Excerpt - "Strange but True Tales of Car Collecting" - NYTimes.com Section 3: Stranger Than Fiction Number 11: The Pontiac Ghost Cars Imagine seeing a transparent car - in 1939. Pontiac's drivable Plexiglas 1940 show car wasn't like anything else on the road. The first full-sized transparent car ever made in America, it bowed at General Motor's Highways and Horizons exhibit at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. Pontiac's see-through body was originally styled as a 1939 Deluxe Six Four-Door Touring Sedan, but later updated with a 1940 clear Plexiglas nose clip. According to the July Automobile Digest, a second plastic car, a 1940 Torpedo Eight Four-Door Sedan, was built for the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. General Motors had used cutaway exhibits to dramatize new engineering and body construction features of its models over the years, and in 1930 Cadillac V-8 show toured America. But nothing prepared World's Fair goers for the ghostly Pontiac that seemed to endow onlookers with X-ray vision. Over 44 million people from around the globe visited the World of Tomorrow-themed World's Fair, which was billed as the biggest international event since World War I. America had hosted world fairs since the 1800s, but this was the first in the Big Apple. Conceived by a group of retired New York City policemen to list the city and the country out of its Great Depression, it created a spectacular diversion from the crummy economy and the war clouds gathering over Europe. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes fashioned the General Motors Pavilion, known as Futurama, which attempted to give fairgoers a glimpse of new products to come. It was prophetic in advancing concepts of the future, such as the nation's superhighways and its suburbs. A re-created auto dealership also let visitors see the entire line of new GM cars. All of GM's divisions took part in the Previews of Progress. Electro-Motive Corporation displayed their then-new streamlined diesel-electric passenger locomotive. Frigidaire, which had introduced its first window-mounted room air-conditioner a year earlier, demonstrated its products. The fair foretold much of what would become commonplace in prosperous post-World War II America. General Electric unveiled its patented fluorescent light bulb. DuPont demonstrated nylon and nylon stockings to the American public for the first time. View-Master made its debut, four years after the advent of Kodachrome color film made small photographic color images possible. Sharing the limelight was the amazing plastic Pontiac, with its one-off body of Plexiglas instead of sheet metal. Both this transparent show car and its Torpedo Eight successor were constructed by GM's Fisher Body division. They were built to show the rigid interior bracing as well as other features, such as the working mechanism of the no draft ventilation system used in the Uni-Steel Turret top Fisher bodies, according to Automobile Digest. "The clear Plexiglas was chosen solely for its transparency," Pontiac historian John A. Gunnell said. The strength and safety of all-steel bodies were really the point of this display- not just the 19039-1940 Pontiacs. The see-through cars also revealed GM's automatic door locking mechanisms, concealed door hinges, details of the independent front suspension, safety hood lock, new sealed beam headlights, improved deck lid supports, column gearshift controls and all the steering gear. Since most of these items were common to all GM cars, the Plexiglas Pontiacs were engineering showcases for the entire product range. Except for their glass-like coachwork, the Pontiac ghost cars, as they were more popularly known, were identical to their steel-bodied counterparts. "Complete in every detail, save for the insulating material normally applied to the inner surfaces of steel outer sheathing in production models," Automobile Digest noted, "it will be possible to drive the plastic Torpedo Eight car on the highway." Yet GM had never before considered using Plexiglas - a transparent, tough, flexible plastic substitute for glass - in regular production vehicles. This was in contrast to the soybean-derived plastic car Henry Ford patented in 1942. Ford hoped to make his plastic material a replacement for the metals used in cars. But World War II intervened, and when car production resumed after the war, Ford's experimental plastic endeavor diminished into oblivion Acrylic glass was developed by various laboratories in 1928 (variants date as far back as the mid-1800s), but in 1933 German chemist Otto Rohm trademarked his discovery as Plexiglas. Rohm and Hass Company (now part of the Dow Chemical Company) was the first to market the shatterproof plastic in 1933. Edmund Green, a former Rohm and Haas public relations man, told auto journalist Ken Gross in 1982 that R&H likely supplied Fisher Body with Plexiglas sections and the GM division did the rest. No documentation exists that suggest a collaboration between GM and Rohm and Haas, but Green told Gross that he recalled seeing photos of the Plexiglas Pontiacs in old Rohm and Hass files, and remembered that R&H supplied GM with plastic panels for later show cars. Automobile Digest chronicled with lavish illustration the Fisher Body craftsmen heating, hand-sanding, molding, and shaping the clear plastic body panels, so there's little doubt that Fisher crafted the cars. "And it's reasonable to assume that Rohm and Haas at least supplied the sheet stock to Fisher" historian Gunnell said.