In mid-2013, I reviewed a new biography of Henry Ford.
Enjoy!
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In 1926, an automobile magnate in Michigan received a fan letter from Alabama: “We of the South affectionately acclaim you, instead of Lincoln, as the Great Liberator. Lincoln has freed his thousands, you have freed your ten thousands. The rutted roads on mountain sides and water sogged wheel tracks on lower lands have been smoothed, that the wheels of Fords may pass. The sagged barbed wire gates of barren cotton patches and blighted corn fields have been thrown open that brainblinded and soulblinded recluses might joyously into the world with their families in Fords.”
Historian Richard Snow understands the role revolutionary technologies play in remaking American culture. “In between the steam locomotive and the Apple,” he writes, “came Henry Ford’s Model T.” I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford (Scribner; 384 pages, $30) explores the genius who designed and manufactured the iconic car. It’s mostly a story of triumph, terminated by a sad epilogue marked by ignorance and intransigence.
Born on a Dearborn farm in 1863, in his words, Ford’s “earliest recollection” was that “there was too much work on the place.” The family wasn’t poor, but agriculture was drudgerous, and a neighbor called Ford “the laziest bugger on the face of the earth.” Hardly, notes Snow, who recounts the boy’s relentless tinkering — by the age of 12, “he could not only take watches apart, but put them back together so that they worked better.”
Ford left school at 17, and went to the city. Jobs in Detroit machine shops eventually led to a position with the Edison Illuminating Company, where his abilities prompted a promotion to chief engineer. No set schedule allowed him opportunities to experiment with hydrocarbon-fueled engines. That led to the “Quadricycle,” a four-horsepower, rudimentary car that quickly sold for $200. At 30, I Invented the Modern Age’s author writes, Ford was “far from young to be gambling his and his family’s future on a raucous novelty he’d improvised in time stolen from a respectable and promising job.” But he went all-in anyway (“I had to choose between my job and my automobile”), and resigned in 1899.
There was a fair amount of friction and failure before the formation of the Ford Motor Company in June 1903. But the man wouldn’t quit — he believed that there was a market for cheap, reliable “horseless carriages,” and he had the self-confidence, buttressed by an immensely patient wife, to surmount every obstacle. Gutsy investors, capable mechanics, and skilled managers helped, too.
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