Modern Transportation

Glenn Curtiss made his name as an aviator, but he started out his career as a record-setting motorcyclist, reaching the mind-boggling and joint-rattling speed of 136 miles per hour in 1907. Later that year he joined Alexander Graham Bell and three other members of the Aerial Experiment Association to help create ailerons, hinged wing flaps that enable airplanes to bank and turn. Curtiss went on to make America’s first exhibition flight, win the first international air-speed prize at Reims, France, in 1909, and design the first practical seaplane.

In World War I he made millions with seaplanes and the Curtiss Jenny, a sturdy, affordable trainer that became the workhorse of barnstormers and airmail pilots after the war. In 1917 he created the Curtiss Autoplane, an unsuccessful hybrid of airplane and car.

In the 1920s the “King of the Air” found that he hankered to get back to his lifelong loves of hunting, fishing, and camping. At 40, he wanted more comfort for his road trips, so he decided to build his own travel trailer and create a new business to do so.

The timing seemed right. The Roaring Twenties saw Detroit’s automobile industry running at full throttle; Americans flocked to the nation’s highways. With so few facilities on the road, many long-distance drivers simply brought their own, sometimes by building trailers for themselves.

Only a few visionary manufacturers had entered the field when Curtiss created the Adams Motor Bungalo, named for G. Carl Adams, his partner and much younger half brother. The trailer bore a single rear axle and a generally rectangular shape, except for a V-shaped prow. A spike descended from the prow, dropping into a retrofitted hitch on the tow vehicle’s trunk or rumble seat. The top-of-the-line Bungalo had two full-length dustproof clothes closets; storage for a gun and fishing pole; food lockers that opened from inside or outside; a water tank; an ice chest; “absolutely insect proof” screens; a steel kitchenette; table seating for six; felt mattresses; and an electric light. Two side wings popped out with extra bunks. Buyers could choose a dark oak or white enamel interior. For all these luxuries, the Motor Bungalo brochure promised that the driver could break camp in three minutes.

Consumers only bought about 100 Motor Bungalos, soundly rejecting the advertising pitch to enjoy “Gypsie Life Modernized,” so the brothers closed up shop in 1922. Despite the setback, trailers still gripped Curtiss’s imagination. A compulsive tinkerer, he continued to build trailers for his own use, even using some as mobile billboards for his Florida land developments. Eventually one of Curtiss’s designs caught the eye of entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, a former racer who had made his fortune with the Prest-O-Lite company, a manufacturer of car headlamps. In Indianapolis he had founded one of the nation’s first automobile dealerships and once promoted it by floating a car over the city with a balloon and then driving back to town. Fisher also helped found the Indianapolis Speedway and pushed for the development of the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway.

“Glenn Curtiss has the greatest trailer that was ever made in America,” Fisher told his friends. With several lesser investors, Fisher and Curtiss founded the Aerocar Corporation in 1928. Curtiss’s new design was a long, sleek, aerodynamic vehicle with a vaulted roof and art deco lines that flowed from a single axle in the stern to a dramatic prow. The Aerocar was not just modern; it was futuristic. The company promoted it as “land yachting.”

It was also, in a real sense, a land airplane. Curtiss disdained most contemporary auto engineering as sloppy, a far cry from the unforgiving field of aeronautics; he wanted his Aerocar to be “airplane construction adapted to the road.” He made his new trailer with a wire and wood frame and then covered most of it with fabric, a construction not unlike the famous Jenny: “There is no chassis, as distinguished from the body itself,” explained the patent application. The structure had taken another page from aviation design. Wooden uprights joined a U-shaped footer to a matching header. Horizontal wooden braces strengthened the floor and the vaulted roof. Wire cross braces joined each upright to its neighbors, creating a rolling box girder—or, if you prefer, a Jenny fuselage blown up, squared off, and set on wheels.

Indeed, the resemblance was striking to those who knew both vehicles. The Aerocar’s wooden structural frames resembled the Jenny’s. The trailer’s double-wire cross bracing stretched across the frames and included corner turnbuckles for adjustment, identical to the configuration on the airplane. Vaulted ribs in the Aerocar’s roof echoed the Jenny’s laminated wing ribs. Even its name—the Curtiss Aerocar—complete with a winged trademark, announced the vehicle’s aeronautical inspiration. A horizontally set airplane wheel served as the hitch connecting the trailer to the tow vehicle.

