by Andrew Glass
9
Joseph Gwinn’s Aircar
Joseph Marr Gwinn Jr. (1897–1956) was a World War I aviator and, later, an engineer at Consolidated Aircraft Corporation. In 1935, he founded the Gwinn Aircar Company in Buffalo, New York, intending to manufacture a small airplane specifically designed for the average automobile driver. The result was the Gwinn Aircar, promoted as a foolproof airplane that was as affordable as a mid-priced car. The Aircar succeeded so admirably at approximating the convenience, comfort, and easy handling of an automobile that it has often been misidentified as a roadable. Some accounts have even described a procedure for unbolting the wing panels from each side of the plane and manually redirecting power to the wheels for driving.
The Aircar’s easy-to-fly design coordinated the steering wheel with the rudder and ailerons for directional control in the air, which made flying the Aircar feel like driving a car. The company claimed that landing an Aircar couldn’t be simpler: Just fly down and level off, and the Aircar would land itself. To take off, just drive full speed down the runway and push the pedal all the way to the floor, and up you’d go.
Because of the coordinated controls, it took about half as long to learn to fly an Aircar as it did to learn to fly a conventional airplane, making the Aircar simple enough that the average driver could own and operate it instead of a second car. Frank Hawks, veteran pilot, air racer, and vice president of Gwinn Aircar, boasted, “With only an hour or two of instruction, any average person, even the intelligentsia, can fly our ship. It will not spin. It will not stall.” With its carlike interior and its two automobile doors with automobile door handles, the aircraft felt familiar. Double wings created enough surface area to allow for a wingspan of only 24 feet, small enough to fit in a three-car garage. However, the Gwinn Aircar’s commercial appeal was not helped by its rather absurd appearance, which was compared to a pollywog or a pregnant guppy.
The Aircar, with Gwinn (LEFT) and test pilots Nancy Harkness and Frank Hawks, 1937.
The Aircar’s interior was designed to resemble that of a conventional car so drivers would feel comfortable and confident, as if they were driving in the air.
The Gwinn Aircar in flight.
What brought the Gwinn Aircar Company down was not the Aircar’s bulbous look or the sort of rookie pilot’s mistake it was designed to prevent. Instead, it was an error made by its number-one advocate, Frank Hawks, a famously skillful and experienced pilot. During a promotional flight with a prospective client on August 23, 1938, Hawks’s Aircar snagged a power line that was obscured by trees at the edge of a polo field in East Aurora, New York. The Aircar burst into flames, killing both Hawks and his passenger. The Gwinn Aircar Company suspended production that same year.
The death of Frank Hawks on August 23, 1938, was big news.
Joseph Gwinn returned to his previous employer, Consolidated Aircraft (now known as Consolidated Vultee), where he continued his work on small planes. But his continued commitment to roadable airplane research led him to publish a depiction of the ideal prototype for the much-anticipated flying car. The existence of this drawing may have contributed to the misapprehension that the Aircar was an airplane designed for the road.
A second Gwinn Aircar prototype was reportedly still flying, but not driving, in 1945.
10
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Omnidirectional Human Transport
Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was a futurist philosopher, scientist, and designer who believed that twentieth-century technology had the potential to meet the needs of humankind without diminishing the planet. He is credited with coining the word Dymaxion from the phrase dynamic maximum tension—meaning “the most functional utility from a minimal material input.” Buckminster, or Bucky (as his followers and friends called him), had no formal academic credentials, having been expelled (twice) by Harvard University, but he spoke with a professorial air when explaining his Dymaxion principle’s potential to make the dream of peace and plenty a modern reality in a Dymaxion world of tomorrow.
In 1928, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), a young artist who had just arrived in New York City from Paris, heard Fuller holding forth about his self-sufficient flying-saucer-shaped Dymaxion house. It was designed to be mass-produced and then lowered by zeppelin into any remote landscape. When asked, “Why a round house?” Bucky answered, “Why not!”
