Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (72 page)

GENERATION TESLA.
In this 1995 Serbian comic, inventor Nikola Tesla transports himself to another dimension and reani-mates a bunch of dead people and gives them all superpowers.

How big an impact did Harley Earl have on car design? Even today, auto stylists in Detroit still utter the phrase, “Our father, who art in styling, Harley be thy name.” Here’s the final installment of our story. (Part II is on page 269.)

R
EINVENTING THE WHEELS
If there’s one person responsible for the evolution of what we think of as an “antique” car into one that begins to resemble what we think of as a modern car today, it’s Harley Earl. When he arrived at GM in 1927, mass-produced cars still had a sort of thrown-together look, because that was how they were made: Partially assembled cars rolled along a quickly moving assembly line, and autoworkers raced to attach one component after another—a hood over the engine, fenders and a running board on the frame, headlights on the fenders, and so on, until the car was finished. The trunk of the car was exactly that—little more than a steamer trunk attached behind the passenger compartment.

Earl thought that a car should look like a single, unified whole, not just a bunch of components attached to each other, and he began to impart his vision on GM cars. One by one, the distinguishing features of antique cars began to fall away: Boxy shapes and sharp corners gave way to the curves and smooth, flowing lines of Earl’s streamlined bodies. Headlights and fenders were integrated into the bodywork, and so was the trunk—from now on, it would be a trunk in name only. And the spare tire would no longer be bolted to the rear or mounted on one of the running boards (Earl got rid of those, too); it would be hidden
inside
the trunk.

Earl liked to explain that his purpose from the very beginning was to make cars lower and longer, if for no other reason than he thought oblong shapes were more pleasing to the eye than the short, boxy cars that were common when he was starting out. Just as he had with the 1927 LaSalle, Earl began lengthening the
wheelbase (the distance between the front and rear wheels) of the cars he worked on. This created enough space between them to lower the passenger compartment so that the occupants were cradled more or less
between
the front and rear wheels instead of on top of them, which is where people had ridden since the horse-and-wagon days. In addition to making the car look nicer, lowering the passenger compartment made for a smoother ride.

The changes that Harley Earl brought to automobiles were dizzying, especially to an auto-buying public that had seen very little change in automobiles since their invention. But Earl was careful to introduce his changes gradually, never making more in a year than he thought customers could adjust to. He had an exquisite sense of just how much he could get away with without alienating potential buyers, and he fine-tuned his judgment by producing the auto industry’s first concept cars, which he used to preview his designs with the public and test whether they went too far.

Earl didn’t spend a lot of time at the drafting table himself; instead, he oversaw a network of 17 different design studios, including one for each division of GM and 12 other special studios that made up the Art & Color Division. (Earl renamed it the Style Section in 1937.) He did his thinking in a hidden office he called the “Hatchery,” which had blacked-out windows, no telephone, and a phony name on the door so that no one would disturb him there. He came up with the overall strategic vision for his cars, and then worked with the different design studios to bring his ideas to life. An excellent critic of other people’s work (which didn’t always make him the easiest guy to work with), he pushed and prodded and preached and praised until the designers working under him brought his dreams to life, exactly as he’d envisioned them. (Kind of like Uncle John.)

In the process, Earl oversaw the design of virtually every Chevrolet, Oakland (renamed Pontiac in 1932), Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac designed between 1928 and 1959. The 1949 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Cadillac’s first pillarless hardtop, with no roof support pillar behind the front doors to obstruct the driver’s
vision. The 1953 Cadillac Eldorado and Oldsmobile Fiesta, with the first wraparound windshields. The 1959 Chevy El Camino, General Motors’ combination sedan and pickup truck (hey, nobody’s perfect), produced in response to the successful Ford Ranchero. All these GM cars, and all the others, too—Harley Earl styled each one.

A true son of Hollywood, Earl thought of his cars as pieces of entertainment. He wanted people to derive pleasure by looking at them, and he wanted driving them to be a dream. “I try to design a car so that every time you get in it, it’s a relief—you have a little vacation for a while,” he liked to say.

For all the changes Earl made to his cars, in his early years at GM they still managed to be shaped like cars. But in the 1940s and ’50s, his designs became ever bolder, as he drew obvious inspiration from locomotives, airplanes, torpedoes, and eventually even atomic missiles and rocket ships. Airplanes and rockets have tail-fins because they
need them—
they’d crash without them. The tail-fins (inspired by the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane) that Earl introduced to automobiles, beginning with the 1948 Cadillac, served no functional purpose at all. Earl couldn’t give GM customers a real jet plane or rocket ship to the moon, but he could make them feel like they were flying whenever they got behind the wheel of one of his cars.

Thanks in large part to Earl’s influence, the American automobile was no longer just a means of transportation. More than ever, it became a status symbol and an object of desire. People didn’t buy cars just because they needed them; they bought them because they
had
to have them, a feeling that lasted until they traded it in on the next model (which they also absolutely had to have).

