#automobile history

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog on this #WetNoseWednesday.

This 1922 photograph was taken at the Cleveland, Ohio home of Fisher Body Corporation executive Frederick J. Fisher (1878–1941), during an event associated with in association with the company’s 1919 integration into the General Motors Company, which formed General Motors’ Fisher Body Division.

The two-legged end of this game of tug or war is William A. Fisher (1886–1969), brother to Frederick and also an executive with the Fisher Body Corporation (both William and Frederick, as well as brothers Charles, Lawrence, Edward, Alfred, and Howard would continue to be associated with the Fisher brand through General Motors until August of 1944).

The photograph was taken by Cleveland Press photographer Louis Van Oeyen (1865-1946). Van Oeyen became Cleveland’s first staff news photographer in 1901 after selling his photographs of the assassination of President William McKinley to the Press. Over the course of his career, Van Oeyen also worked as the official photographer for the American League and the World Series, tested new photographic equipment for General Electric and other major corporations, and provided mentorship to emerging photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) and Herman Seid (1908-1980).

This image is part of Hagley Library’s collection of P.S. du Pont photographs (Accession 1969.002). This collection photographs includes images collected by Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954) during his life. You can view a selection of nearly 7,000 images from this collection online now by visiting its page in our Digital Archive. Just click here!

And don’t forget! Beginning Monday, April 12, we will be discontinuing this Tumblr blog. But we won’t be going far. We’ll be continuing to post regular content at our new home at https://www.hagley.org/research/news/hagley-vault. You’ll also continue to be able to find images and links to new posts, as well as additional bonus content, on our Twitter feed,  @Hagley_Library.

This #MotorMonday finds a new kind of car at the end of the rainbow; the Nash 600. This model was the first mass-produced American car featuring unibody construction. Pioneered by European manufacturers like Lambda in the early 1920s, unibody construction consisted of a manufacturing design in which the body of the vehicle, its floor plan, and its chassis all form a single structure. This allowed for a lighter vehicle with better fuel economy, as well as a vehicle that was able to absorb crash impacts more safely for passengers.

This approach to automobile construction would later become common among American automobile manufacturers, as would seat-belts, which Nash begin including in 1949, making them an early adopter of this technology as well. Nash’s innovative 1936 ‘Bed-in-Car’ system, however, yet remains to achieve the widespread acclaim of its other achievements.

The ca. 1941 catalog is part of Hagley Library’s Z. Taylor Vinson collection of transportation ephemera (Accession 20100108.ZTV). For over sixty years, Zachary Taylor Vinson (1933-2009), a senior lawyer with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1993-1995 president of the Society of Automotive Historians, and 1995-2009 editor of Automotive History Review amassed a large and comprehensive collection of printed material documenting on the history transportation, particularly automobiles.

Our Digital Archive offers a small selection of materials from the Vinson collection documenting the history of the automobile and transportation. Click here to view them online.

The National Society of Professional Engineers has been sponsoring Engineers Week every February since 1951 as a means of calling attention to engineers’ contributions to society and advocating for the importance of education in math, science, and technical skills.

Today’s Engineers Week theme is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, so we’re sharing this December 1949 photograph of Florence Naum (1922-2006) testing a generator regular quality control machine at the Ford Motor Company’s plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The device tested regulators for 1950 Fords under simulated road conditions.

Naum was a resident of Farmington, Michigan. She began her career at Ford as a stock handler in 1939 after graduating high school and, by 1949, was the only woman electrical technician at the company and one of only two women enrolled at the University of Detroit in pursuit of an engineering degree. She eventually earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Michigan and later became the first female electrical engineer employed at the company.

This photograph is part of Hagley Library’s collection of Chamber of Commerce of the United States photographs and audiovisual materials, Series II. Nation’s Business photographs (Accession 1993.230.II). To view more items from this collection online, visit its page in our Digital Archive by clicking here.