“The principles of aeronautical engineering in which maximum structural strength is obtained with a minimum weight, have been successfully employed in the Curtiss Aerocar,” declared a brochure. “It was designed by Glenn H. Curtiss, pioneer in airplane manufacturing in America.” Advertisements proclaimed that the Aerocar had “sturdy airplane construction.”

Patent applications suggest that Curtiss designed the Aerocar’s fuselage in part to save weight: Jenny’s land-bound cousin was light, resilient, capacious, and reasonably streamlined. In 1932 Frederick K. Moskovics reported to the Society of Automotive Engineers that, while towing the 2,100-pound Aerocar with a “powerful coupe” on Daytona Beach, he had actually traveled three miles an hour faster than he could without the trailer.

Curtiss also designed his Aerocar to free passengers from the tyranny of bad roads. In the words of his patent application, the occupants of normal vehicles “are jolted and jostled about in a most objectionable manner; in fact, so much so that riding becomes irksome, tiresome, and uncomfortable in the extreme.” That was not the case for Aerocar passengers, who could lounge in fixed armchairs, enjoying close-set windows that created 10-foot fields of vision on both sides, broken only by window posts. An occupant could also stretch out on the rear-facing divan in the prow, under a built-in Philco radio. A table snapped into place so that passengers might play cards or sit down to a meal created in the galley, with its two-burner gasoline stove, icebox, and sink. The chemical toilet had its own private compartment.

A privacy curtain turned the galley into a shower. (A drain in the linoleum took care of the water.) Concealed Pullman-type bunks pulled down from the roof, while armchairs folded down to make additional sleeping spaces. Snap-up privacy curtains and individual reading lights added further amenities.

The Aerocar’s $2,600 price tag clearly placed it in the luxury market, which made it difficult to sell during the Depression. Nevertheless, sales of Aerocars managed to weather the hard times, even surviving Curtiss’s unexpected death in 1930 at age 52.

Soon afterward, Aerocar introduced an “economy” version, priced at $1,985 for a stripped basic unit, and further broadened its base by stressing varied uses for the Aerocar. Miami Beach’s Floridian and Biltmore hotels used the trailers as shuttles, as did the polio clinic at Warm Springs, Georgia. Long Island’s Lido Hotel advertised Aerocar service from the nearby train station as late as 1942. Enna Jettick Shoes outfitted four Aerocar units to display their wares for retail-store buyers. Other Aerocars served as horse trailers and hearses, while Miami hauled garbage loads with its open-bed version. Cities Service modified its Aerocar into a rolling movie theater, while Pure Oil used one as a sound truck to attract customers to its gas stations. The Grolier Encyclopedia Company ushered prospective customers into a tasteful reading room on wheels. General Electric used Aerocars as appliance showrooms, adorning the exteriors with painted images of their refrigerators.

In the Depression year of 1936, the New York Times estimated that 100,000 trailers of all sorts were already on the road, while buyers were prepared to snap up another 300,000—more than six times what the country’s estimated 300 manufacturers expected to produce in a year. “A new industry is rapidly coming to the front,” the paper said. “It is not an uncommon sight these days to drive past a factory making trailers and find it operating full blast in the middle of the night. Many plants are running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” At the National Automobile Show later that year, dealers displayed 50 different models, ranging in price from $275 to $12,000.

Even with its economy model, the Aerocar remained securely in the upper echelon of the trailer industry. In 1937 the company continued Curtiss’s legacy of innovation with what it described as the first trailer with air-conditioning. This Plesantaire option cost $199.50 and operated with a generator in the “power unit” (or tow car), which also meant that an electric refrigerator could replace the Aerocar’s icebox.

The Aerocar set the industry standard before it finally reached the end of the road a decade later. Curtiss’s widow had continued the business with her second husband, but the couple reached retirement age as World War II broke out. Shortages of labor, materials, and travel opportunities sent the Aerocar into retirement with them.

The Aerocar may have been a footnote to Curtiss’s spectacular career, but he had clearly loved it. On his way to the hospital from which he never returned, while bouncing over the same roads he had cycled on while young, he shared his thoughts with his son on building an Aerocar ambulance, certain that it would provide patients with a much better trip.

Kirk W. House, a history teacher at Genesee Community College in Dansville, New York, has served as the director and curator of the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York, and most recently wrote Hell-Rider to King of the Air: Glenn Curtiss's Life of Innovation (SAE, 2003).