1926 Stutz sedan
date: label: date made
content: 1926
name: label: maker
content: Stutz Motor Car Company
notes: label: Description
content: The 1926 Stutz sedan introduced two trends in American automobile design: longer, lower cars, and safety features built into the body. The redesigned "Safety Stutz" was noticeably lower than "high hat" sedans of the 1910s and early 1920s. Its safety features included a low center of gravity, which helped prevent skidding, swaying, and tipping over; a wire-glass windshield, an early effort toward shatter-resistant glass; narrow front corner posts for better visibility; and reinforced runningboard side bumpers. The body sat low on the chassis because a worm-gear differential made it possible to place the drive shaft below the rear axle. Some new-car showrooms featured a 1926 Stutz mounted at a 45-degree angle to show how far the safety car could lean without tipping over. Stutz sales literature extolled the car's "road-adhesiveness" and compared it to "a strong magnetic attraction exerted by the earth upon the car's wheels."
label: Description
content: The worm-gear differential used in the Stutz automobile was not widely adopted by car manufacturers, but the lengthening and lowering of sedans continued for decades and had a great impact on styling, manufacturing, and sales. Safety glass became common in the late 1920s and 1930s, but wire glass was replaced by two-layer glass with consolidating material between the layers.
label: Description
content: Eugene Fatjo purchased this car in 1926; he lived in Santa Clara, California, and worked at the Bank of America. Fatjo's granddaughters, Katherine F. Harrington and Candace M. Harrington, donated the Stutz to the Smithsonian in 1994.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Indiana, Indianapolis
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Transportation, Road
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content: Automobiles
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content: Transportation
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content: Road Transportation
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Katherine F. Harrington and Candace M. Harrington
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1994.0278.01
label: accession number
content: 1994.0278
label: catalog number
content: 1994.0278.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: automobile
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 ft x 5 1/2 ft x 16 1/4 ft; 1.8288 m x 1.6764 m x 4.953 m