FDR's Custom 1938 Ford Had A Mechanism That Dispensed Lit Cigarettes

Priorities used to be different. In the 1990-1995 Mercedes 500E/E500, the Porsche-built super sedan, there are three ashtrays for the rear passengers alone, and zero cupholders for anyone. Fast forward a bit, and in a 2019 Subaru Ascent, there are 19 cupholders and zero ashtrays. However, Subaru will happily sell you an ashtray for your Ascent. Where do you install said ashtray? Well, you simply place it in one of your cupholders.

While new cars pretty much don't have ashtrays anymore, in 1938, car smoking might as well have been mandatory. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (we'll go with FDR for the sake of brevity) certainly enjoyed his share of cigarettes. Some of his most famous pictures show a lit cigarette either directly in his mouth or shoved into a cigarette holder. 

So, if you're FDR and you love smoking, but you also love driving, how do you continue smoking without hiring someone to sit in the passenger's seat and light cigarettes for you? You get a steering wheel-mounted dispenser that automatically lights cigarettes as you extract them.

As far as I can tell, the dispenser in FDR's 1938 Ford was an early Masterbilt Products Corp dispenser/lighter. Commuting smokers had other options, such as the Pres-a-lite dispenser, because lighting cigarettes while on the go was apparently a pressing safety concern. No, seriously, Masterbilt lost a court case to the United States in 1939, and to quote directly from the case notes, "the device enabled a smoker who was driving a car to obtain a lighted cigarette without taking his eyes off the road, and the contrivance was advertised by the plaintiff as an automobile safety device." The first car to offer seatbelts came 10 years later in the 1949 Nash, so maybe we weren't addressing safety properly back then.

Anyone who's ridden in a car made in the '70s or '80s remembers when auxiliary power outlets went by another name: Cigarette lighter. When someone needed a light, the process was as simple as pressing on the spring-loaded handle to complete a circuit, which would heat up a coil until it was red hot. Then, you'd pull it out and press the coil against a fresh cigarette to enjoy crisp, refreshing tobacco smoke. Just maybe don't do that while your SUV is full of propane tanks, though.

FDR's Masterbilt worked under the same principles, except he didn't have to futz with any of that cumbersome lever pressing and precision cigarette tip placement. With a Masterbilt, you simply flip down the little door at the bottom of the device, and a cigarette drops into the convenient tray. While in that tray, the cigarette is held against a heating coil, so all you have to do is grab it and put it in your mouth once it's lit. If that's still too much arduous labor for you, why not just hook up a little gas-powered piston to shoot the cigarette into your mouth?

Now, to be fair, in FDR's case, limiting the number of tasks for his hands was actually quite prudent. FDR had contracted polio in 1921, and it left him paralyzed from the waist down. His 1938 Ford was thoroughly modified with hand controls for every function, including the throttle, brake, and clutch. In fact, the engineers designed a single lever that would release the clutch, activate the clutch when pressed, and then push the brakes when pressed further.

In 1939, Fortune magazine somehow determined that 53% of men in America loved to take as many breaths as possible through lit cigarettes, and apparently, this increased to 66% for men under 40 (via Going Down Tobacco Road). So, of course, companies had to figure out easier and more diverse ways to get lit cigarettes into the shaking hands of motorists needing their fix. Fortunately, German inventor Friedrich Wilhelm Schindler created the electronic lighter in the early 1880s, and J.M. Morris filed a patent application in 1919 for that familiar, spring-operated car lighter, so there were some shoulders of giants to stand on.

DeSoto had a particularly ingenious steering wheel-embedded dispenser. As per the March 1942 issue of Popular Mechanics, this holder was molded into the plastic steering wheel and held 14 cigarettes. The driver would press a button at the bottom of the dispenser, and a lit cigarette would pop out of the top. I hope that button was at least a little difficult to operate because no one wants a smoldering Chesterfield pressed against tender wrist flesh. Is that white smoke coming from your exhaust? Nope, it's coming from your skin! 

It's easy to rag on previous generations for their habits, but these are really neat inventions. There's a lot of ingenuity and testing that goes into figuring out how to create a device that sets a little stick on fire without setting the other sticks on fire while not burning the person reaching for that on-fire stick. And considering all the impressive controls in FDR's Ford that let a paralyzed man continue to enjoy driving his automobile, let's also remember that sometimes inventors of the era really did figure out ways to make people's lives better.