By Leftlane Staff
Wednesday, Jul 19th, 2006 @ 2:17 pm

Harold T. Ames filed a patent application for his retractable headlamps on this day in 1934. The headlamps were a defining feature of the Cord 810. Today, retractable headlamps don’t appear on any production automobile. But while the retractable headlight may be thing of the past, another invention that debuted exactly a year later is most certainly here to stay. On July 19th, 1935, the first automatic parking meter in the U.S., the Park-O-Meter invented by Carlton Magee, was installed in Oklahoma City by the Dual Parking Meter Company.

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