This will sound wearily familiar: when Middle East strongman Gamal Abd el-Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal 1956, there were widespread fears that the flow of oil from the region would be interrupted.

So the chief of the British Motor Corporation told engineer Alec Issigonis that the company desperately needed a tiny, fuel-efficient vehicle. The result was the Mini, a car that changed the face of the industry.

  Issigonis gave his team a terrifyingly simple brief: create package with room for four adults in a vehicle that would be only slightly longer than ten feet and no wider than five. Issigonos ‘s solution was to mount the engine transversely, kick the wheels right out to the corners of the body, and put the gearbox in the only space not in use---under the engine.

  Back in 1959, the Mini was launched in a way that was just as innovative as the car itself. Tony Ball, who was young man in the company’s sales department, remembers getting the call.

  “I was summoned into the design studio by the directors and people like Alec Issigonis. They pulled back the curtain, and there was the Mini. I was amazed. I’d never seen a car with front-wheel drive and a transverse engine before---or a car designed to be small but so big inside. The word’ magical’ came to mind. It’s wizardry on wheels,’ I said. They said, ‘how would you like to launch it?’”

  Ball had a plan, for which he requested a  $1,000 budget. Incredibly, given the size of modern launch budgets, the company balked initially but eventually relented. Ball’s plan revolved around a magician's enormous top hat, from which the Mini emerged. Then the real theater began:” Inside the car, rather like a magician pulling endless rabbits out of a hat, I had put three of the biggest men I could find, two ladies, one of whom was my wife, a baby who was my three-month-old son, two rather large poodles, and all the luggage we could possibly cram in---in door wells and under the seats, and golf clubs, almost everything you could imagine. As I waved a wand, these men and women and babies and golf clubs came out of this little car and made such an impact that people just stood and cheered.

  “After having put the car on the market for less than $1,000, we wanted to make sure that it would mot be regarded as a novelty or a gimmick. We wanted to show that it was a car with genuine, ingenious, practical design. We felt it also needed to be regarded as something people would love to be seen in, a charismatic vehicle rather than a gimmicky one. So we made sure all the leading social figures those days were seen to own one or drive one. Peter sellers, for example, and people like him, who moved in great social circles. All the leading fashion models, we made sure, were seen in the car.”

  Ball went on to have a successful career in the industry. The Mini went on to become a symbol of the 1960s as well as world-beating racing car with victory at, among others, the Monte Carlo Rally. Pretty good for a car that Issigonis once described as having been designed “for the district nurse.”