ethos of the ’50s, which was basically slab-sided; the sides might be curved or broken up with creases and trim streaks, but there isn’t really any distinction between the forms of the body sides and the front and rear fenders on that side. Instead, the “area rule” shape exaggerates the fender forms while still making them an integral part of the overall form of the body (rather than separate entities, as was the case before the late ’40s).
Here’s the F-102 showing what you are referring to, Ate Up. The more I look at it, the more the pinched waisted look seems to attract because of its anatomical characteristics. Hmm. May be a story in that…
Actually the F-106 had the Area Ruled fuselage, not its unsuccessful Mach 1.2 predecessor the F-102. There’s very little taper in this drawing, what there is looks like it’s due only to the inlet transition.
The Northrop T-38 is a clear example of Area Ruling, still in use. They seem incredibly fast after leaving the runway.
The original YF-102 prototype was not area-ruled, but the subsequent YF-102A was. If you compare photos of both in plan view, the difference is pretty obvious. The application of the area rule — of which the F-102 program was one of the first, if not the first, U.S. examples — is why the production F-102A was able to reach Mach 1.2. The non-area-ruled prototype had great difficulty breaking the sound barrier in level flight.
The F-102 was a disappointment (getting it to meet the original specification, which wasn’t very realistic to begin with, resulted in a more or less new aircraft) and like most ’50s jet fighters it was buggy for quite a while, but I wouldn’t call it unsuccessful. Convair built more than 900 of them (compared to 340 F-106s) and they were in service for more than 15 years. The F-106 had much superior performance, but the F-102 certainly wasn’t a complete disaster.
I am not sure why, perhaps because my wife and I spent our most rewarding professional years in the airline Industry? But all four of our vehicles, a Ford Thunderbird, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Mini Cooper convertible and Honda Shadow all utilize wings in their trim/and or insignia.
Go figure.
Thanks for that reminder of where the ’59 Cadillac Pods came from…The B’52s.
and those taillights were too cool. i remember as a kid trying to understand the concept that they had gone out of style, they were looked on with disdain when i was 3 in 1962.
The same holds true of the Ford, However, I Think of Jello Molds On Aluminum Pie Plates when I Look at those taillights.
Fantastic imagery here ! .
THANK YOU .
I hope all and sundry have a GREAT THANKS GIVING .
-Nate
Mixed in with the space/rocket imagery was still plain old aviation imagery. Now bear with me for a moment. What were those bullet over riders/ tapering bumper guards supposed to evoke on the ’55 and ’56 Cadillacs? ( Don’t say breasts!) They started as “bomb type” bumper guards in 1950.They got bigger, taller, and more forward protruding by 1952, Then in ’53 they became integrated with the front grille. The ’55,’56 and ’57 had gullwing bumpers dropping down from them and forming the upper bumper beam.
Wait, surely they didn’t call them Dagmars because they looked like bombs?
They were commonly referred to as Dagmars for obvious reasons. I’ve got a book entitled Cadillac 1950-1959 MotorCars by Roy A. Schneider, published by Cadillac Motorbooks. It covers all the models of the decade and includes dealer and salesmen information book material. Not sales brochures. I wouldn’t have expected the factory material to make any mention of breasts, but I’ve always wondered, exactly, what were they “thinking” incorporating that particular design feature. It’s interesting to see the evolution of the design, from 1950 when they were just bumper guards flanking the front license plate to those full blown giant nose cone bumper projectiles. There was a 1959 Cadillac showcar, named the Cylclone, equipped with radar activated braking. It had large twin nosecones on the front of each fender. Since the automakers style their cars years in advance, the growth of the bumper guards was already planned since before 1950. Here’s a picture of the Cyclone.
Full story on the Dagmars here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/design-3/design-history-cadillacs-dagmars-an-intimate-look-at-their-origins-development-and-namesake/
My theory is that they were supposed to mimic in profile, the nose cone on the propeller of a fighter plane. That’s all you can see on the front of the plane with the prop spinning.
Here’s a photo of the book cover. I also have the volume covering the 1960s models.
Here’s a pic of a couple of pages covering the Eldorado Brougham. The material dissects all the features for the salesmen to use as selling points. The term that was constantly used to describe the main line car’s grilles throughout the 1950’s was “massive.”
I still like these cars, I once had a ’56 and a ’57. I always thought that those front bumpers were odd and dangerous, it looks like they could punch a couple of holes in another car, if it ever hit them broadside I cringe to think about the poor pedestrian that might get hit by one of those things. Still, that design was popular, the ’55 and ’56 Buick had almost identical bullets, even the ’57 Chevy had optional bullets. Lincoln even used them on their canted headlight series.
I’m a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned the best automotive copy of the twin jet engine nacelles on the B-52 (pre-turbofan), B-47 and B-36 (added on after initial production): the parking lights on the 1958 Chevrolet.
Wow-what a fantastic article. I knew the Cadillac tail fins were inspired by the fin and rudder of the P-38, but the rest of the stuff was totally new to me. I’ll never look at a ’58 Chevy in the same way ever again.
Excellent piece.
I had to do a double take on those P-38 taillights, they are so exacting to the 1958 Caddy.
Modern interpretation of jet influenced design.
This ad really illustrates the designer’s intentions. A land based fighter plane. Great ad.
61 Plymouths had rocket pod tail lamps in coves on the rear quater panels.
After reading Aaron’s (Ate Up With Motor) comments here, It became even more evident that his very high technical expertise as manifested in his many articles of Ate of With Motor I read, has few peers.