JF Ptak Science Books Post 2086
Chrysler Motors was really on a hayride when their New Worlds in Engineering (1941) booklet hit the presses in 1940. From about 1930 to 1940 they produced about 8 million automobiles—more than a million in 1939 alone.
Their cars got bigger, heavier, and of course, wider--on a course with the rest of the American automobile industry to secure their shiney spot in the Manifest Destiny of Wide. This ultra-wide model (above) was a bit of a peek into what the future might hold for the automotive company—the license plate says “1948”, and the car is definitely, defiantly, prodigiously, wide. Those three heads peeping up above the dash really are sitting in a front seat front seat that looks as though it still held room for one more. The razor-cheeked platinum blonde behind the wheel look as though her pencil fingers were just able to wrap around what looks to be a gigantic steering wheel. –the two women actually look like they have the situation under control, while the eyebrow-arched male passenger looks to have something on his mind. Perhaps his 1948-future self was thinking about the sweepingly sleek “Chrysler Royale”, which is not only wide but also very long, though it unfortunately has not dated license plate out front to give him any hope of when he might be able to expect to see this futurmobile.
In this picture (below) we get another glimpse of the wide future over the shoulder of a Chrysler designer. Still another look-at-wide is this fellow in the purple smock from the art and design department who was molding new instrument display panels in clay—they seem long enough for this man to lay out in fron of and still have plenty of room left over.
It seems to me that all of these cars are wider than the widest of the wide production vehicles, including the unstoppably wide North African dune vehicle, the Unimog 5000, which measured in at 247 cm for its 2002 model.
I’m not sure where the roads were that these wide cars were going to travel on—but since they were future cars I guess they were all going just one way, so two-way streets could become one-ways, double-wide...
[“Tomorrow department” is taken from the Chrysler Corp’s “Chrysler Junior Craftsmen” department for the 11-16 year old sons of Chrysler employees, and which was nicknamed the “Tomorrow Department”. ]
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