The 1936 Cord 810 featured the first hidden headlamps on a volume-production automobile. And naturally, there’s quite a story behind them.
When the front-drive 1936 Cord 810 made its debut at the New York Auto Show on November 2, 1935, guests at the Grand Central Palace were stunned by the machine’s many radical features. One of the more obvious among them, of course, was the headlamp arrangement, which they had never seen before. These were the first hidden headlamps on a volume-production automobile.
Like many of the Cord 810’s exterior features, the hidden headlamps had their origin in a prototype vehicle built by the Auburn Automobile Co. in 1933 that was known as the Baby Duesenberg. The project was proposed at various times as a Duesenberg, an Auburn, or a Cord product, as all three makes were then controlled by auto and aircraft tycoon E.L. Cord. But ultimately it was decided that the vehicle would be produced and marketed as a Cord.
While Gordon Buehrig is universally recognized as the designer of both the Baby Duesenberg and the production Cord 810, the patent for the hidden headlamps was filed in the name of Harold T. Ames, Auburn’s executive vice president (above). The 1934 patent application differs from the production Cord’s setup in at least two ways: The lamp assemblies were tucked into the interior of the front fenders, and the operating mechanism was an unlikely-looking system of wires and pulleys.
Early pre-production 810 models, including the auto show cars, shared the Baby Duesenberg’s inner-fender headlamps, but that location proved to be impractical. As production began in earnest, the lamp assemblies were moved out to the crowns of the fenders. The hidden lamps were one element in a complete exterior design theme conceived by Buehrig. The fuel filler, radio antenna, and door hinges were also tucked away out of sight, while there was no radiator shell as such and the running boards were eliminated. Details were concealed in order to emphasize pure form.
Auburn engineers experimented with powered opening and closing mechanisms, both vacuum and electric, but they weren’t sufficiently reliable. Instead they developed a manually operated setup with a pair of hand cranks in the instrument panel (white circles in the photo above) that drove worm-and-sector gearsets in the lamp modules via two speedometer-type cables. Thanks to the cabin’s narrow width, the driver could reach both cranks from behind the wheel, clockwise to close and counterclockwise to open. Both the 1936 Cord 810 and the 1937 Cord 812 use the same arrangement, which owners were encouraged to keep closed when the headlamps were not in use to maintain the dramatic look. .
Once the Cord 810 made its dramatic appearance in midtown Manhattan, hidden headlamps soon began to crop up elsewhere: on GM’s 1938 Buick Y-Job, the 1941 Chrysler Newport and Thunderbolt dream cars, and on the production 1942 DeSoto. (See the DeSoto setup here.) However, hidden headlamps weren’t widely adopted on American production cars until the 1960s, for example on the 1966 Toronado, which featured a number of styling details in tribute to its front-wheel drive forebear, the Cord 810/812.
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Thank you for your interest. We know these topics have been covered many times, so I do what I can to find fresh info or perspective.
I never realized that there were separate cranks for the headlamps. I wonder what the point of that was? It’s not like there’d ever be a situation where you’d only want one headlamp open.
Easier and cheaper is my guess.
I never realized that, either; I always assumed it was something like the setup in the Opel GT, a mechanical linkage that moved both headlamps in tandem. Maybe it was too difficult to design and manufacture a reliable cable-operated mechanism that branched off to the two headlamps?
Because of the way the fenders and the headlamps are placed – far forward of the engine compartment – there appears to be no place to hide a rod that connects the two headlamps, which would have made it fairly easy to have one mechanism operate both headlamp doors in tandem.
A digression to be sure, but it dawns on me the Cord may have been the earliest to carry sealed beams
I can’t find any info on Cord headlamps being sealed beams, but apparently they were landing lamps from Stinson airplanes. Cord also owned Stinson at the time. Don’t know if they were sealed beam though? Years ago JC Whiney used to sell a sealed beam headlamp for hot rods etc. that was about 6-61/2″ and was amazingly bright. I had a pair. They were believed to be aircraft landing lights (and illegal for street use, of course….).
The Cord lamps are conventional non-sealed beams with separate lens and reflector. I have long wondered about the Stinson landing light story in Cord lore, but since the 810 uses a conventional 6V automotive lamp (bulb) I am not sure what the significance might be, if any. Most Cords today are converted to sealed beams.
Uh,… did we overlook the 1963 Corvettes?
Not at all. It was never the intention to name every car ever produced with hidden lamps. That would be a completely different kind of article.
The “Copper Cord” at the ACD museum has the inner fender headlights