Hood Mascots: Motometers (Part I)

One element of the car that has fallen to the wayside lately is the hood mascot (or ornament). Few car companies still use them (the major exceptions being Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, Lincoln, and Maybach) and the ones that do often don't put them on all of their cars. There was a time when virtually every car, from the cheapest to the most expensive had a little hood jewelry.

The hood mascot really grew out of a desire to beautify the required hardware that attached to the car. Early cars did not have a dashboard mounted temperature gauge, as cars today have. Instead, a radiator pressure gauge was mounted directly above the radiator filler cap. This was, of course, on the top of the grill, at the front of the hood. The most popular gauge was a Boyce Motometer. At first unadorned, Motometers soon became launching points for everything from wings to animals to figures. This marked the beginning of the hood mascot.

Mascots, clockwise from the lower left-hand corner, are from a 1916 Scripps-Booth Roadster, a 1915 Stutz Bearcat, and a 1919 Paige Daytona Speedster Pototype.

For the next edition, I'll explore the golden age of mascots...