A Lady with a Blitz-Top

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What a luck, that our lovely Friday-Lady´s car is fitted with a “Golde-Patent-Verdeck”. It makes it easy for her to open and close the canopy top of her automobile. And furthermore, the advertising is telling us, that this top can be opened and closed very easily and fast, even by a lady and very astonishing: in a driving car.

But who was the early pioneer of canopy tops, who invented this fantastic mechanism? We´re talking about Traugott Golde, a blacksmith, born in Lessen, a little village in Thuringia in February 1845. He founded his wagon-building company in the nearby city of Gera in 1872 and became a coachbuilder in 1905. As a trademark of his company, he invented the “Golde Blitz-Verdeck”. It would have been the perfect top for a LeMans-racer between 1924 and 1927. After the death of Traugott Golde in 1905, his sons Richard and Alfred continued the business. For the use of their American patents, in 1910, they even founded the "Golde Patent Top Manufacturing Company" in New York. Big Business for a small factory in Thuringia, but with high skills in coachbuilding and especially the canopy top development, the company survived the Great War and in 1921 a new modern company building was built by star architect Thilo Schoder. This Bauhaus-Style building still exists. Body designs for Benz, Minerva, Audi, Horch and Maybach followed and in 1927, 10 years before the first car company offered a sliding roof (the Nash Motor Company in 1937), Golde already offered this feature as an aftermarket extra. Because after World War II, the old company now located in the Sowjet zone, Golde founded the successor company “Hans Traugott Golde & Co. GmbH” in Frankfurt/Main and became Germany´s first supplier of sliding sunroofs. You found Golde roofs on Mercedes, VW Beetles, Borgwards, Citroens, Fords and so on and so on. Even convertible hard-tops sometimes were fitted with Golde sliding-roofs. I once saw a Mercedes Pagode with this rare extra. In 1973, the company developed the world's first slide and tilt module, a feature I love at my Baby-Benz. Golde finally was purchased by Rockwell Automotive the same year.

So we know a lot about canopy tops, sliding roofs, etc. now. But there is one thing, I´d like to know about our Friday Lady: what car is it, that she has fitted with the famous Golde-Patent-Top? I think it looks like a Benz, doesn´t it? Maybe one of our readers will identify the correct type of this nice automobile!?

Words and photographs by Hubertus Hansmann.

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