Noguchi was impressed with Fuller’s “comprehensivist” vision, a creative fusion of design and science. Before long, the futurist and the modern artist were sharing an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. Together they dreamed up an “omnidirectional transportation device,” and Noguchi sculpted a streamlined plaster model, giving actual shape to their idea. Fuller’s first sketch of a flying automobile, titled 4D Transport, included inflatable wings and small jet engines. It was intended to carry passengers anywhere a Dymaxion house might be located. Fuller wrote to his daughter that a “Zoomobile,” as she had called it, would be able to hop off the road at will, fly about, and then—as deftly as a bird—settle back into traffic.
Isamu Noguchi’s gypsum model for an “omni-medium transport” (Dymaxion car) sold at auction in 2008 for $92,500.
Fuller sketched a Zoomobile flying auto in 1928. It was designed to have inflatable wings and a propeller that would be locked when driving. Fuller called it his “4D twin, angularly orientable, individually throttleable, jet-stilt controlled-plummeting transport.”
The Fuller-Noguchi flying car never got off the ground. The proposed inflatable wings and the jet engines necessary for liftoff existed only on paper. But the concept was as revolutionary as any transportation device envisioned since Longobardi’s combination vehicle.
Fuller rented an empty factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he intended to build a practical automobile, without inflatable wings or jet thrusters but nonetheless based on up-to-date principles of airplane engineering. He and a small crew, led by the racing yacht builder Starling Burgess, constructed a 21-foot-long Dymaxion car prototype, resembling models built by Noguchi. Clad in sheet aluminum over a teardropshaped wooden frame and having a canvas roof, the Dymaxion car accommodated eleven passengers yet weighed less than 1,000 pounds. Its wide-set front wheels and unique centered-rear-wheel steering gave it a sensationally small turning radius, allowing it to be maneuvered into a seemingly impossibly small parking space.
Fuller claimed that the rear-mounted Ford V8 engine could power his lightweight, aerodynamic Dymaxion car at speeds up to 120 miles per hour, with a safe cruising speed of 100 miles per hour, while attaining gas mileage of 30–50 miles per gallon. (An ordinary 1933 Ford achieved about 16 miles per gallon.) However, the prototype showed a precarious instability, caused by the tendency of the single back wheel to leave the ground. But it was the Dymaxion car’s bizarre appearance, not its instability, that earned it a stay-out-of-town order from the New York City police. While it was parked in front of Madison Square Garden, drivers stopped to stare, tying up traffic for hours.
Enthusiastic European manufacturers saw practical investment potential in Fuller’s economical human transport prototype—that is, until the Dymaxion car collided tragically with a conventional automobile right in front of the entrance to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. The prototype rolled over, its driver was killed, and two potential investors were injured. The Dymaxion car, now labeled the “Freak Auto” by the press, wasn’t responsible for the accident, but manufacturing interest dried up anyway.
The aerodynamic wooden framework of the first Dymaxion car.
Fuller built one more prototype—this one for renowned orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski, with a top fin for increased stability and a periscope in place of a rearview mirror. Celebrity pilot Amelia Earhart also ordered a Dymaxion car. But even such endorsements failed to reassure the public. Besides, Fuller had spent his entire inheritance to repair the second prototype and could not afford to build another.
Fuller foresaw a utopian society that would need lightw
eight, energy-efficient transportation combining the quickly evolving engineering principles of an airplane with the convenience of a car. Even if it didn’t fly, his airplane car approached an engineering ideal of comfort and economy that is still pursued by twenty-first-century automotive engineers. He was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated futurists, inventors, writers, and lecturers, accumulating forty-seven honorary degrees. Yet to the end he remained an outsider, encouraging inventors to look past conventional wisdom and seek solutions unconstrained by historical limitations.
The Dymaxion car on display in the Chrysler pavilion at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. At 20 feet—twice the length of a typical car—Dymaxion Car 1 always drew a crowd.
