Take a look at 19 minutes, 10 seconds in:
See the side lamp on the car. This is the movie, IT came from outer space.
I have seen this mostly in old movies, usually on a police car where the driver can reach out the window and manually position the lamp in various positions. In this movie, he’s able to do this even pointing the light to the back of the car.
What cars came with these kind of side lamps? Or was this simply a prop added to the car to help the story?
External spotlights were common after-market additions to police cars and taxis (so they could illuminate address numbers). Other folks, like those doing deliveries or repossessions, may have just found them handy, or may have bought secondhand taxis and police cars. Before modern streetlights, even big cities could be pretty dark at night, and leafy suburbs or rural areas could be really dark.
I’m not sure spotlights were ever standard on any model of car, but they may have been a factory option.
They sure came in handy for very dark rural places, at least the movies they were.
So would the 2017 equivalent to that be adding the optional fog lights on some vehicles?
They could be mounted through the front window pillar in pretty much any car. The hand grip twisted to spin the light around, and the whole shaft rotated to shine the light up or down. There really isn’t anything like it in a fixed light. Modern police cars have “alley lights” in the ends of the light bar to shine to the side.
We used a variation mounted through the roof on rally cars. The navigator could theoretically light the way around corners but in practice it was pretty tough to do.
Dennis
Ford offers it in their police interceptor package as a “free-standing option.”
Or light bars like these?
A rough equivalent which survives to the present day is a handheld spot that plugs into the 12 V receptacle, AKA the cigarette lighter. I still have one lying around that some guy was making by mounting an aircraft landing light in an aluminum saucepan with a pushbutton switch, and leading the cord for the cigarette lighter out the handle.
Growing up, we had a (Pontiac? definitely not Ford, dad was death on Ford’s) station wagon with dual spotlights (driver and passenger side). Dad got tired of replacing the bulbs (apparently broken by pebbles bouncing off country roads), so they were seldom working. The family had it in the early to mid 1970’s, having acquired it used (meaning it was probably a late 1960’s or early 1970’s model).
You can still buy post mounted spotlights today for most vehicles.
http://www.unityusa.com/
Caryl Chessman used a red spotlight.
Which is why it makes sense for the movie character to have one. It Came From Outer Space is set in a small town in Arizona. The hero’s house is a couple of miles outside town, with almost nothing around it but desert. That seems like exactly the sort of super-dark environment in which he might want to add a spotlight to his car for extra illumination.
I don’t know anything about cars and what is considered standard, but I am going to guess those can’t be install in just any car? Cars look so different, I wouldn’t expect there to be an industry standard size for them to replace what came with the car, or am I mistaken?
I had a roof mounted spotlight on my 74 Ford pickup.
The Sheriff’s cars and police cars in my area have post or cowl mounted lights.
Most passenger cars today have windshield installed airbags which limits mounting locations.
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My brother had a roof-mounted spotlight in his Datsun pickup in the early '70s. I remember him driving up the road using it to put out streetlights (my Dad’s Impala could hit the cross-street at the bottom of our street just so that the high beams could put out a streetlight down the hill). As I recall, my brother said that the spotlight was not street-legal: he had to drive on regular streets with it down and off.
The spotlights themselves are all pretty much the same. The differences are the mounting brackets and the overall length of the spotlight shaft from the light head to the handle, which varies depending on the specific vehicle it will be mounted on.
Yes, there are a few vehicles for which they don’t offer a mounting bracket, but generally you choose your vehicle year, make, and model, and whether it’s for the left or right side of the vehicle, and you can get a spotlight for it.
Spots like these are also pretty popular in kustom and hot rod culture. Places even sell “dummy spots” for those that want the look but don’t want to actually have a working spotlight (and have to wire it up, etc.):
No relation between my username and that site BTW 