The Fisher Body Division of the General Motors Corporation presents “This Moving World,” a black-and-white film produced by Wilding Picture circa 1940. The film opens with a montage of various automobiles, ships, and trains whizzing past, before settling in a machine shop at mark 1:20. There, a young man meets with his uncle and examine a model of an automobile body designed by the boy for a contest. The introduction segues into the film’s topic — “the business of going places.”
“I guess there have always been wandering tribes in every land, from the dawn of history,” the uncle remarks at mark 02:30, leading to a conversation of life “way back in the Stone Age.” We see two “cavemen” silently struggling to move a boulder starting at mark 03:00 before stumbling upon the invention of the wheel. Four minutes later, the uncle pulls a book from his drawer — “An Outline History of Transportation from 1400 B.C.” — as the film continues its celebration of the wheel. Other civilizations have also relied on beasts of burden, such as the elephants that stack teak “in the Orient” or camels that transport goods and people across the “mysterious, meditative, unapproachable desert.” At mark 08:24 we see a “chariot of the Romans” racing down a dirt road, and men navigating rafts down a river. More than 8,000 years ago, the narrator continues, Egyptians attached a sail to large boats to make sea travel faster, with the Greeks and Romans later using the same premise to aid in their transportation. “Always there have been sailor men to sail the multitudinous seas. Men who yearn for the sting of the salt spray and who said, ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by,” the narrator remarks at mark 09:00, quoting English poet John Masefield’s famous “Sea-Fever.”
Come mark 10:30, the film re-creates a scene from the days when young men would take an apprenticeship under a master to learn a trade. As they work on a wheel, the apprentice wonders aloud whether there’s a way to create a gentler ride and “shield the burden of the coach from imperfections in the highway.” From ancient highways to sailing the Seven Seas, the film looks at the move westward in the United States at mark 13:52, “as many hundreds of intrepid pioneers turned their faces toward the setting sun … facing unknown dangers with steady eye and dauntless courage” as covered wagons are shown crossing barren prairies.
Advancements in sea travel continued simultaneously, and in the 1800s, iron ships and paddle wheel boats replaced their wooden forefathers, while steam engines improved railroad travel. By the late 1860s, the audience is reminded at mark 15:10, the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad linked the Pacific Coast with the existing eastern United States railway system in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
“Still for years, hardly anyone traveled for pleasure, and only the very wealthy traveled in any sort of comfort. Then, at the turn of the century, came the amazing innovation that was to liberate the individual, rich and poor alike,” we are told. That innovation … “the horseless carriage” … the automobile. At mark 18:27, the film takes the viewer from a single automobile to a scene of a bustling city street crowded with traffic. At mark 18:40, the film shows the offices of Fisher Body, the Detroit-based automobile coach builder (and maker of the film), as the narrator explains how the company built 450 Cadillac bodies in 1910, just two years after the company was founded. A few years later, the company introduced the P-type 8-cylinder high speed engine.
A different type of transportation, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And in 1923, the introduction of Duco, a product line of automotive lacquer, gave cars a more durable finish, the narrator explains at mark 19:30 as the film shows workers applying the product. The introduction of four-wheel breaks on the 1924 Buick helped make that particular car safer, the audience is told at mark 19:45, as did the introduction of safety plate glass in 1926.
Travel gained perhaps its greatest boost, we are told at mark 20:00, following Charles Lindbergh’s historic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 in his plane, Spirit of St. Louis. Images of Lindbergh appear on the screen as the narrator touts his accomplishment. Scenes of underground tunnels, the Graf Zeppelin, the construction of the Ambassador Bridge (connecting Detroit, Michigan with Ontario, Canada), the 16-cylinder Cadillac, and the Pam American China Clipper are all shown in rapid succession.
“Gone forever are the days when travel was only for the few,” we are told at mark 23:25. “Nowadays, in this moving world of ours, we all go places. We can all say can say with a poet, ‘Light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free,, the world before me.’ (The quotation is from Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road.) We in this matchless age truly have the world before us. Because of the development and refinement of the motorcar, safe, comfortable, and economical transportation is now available to all of us.”
