This page has my collection of printed and audio material related to the point of sale, and aftermarket items for the car.
My favourite of the collectables is the 'Meet Buick for 1950' showroom album, and its companion 'Colours and Fabrics'.
These albums are very rare and beautiful items. These books cost me so much I have chosen to forget the sum. I bought the first book in 2005. At the time I thought I could sell it again, and any money I may have lost would be my fee for looking at it.
However, when it arrived I could not part with it. I have had the album professionally restored. The book is too big for my scanner. As a result the images above are photos. The second book I bought in 2007.
"The car will survive:you won't"
The safety pamphlets make the most outrageous claims.
The blue "Beauty on Duty" brochure is a Buick item. Is it saying that when your unrestrained children go flying through our glass in an accident, they will be cut up far less, because we have fitted the car with laminated glass?
Logic would say, stop them before they reached the glass. It was not that seatbelts did not exist. It was that the big three auto makers did not want the buying public to perceive cars as unsafe. Everyone knew that glass was unsafe through personal experience. However, not everyone had experienced or been affected by a major road accident. Buyers did not make their own conclusion about racing down a highway at 50 miles per hour, and a sudden stop.
Buyers relied on the information provided for them, as in the article below. The crash test driver or dummy are obvious by their absence.
An excerpt from the article http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050515long.htm discusses the resistance to seatbelts and the part the auto maker Preston Tucker played in his own downfall. http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1948/tucker.html http://www.tuckerclub.org/index.php
"Tucker instinctively knows that his introduction of seatbelts implies to the buying public that cars without them are unsafe. He emphasizes this selling point at a lunch with the War Assets Administration, where he shows slides of accidents and people who were injured. Tuckers intrinsic understanding of what "sells" the American public is his most valuable asset, and it's also what makes the Big Three so afraid of him. If they are to survive this "Torpedo," then they either have to "produce quality products efficiently…keeping prices down" or resort to unethical activities that will snuff out their competition. Unfortunately, their choice says a lot about their capabilities."
GLASS
Auto makers avoided the topic of car safety. Sales could be hurt if customers began to think of cars as dangerous machines. There was, however, one aspect of car design so lethal everyone recognized the need to change it - plate glass windows.
A minor collision, even a small rock tossed up by a passing vehicle could shatter a windshield, sending razor-sharp shards of glass inside. In 1910, a laboratory accident would lead to a major advance in glass safety when Edouard Benedictus, a French chemist, knocked a flask on the floor. To his amazement, the bottle broke, but didn't shatter, because it was coated with nitrocellulose which had dried out, leaving an adhesive film on the inside. Benedictus didn't think much about the incident until he read of an auto accident in which a young girl's face was disfigured by flying glass. Moved by the reports, he went back to his lab. The result was a sheet of celluloid adhesive between two pieces of glass. Bonded together, they made one clear pane, the middle layer holding the lethal pieces in place. An improved form was first used in gas masks during World War I. But it took 16 years and an accident to get safety glass used in cars. (Quoted)
A transcript of a documentary 'The Glass Necklace'. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2605car.html .
http://www.apexstrategy.com/sc/safety.html
The accessory makers would look after you if the Big Three didn't.
Among other things like a vacuum operated ashtray (which is an other matter Camels will not hurt you), You could buy a 'Crest Key' with St Christopher on the top. See no need to worry, just get St Christopher on the job!
Things are becoming very modern and sophisticated, Some of the boasts in the salesman's book for the year is that the electrics in the car will not interfere with "The new mobile phone networks". This prompted me to look for the history of mobile phones in cars. Sure enough they existed at the time. According to this article http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/mobilephone.htm the equipment weighed 80lbs. Another I read said that you could only make three to four calls before the cars battery was flattened. Photo of first mobile call
