All Steel

There have been no major changes in automobile engineering for many years. Since the most consummate ingenuity has been able to add nothing to bring the gasoline engine any nearer to perfection, body design has been more and more carefully studied, until now the glittering fashions in enamel, glass, aluminum, mahogany, lacquer, alter as perennially as the styles in silkier clothing; and the famous body-designers-- Brewster, Willoughby, Fleetwood, etc.--have achieved a prestige comparable to that of the great dress-makers--Molyneux, Paquin, Poiret, Worth.

Last week on the waxed parquetry of a Manhattan ballroom, which had been chartered for the 21st Annual Automobile Salon, stood some 100 of the cars of the more expensive manufacturers equipped with various body-designs which will define the trend of the new year's elegance: Bodies that reproduced in lustre-lacquers the garnet, topaz, turquoise, sapphire, chalcedony, beryl, aquamarine, lapis lazuli, agate, carnelian, porphyry, opal, and the tinctures of those most exquisite of jewels stupidly known as semiprecious; bodies that borrow the dyes of those birds that streak green jungle tunnels with a brilliance as of exploding flame--the golden-headed trogon of Ecuador, the green tanager, the Chinese jay, the yellow woodpecker of Venezuela; a body inlaid with Macassar ebony from the island of Celebes; a Salamanca cabriolet whose interior is a Louis XV tapestry reproduced from the original in the Metropolitan Museum in two and a half million stitches, from the needle of a woman named Helen Pascal.

But there was one body which made the rest seem shoddy. It covered the spare, fierce bones of the fastest "stock" car in the world, the 100-horse-power Mercedes. It was made of steel, painted green, by Edward Budd of Philadelphia. From a trunk swung low behind the gas tank, the curve of the tonneau rose to melt in grace, in vibrant repose, in transcendent muscular languor, into the forward thrust of the hood. The steel mudguards swept over the front wheels with the curve-like ripple of a bloodhound's shoulder-thews; they began where most mudguards stop and curved insolently toward each other far out against the bumper, where the four frosted eyes of the car glare at the daylight. Inside the steel shell was a boudoir of swansdown upholstery finished in velvet of Cleopatra green, a color sleepier than the Nile at twilight, and above the door handles of antique bronze four rosewood panels were inlaid with little ivory panels showing a sedan-chair of the 16th Century, a Pickwickian stagecoach, a Japanese rickshaw and an Egyptian whatnot, to remind the fortunate who ride within that there are less comfortable ways to travel. For the convenience of any lady who might be so ill-advised as to forfeit a quiet walk for a ride in this car, there was a vanity case of tooled Venetian leather stretched upon wood, in which was set a Wedgewood cameo.

Far from the hotel in which the Mercedes was exhibited, another car with a steel body by Budd lay on its side--a Jordan which had just rolled down a 90-foot embankment in North Carolina. Mechanics righted it. The body, which had somersaulted six times, was practically unhurt. Away it drove to the Jordan plant 1,000 miles distant to be rehabilitated.

Edward S. Jordan, President of Jordan Motors, pointed modestly to his battered car, to the magnificent Mercedes, to the fact that the Ford and Dodge Companies are using steel bodies. He declared that just as the old wooden Pullman cars have been discarded, so wooden automobile bodies will in a few years be obsolete. Said he: "It's the splinters that kill. . . . Steel laughs at shocks that demolish wood. . . . Smaller, lighter, more economical, better looking, longer lasting motor cars are coming "