By Paul Stadden

Copyright jalopnik

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.