In 1915, Emily Post wrote one of the first accounts of transcontinental motor travel in the United States,By Motor to the Golden Gate.¹ Hired byCollier’smagazine to travel the newly completed Lincoln Highway from New York City to San Francisco for the Pan American Exposition, Post recorded her impressions of long distance travel by automobile. As a way to sell both the book and motor travel, friend and editor Frank Crownin-shield asked Post to “keep an informal but complete record” of the trip to be published as advice to the legions of middle-class drivers who would follow her....

“There was this about a Model T,” wrote E. B. White in 1936, “the purchaser never regarded his purchase as a complete, finished product. When you bought a Ford, you figured you had a start—a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware. Driving away from the agency . . . you were already full of creative worry.”¹ A veteran of early motoring, White recalled the popularity of tinkering with the Model T. In his sentimental eulogy for the archetype of Ford-style production, White demonstrated that early automotive design was...

In the first decades of motor travel, young women like Ruth and Grace emerged as popular heroines for women drivers.¹ Alongside the many stories of technological heroism for boys and men, such as Tom Swift, motor girls represented one of the few examples of technological skill and ingenuity for women. The introduction of the automobile in the United States coincided with debates about women’s changing relationship to public space and technology, and the emergence of the motor heroine marked a seminal period for the popular discussion of women’s use of the automobiles.² Women motorists not only remade the automobile to...

In the spring of 1926, as many Americans dusted off touring equipment and began tinkering with their autos,Scientific Americantold its readers to put their ingenuity to work, not just for fun but for profit. Milton Wright, editor ofScientific American’s Commercial Property News, which counseled readers on the “dos and don’ts” of invention, reminded would-be inventors that “little things count.” Wright was convinced that “one of the most encouraging things about inventing is that it generally is the simple little ideas, ideas that any of us might have thought of, which make the most money.”¹ He noted that...

Earl Silas Tupper represents one grass-roots inventor who embraced the prolific advice literature on the importance of individual inventors and the profitability of patents during the Great Depression.¹ Tupper, creator of the famous plastic containers that bear his name, was an avid tinkerer who began his inventive career by patenting and promoting an automobile accessory. In the 1930s, a young Earl Tupper tinkered with the design of numerous consumer novelties ranging from hairpins and permanently creased dress pants to a streamlined sled.² While many of these were fleeting ideas, he promoted some quite vigorously. Tupper kept detailed diaries and notes...

In 1933, Henry Ford’s public relations staff wrote, “There are two ways to build a car. You can give the buyer only what he expects. . . . Or, you can give him . . . what we engineers know he ought to have.”¹ Shortly after the introduction of the V-8, Ford’s staff expressed the new voice of industry intent on asserting its professional authority over automotive design and the consumer. Coupled with material changes in the automobile, such as streamlining and the addition of accessories as standard equipment, the automotive industry solidified its control over design and innovation by...

The automobile became part of the fabric of everyday life in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the central purpose of this history has been to show how cars were vehicles for cultural expression and authority among consumers in this period. Mass consumption of the automobile and the motor vacation, in particular, provided tremendous opportunities for consumers to engage in their own, grass-roots acts of production, remaking their cultural identities, challenging and sometimes inserting themselves in social hierarchies, and redesigning the automobile.

American motorists were far from passive consumers. Many who wanted more from the design of early...