And that meant speeding up the work by simplifying it. The profits would come from volume, not pricing. To drive down the price of his car he’d have to make lots of them. This is where Ford would make his outstanding contribution to the machine age: as a systems-builder, the creator of a gigantic technological system capable of producing, well, almost anything. What had to change was the way of making it. It ran like a dream, but at $825, the equivalent of a teacher’s salary back then, it was still too expensive for the common man. Here was Ford, the backyard mechanic, in his glory, working day and night on his dream product, tinkering, testing, playing with new ideas, working with men he respected, all of them self-taught. When Ford’s chief financial backer kept pushing for big, fancy cars, Ford bought him out in 1906, built a new production plant at Highland Park, north of Detroit, and began work on the Model T with a team of dedicated mechanics. As he said, “The way to make cars is to make one automobile just like another automobile just as one pen is like another pen, or one match is like another match when it comes from a match factory.” He’d fix on a design, freeze it, and then work on ways to reproduce it year after year. It would be rugged, reliable, and designed for rough country roads and it would liberate rural people from the isolation that had nearly driven him crazy on his father’s farm.įord was convinced there was only one way to make such a car. Ford wanted to build an inexpensive car for farmers like his Irish father. As he built more cars and formed his own company with the backing of Detroit capitalists, Ford developed the idea that would make him the most powerful industrialist in America. But Ford’s could go 20 miles per hour, a terrific speed back then and it was reliable and didn’t cost that much. Europeans like Karl Benz had been making cars for at least a decade. So he grabbed an axe, demolished the doorframe, and rode off into the night. Then he realized that the door of the shed wasn’t wide enough to get his road machine through. When he finished it on June 4th 1896, it was almost two in the morning, but he was so excited he wanted to take it for a run. It was to build a horseless carriage, a self-propelling road machine that ran, not on steam, but on the fuel of the coming age, gasoline.įord spent his evenings after work in a small shed behind his house putting together his first car. His dream was the dream of countless other backyard mechanics of that time with names like Dodge, Buick, and Olds. At age sixteen, he left home and walked to Detroit, where he found work in a machine shop. This was the Machine Age, and he was enthralled by modern machinery. But in truth, he hated the isolation and boredom of farm life. As a boy, he loved to roam in the woods and fields by the River Rouge, near his home, and he developed a lifelong attachment to rural values of thrift, self-reliance, and simple living.

Henry Ford was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan in l863, only a few weeks after the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. All of us are products, in one way or another, of Fordism. Ford, in fact, coined the word, “mass production.” Until he did, in 1926, it was called Fordism. This was modern mass production, the single most important factor in making America the economic and military powerhouse of the 20th century.įord’s system of belt-driven assembly line production is arguably the most important innovation of the Industrial Age. It was the system he developed for making it, and thousands of other products. But Ford’s greatest innovation wasn’t the Model T. His Model T Ford began this country’s love affair with the car and turned America into an automobile civilization. But this cranky cultural reactionary, who, at the height of the Jazz Age, tried to revive square dancing and country fiddling, was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the Industrial Age. As he once said: “I invented the modern age.” Now that’s pushing it. Henry Ford was at the center of these great changes, and he wasn’t modest about his place in history. And no story describes this cultural transformation better than the story of the automobile revolution, and the rise of Los Angeles, the first auto-age city.

It’s a decade we’re drawn back to because it’s here that we start to see ourselves, that Americans become recognizably modern. Americans were speeding up, moving out, buying more, having fun, dreaming bigger.

It’s the Jazz Age, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, the Age of Babbitts, Bootlegging, and Bathtub Gin.

Empire of sin change alcohol production