Earl worked for GM for 30 years, from 1927 until his retirement in 1958 after overseeing the development of the 1959 models. If
your
dream car was built by GM in that period—a 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible, perhaps—you have Earl to thank for it. If your dream car hails from the same era but was built by Ford or Chrysler, or even MG or Citroën, you may
still
have him to thank for it
because his designs proved so successful that virtually every other car company in the world adopted his methods, all the way down to the clay mock-ups he pioneered while he was still building cars for Hollywood film stars. Many of the best-looking cars produced by other automakers were designed by Earl-trained stylists who were lured away from GM.

Few of these designers were able to repeat their mentor’s success, and without GM’s enormous profits, few of the smaller American auto companies, including Kaiser-Frazer, Hudson, and Nash, could keep up with the pace of annual model changes. They either merged with other struggling companies, or went under. Given GM’s problems in recent years, it’s easy to forget that by the early 1960s more than half of all cars sold in the United States were made by GM, with Ford and Chrysler divvying up the rest. In those days, GM’s biggest fear was being broken up by the federal government for being a monopoly—in that sense, the company was actually selling
too many
cars for its own good.

On Earl’s watch, GM cars became ever bigger, ever longer, ever heavier, ever chrome-ier, and yet toward the end of his career even he apparently began to realize that being bigger, longer, and heavier had its limits. After a trip to a sports car race in 1951, Earl came away so impressed with the enthusiasm that the drivers had for their autos that he talked GM into building the company’s first-ever two-seater sports car—the 1953 Corvette, which was substantially smaller than most other GM cars made that year.

By the late 1950s, the story goes, Earl couldn’t help but notice as he walked from the parking lot into his office that many of his young designers had taken to driving smaller cars—lots of Corvettes, of course, but also Porsches, Triumphs, Fiats, MGs, and even Volkswagen Beetles, whose most appealing feature to VW buyers was that they weren’t anything at all like the cars being sold by Detroit. Small cars were likely to play a big role in the future, Earl thought, and as he approached retirement he pushed GM to begin building more small cars so that fans of these little imports would also have a range of domestic cars to choose from.

Earl succeeded in bringing the Corvette into production, but his theory that smaller cars were the wave of the future did not
win much acceptance at GM. After he retired in 1958, his successors continued grinding out one gas-guzzling land yacht after another, even as the Ford Edsel, described by one historian as the “
Titanic
of Automobiles,” flopped in 1957 (taking $250 million of Ford’s money with it) and sales of the Volkswagen Beetle—and other small cars like it—continued to climb year after year.

GM paid (and continues to pay) a heavy price for ignoring Earl’s advice and not moving into the small-car business in time to compete with the Japanese automakers. But perhaps the most enduring testimony to Harley Earl’s brilliance as a designer is that more than 50 years after he left the company (he died from a stroke in 1969 at the age of 75), his cars are still considered the high-water mark of American automobile design. GM has spent 50 years looking for another designer who could make its buyers feel the same way about brand-new Saturns, Chevys, Pontiacs, Buicks, and Cadillacs as they do about the cars designed during the Earl era. And they haven’t found one yet.

Why are the elderly called “old people,” but children are never called “new people”?

If it’s true that we’re here to help others, then what are the others here for?

Do all cemetery workers work the graveyard shift?

If they’re just stale bread to begin with, why do croutons come in airtight, resealable packages?

How come when asked what things they’d bring to a desert island, no one ever says “a boat”?

When a dog food is “new and improved,” how do they know?

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still called a hearing?

How did Noah prevent all those animals from eating each other?

Who says underwear should only be clean and comfortable? Here’s a look at some strange skivvies with extra built-in features
.

P
RODUCT
: A bra that detects breast cancer
INVENTOR
: Professor Elias Siores of the University of Bolton in England
HOW IT WORKS
: When tumors form in the breast, they are fed by a large blood supply. Because blood is warm, the tumor is warmer than surrounding tissue. Professor Siores’ bra, which is still in development, is fitted with a number of microwave antennae that detect changes in temperature within the breast, a cancer-detecting technique known as thermography. “If we can identify transformations that emanate these heat signatures, we may be able to detect these cancers early,” says Siores. He hopes to bring a bra to market sometime after 2012.

PRODUCT
: Self-cleaning underwear

INVENTOR
: Scientists working for the U.S. Air Force

HOW IT WORKS
: Who knew that the largest number of casualties from Operation Desert Storm (1991) would be from bacterial infections? Soldiers in combat don’t always have the luxury of being able to change into fresh underwear, if they even
have
a clean pair to change into. Underwear worn day after day in those hot desert conditions turned out to be a significant cause of bacterial infections and discomfort. That prompted the military to take the chemical-repelling techology that it had developed to protect soldiers against biological weapons and apply it to T-shirts and skivvies. The underwear is manufactured by using microwave energy to bond tiny “nanoparticles” to the fibers in the underwear fabric. Then chemicals that repel oil, water, bacteria, and other substances are bonded to the nanoparticles. Result: underwear that is very, very difficult to get dirty, because virtually nothing
will stick to it. And because bacteria never gets established, undergarments made with the stuff can be worn for weeks without washing and without risk to the wearer’s health. The materials may soon be used to make sports apparel for civilians.