Noguchi and Fuller remained friends and collaborators until Fuller died on July 1, 1983, at the age of eighty-seven.
The shape of the Fuller-Noguchi Dymaxion car was echoed in the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, whose work also represented a combination of engineering and aesthetics. Bel Geddes began his career as a theatrical designer, and in 1929 he opened one of the first industrial design studios. He popularized the concept of streamlining, which is based on a teardrop shape and allows for smooth, efficient airflow.
Bel Geddes’s 1945 concept for a flying car, named simply Flying Car, sported a rear propeller and extending wings. It was designed to satisfy the motoring public’s desire to sit behind the wheel of an elegantly curvy sedan, whether on the road or in the air. But the art deco Flying Car was never produced, even as a prototype.
11
William Bushnell Stout’s Skycar
As a child, William B. Stout (1880–1956) played with model airplanes made of cardboard and rubber bands. He went on to have a long career as an engineer and inventor, and among his many inventions was the first all-metal airplane, the Ford Tri-Motor. (At the time, conventional engineers still insisted that airplanes should be made of wood.) He also invented a self-propelled gasoline-powered railroad car called the Pullman Railplane, as well as movable theater seats and an air-cooled bed. Like Buckminster Fuller, Stout believed that successful design was improved by the judicious use of resources. “Simplicate and add more lightness” was, for him, the cardinal rule of engineering.
In 1912, Stout began publishing Aerial Age, the first aviation magazine in the United States. He was one of the reputable engineers in the late 1920s who believed that if small airplanes were designed so that piloting was as easy as driving a car, then flying would become part of everyday life. Skycar I, Stout’s entry in the 1933 Easy Airplane Competition, was meant to make a driver-turned-pilot feel at ease when stepping into a plane. It was designed with a low door, like a car’s, and a comfortably upholstered upscale interior. The instrument panel resembled the dashboard of an Oldsmobile, with key ignition, and the emergency brake and rudder pedals looked like a car’s brake and clutch. Originally designed for roadability, with a rear propeller protected by a steel tail assembly, the prototype was reconfigured with convenient hinged wings for ground maneuverability. Even so, the final prototype was never intended to double as a car, despite its misleading name.
The 1931 Stout Skycar 1 was designed for easy handling and automobile-style comfort.
The 1932 Scarab car had no running boards, which allowed for a wider interior, and the engine was placed at the rear, eliminating the driveshaft bump. Other improvements included a smooth, aerodynamic body, four-wheel independent suspension, hidden door hinges, pushbutton door locks, and flush headlights.
Airplane design in the 1930s was miles ahead of automobile design in terms of efficiency and economy. In fact, according to some authorities, the average car was so unaerodynamic that it actually met less wind resistance going backward than it did going forward. Stout’s streamlined Scarab car, named for the beetle sacred to ancient Egyptians, had four wheels and a turtle shape. Stout claimed the turtle was more stable than the teardrop favored by Fuller, and less apt to rise from the road—a characteristic, he pointed out, desirable in an airplane but not in a car.
The rear-engine Scarab car introduced innovations to auto making such as electric doors and controlled heating. By eliminating the running boards typically found on cars at the time, Stout made room for a wider interior, increasing the size of the luxurious passenger space, which featured leather, wood, and chrome. The Scarab’s independent suspension allowed each wheel to react to a bump independently, making for such a smooth ride that only the driver’s seat needed to be fixed in place. Passengers were free to arrange their seats however they chose—even at a table—and create a living room environment.
Movable furniture and a flat floor made the Scarab car’s interior feel like a living room.
Only nine of the trendy Egyptian-style aluminum Scarab cars (and later, in 1946, the first fiberglass-reinforced plastic car) were produced. They sold for $5,000 apiece, the price of a new airplane at the time. One Scarab was said to have been purchased by a French businessman and later used as a mobile command post by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in North Africa during World War II. Eventually it housed monkeys in a circus. It was rescued and finally found a dignified home in a European automotive collection. Philip Wrigley (1894–1977), the chewing gum king, owned a Scarab car and used it as a beach car at his family’s lakeside retreat until 1964. Five are said to survive, including one in running condition at the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine.
