The notion of a car with a steel roof that folds down as easily as a canvas one is straight out of the Rube Goldberg playbook as interpreted by Dr. Seuss.  Yet, postwar America, with its if-you-can-think-of-it-we-can-build-it attitude, was the place where, however briefly, this phantasmagorical dream was fully realized.

Ford had been caught flatfooted in the wake of the hardtop craze spawned by GM in the late ‘40’s with the introduction of pillarless two door models that mimed the profile of true convertibles.  In 1954, Ford trumped the industry with the Crestline Skyliner, a hardtop that featured a tinted Plexiglas roof section.  The glass top option continued for three years with fewer than 25,000 of Ford’s rolling terrariums (plus about 12,000 of Mercury’s Sun Valley) finding buyers.

Ford needed a “Better Idea” and looked at the retractable hardtop that was first tried by Peugeot in 1934.  Despite the public’s indifference to its Skyliner the company’s R&D in roof and greenhouse design continued at the newly established Continental Division where a revolutionary concept was, quite literally, unfolding. It was there that a 30-year-old draftsman named Ben Smith came in 1953 to head up a project that would later be the basis for the Ford Skyliner, the first mass-produced cars with a fully retractable steel roof.  The idea was to develop a button operated, “convertible hardtop,” for the Continental Mark II, a super luxury coupe that debuted in 1956 with a timeless shape, an extraordinary price and, as it happened, a fixed steel roof.