Stout merged his company with Consolidated Vultee and brought along a model of a flying Scarab car with a removable flight module. The aircraft manufacturer was already enthusiastically hiring innovative engineers to design prototypes for a postwar flying car small enough to fit in a suburban garage, and Stout collaborated on the 1945 Spratt Stout Aircar. The Aircar made use of a removable “articulated wing” developed by George Spratt, which pivoted to adjust altitude and direction by means of a single control stick.
Bill Stout with a model of the Stout 1941 roadable Skycar, which had removable wings and twin tail booms, stainless-steel construction, and four-wheel landing gear.
The Convair 103 (also known as the 1944 Stout Skycar 4, the Spratt Controlwing, and the Flying Flea) was successfully test-flown at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation’s Stout Research Division.
12
Theodore P. Hall’s Convaircar
World War II ended in 1945, and triumphant Americans imagined they were finally about to enter the “world of tomorrow.” But instead of an environmentally conscious vision of optimal and careful use of resources for the good of humanity and the planet, they imagined a sprawling, mass-produced paradise with an abundance of techno-miracles, including scrumptious prepackaged meals served up by robotic appliances in the glistening kitchens of ultramodern pushbutton homes.
During the economic boom that followed World War II, victorious and newly affluent American consumers bought fully three-quarters of all the cars and appliances on earth. In such a buoyant climate, cheerful American motorists could easily believe in the possibility of a flying car in every garage. Congress had already discussed mandating the construction of runways alongside all new major highways, and House and Garden magazine was advising new homebuilders to “consider a landing strip as you would consider a driveway.” All that was missing was the vehicle itself: a practical family car with wings.
Even before the postwar euphoria set in, Theodore P. Hall (1898–1978) had made his first attempt at designing a practical flying car, called simply the Roadable Airplane. Completed in 1939, it was powered by a V8 engine and looked like a three-wheel automobile with a snout and a propeller. Installing or removing its wings and divided tail required two technicians. Occasional sightings in the clouds in 1939 must have caused considerable astonishment. However, development never went beyond a prototype. When wartime priorities replaced civilian aircraft development, Hall accepted the position of design coordinator for the B-24 heavy bomber, known as the Liberator.
ABOVE: Ted Hall’s 1939 Roadable Airplane, a three-wheel automobile
with a nose propeller. It never went into production. LEFT: The first Roadable Airplane resembled a sporty convertible with a snout.
In 1943, joined by his former Consolidated colleague Tommy Thompson, Hall resumed his quest to build the perfect postwar flying car. At the same time, to help raise money, he agreed to oversee the construction of the prototype being built in Garland, Texas, by Southern Aircraft. The SAC Aerocar looked more or less like a mid-1940s two-door sedan, but with three wheels and a protuberant attachment for a nose propeller. The gracefully divided tail and wings were removable, making it almost a normal-looking automobile on the street. In flight, the Aerocar was controlled by a combination of rudder pedals and a steering wheel that functioned like a joystick. In spite of encouraging performance and favorable publicity, the SAC Aerocar never went into production.
The 1946 SAC Aerocar, an experimental three-wheel flying car called the Roadable, was said to be underpowered. It, too, never went into production.
Back in San Diego, Hall resumed pounding aluminum sheets around a steel chassis using a rubber hammer. His prototype resembled a sort of sloppily constructed Crosley, a sporty, light-weight war-era automobile originally sold in appliance stores. When outfitted with a sleek “flight module” powered by a 90-horsepower Franklin engine, it flew through the air like a car that had been snatched up by a mechanical albatross. In 1946, Popular Science magazine lauded Hall’s convertible car-airplane as the most promising marriage between a small plane and an automobile.
