Ford’s often bizarre and single-minded behavior has filled volumes. It ranged from the infantile (his insistence on the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy) to the bizarre (his doomed plan to build a jungle city in Brazil, Fordlandia, that would bring civilization to the natives and rubber to the United States) to the brilliant (his creation of the eighty-acre Henry Ford Museum, with its preservation of a dazzling array of buildings and artifacts of American history). What links all of these together is Ford’s conviction—which he was not shy in enunciating—that he had the answers to fundamental questions of human existence and if the world would follow his formula, strife and misery would disappear. In these plans, he was almost never successful.
The most tragic example of Ford’s dictatorial paternalism was with his own son, Edsel. Edsel shared his father’s intelligence, his determination, and, to a great degree, his business sense, but little else. Where Henry was rough-edged, Edsel was smooth; where Henry was, at his core, an angry and bitter misanthrope, Edsel was affable, gregarious, and compassionate; where Henry would eschew alcohol as a substance that bred weakness of character, Edsel enjoyed a sociable cocktail; where Henry ruled primarily by fear, particularly after the Model T’s ascension, Edsel inspired affection and loyalty; where Henry married “the believer,” who would follow him anywhere, Edsel married an equal and treated her as such.
Henry hated it. And he hated it even more when Edsel demonstrated impressive business acumen despite going about things far differently than his father insisted. Edsel was, in fact, a perfect second-generation manager—he was thoughtful, he planned carefully, and he always considered the future as much as the present.
Henry dealt with Edsel’s independence as he did whenever he was defied—he attacked until he had broken his adversary’s spirit. But he could not break Edsel’s. Edsel continued in the company, and even bought a home on the other side of Detroit from his parents’ Dearborn home, in Grosse Pointe, an area Henry saw as filled with the country club set he loathed. By 1938, with Henry instructing his enforcer, Harry Bennett, to break the back of the autoworkers’ union by any means necessary—meaning violently—and Edsel determined to enact a more enlightened labor policy, Charles Sorenson wrote that relations between the two “were stretched to the breaking point.”7
The clash of wills became so debilitating for Edsel that his health broke down, and in January 1942 he was hospitalized with an acute case of stomach ulcers that his doctors told him had been caused by stress. They instructed him to get away from the company for a while, but with World War II on, Edsel did not. Henry, himself nearing the end of his life, never let up. He insisted that Edsel drink milk from the farm that Ford had set up, but the milk was not pasteurized, and Edsel was hospitalized again in November with undulant fever. Soon afterward he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Edsel Ford died on May 26, 1943. He was forty-nine years old. Sorenson called the relationship “Henry Ford’s biggest failure.”
Henry Ford lived another four years and died at home at age eighty-three.
—
George Selden’s life went a good deal differently.
According to George Selden Jr., his father eventually took in $360,000 in royalties from his patent, which would translate to approximately $10 million in 2010 dollars, but that figure, like all Selden family claims, is quite possibly inflated. The fate of their automobile, however, is a good deal more clear. The Selden Motor Vehicle Company would produce only three models, each costing at least $2,500, none of which sold especially well. Production never exceeded one thousand cars a year.
In 1912, Selden’s sons decided to exploit what promised to be a fertile market and move into truck manufacture.*3 The company spun off a dedicated subsidiary and, to help sales, instituted an installment plan for buyers, a practice new to the industry and one that Motor World described as “generally considered an undesirable practice.”8 As the Selden automobile withered into extinction, the truck division thrived. With the coming of World War I, Selden trucks saw robust sales—Russia ordered one thousand in the fall of 1914—and in 1916, the truck division absorbed the parent company. In the years after the war, the Selden Model B Liberty truck became a common sight on the city streets. In 1930, in the wake of the stock market crash, Selden Trucks was sold to the Bethlehem Truck Company.
George Selden Sr. died in 1922, all but forgotten in the decade since he had merited national headlines. In the same year that Henry Ford would publish his triumphant autobiography, Selden’s death on January 17 rated only a short obituary at the bottom of page fourteen of The New York Times. The article called Selden an “auto pioneer” and noted that the courts had upheld his patent but ruled his engine was of the wrong type. The final line read, “Notwithstanding the gibes of others, he persevered.”9
—
Of Henry Ford’s notion of creating a single model and sticking to it, Jonathan Norton Leonard wrote:
Ford’s single idea was a good one. Whether or not he thought of it first himself is unimportant, for it was Ford who stuck to it through thick and thin. He would build a cheap car for the large public. Every other consideration was out. Not a penny would he spend on appearance, on sport or fashion appeal, on comfort or more than necessary speed. The cars would be alike. They would “get you there and get you back”—nothing more. They would be an expression of Ford’s own personality: bare, utilitarian, perverse. They might have their own peculiar weaknesses, but they would not cater to the weaknesses of others. Without exception they would be painted black when they left the factory—a symbol of their standardization in other respects. Every Ford on the roads of America would look like every other. Only the drivers would vary.10
Ford’s two greatest triumphs, the Model T and the assembly line, therefore, were both based on the forced acceptance of an immutable group standard, the first among consumers and the second among workers. And this from a man who despised communism for its suppression of personal initiative. His success was totally dependent on the adoption of principles for which he felt the deepest contempt—and which never, under any circumstances, would he attribute to himself. But only from the total repression of personal choice would it be possible to construct the empire that he trumpeted as a triumph of American individualism.
—
That Ford considered himself the inventor of processes he adapted, borrowed, or appropriated from others is without question. And he never acknowledged that the immense success of the Model T was due as much to being at the right place at the right time as to creating a piece of brilliant engineering. But Henry Ford, like other marketing geniuses before and since, seemed to know instinctively that being in the right place at the right time meant being in the right place all the time. Unlike so many of his fellows, who chased the market by trying to divine its pulse from moment to moment, Ford—the Model K experiment notwithstanding—stayed where he knew he should be, and eventually the market came to him. He did not so much create demand as anticipate it.
On the one hand, there is little significance in whether or not Henry Ford was an inventor, an innovator, or just a shrewd and talented businessman. Whatever role he did or did not play in Ford Motor’s ascension, the company became a colossus, one of the most successful and profitable ventures in human history, and Ford was at the helm for the entire ride.
But from another viewpoint, where Ford fits on innovation’s continuum becomes a good deal more salient. The great fortunes, after all, are almost never amassed by pure inventors, but rather by the men and women who recognize how to sell the inventions that others have created. Such sales, when successful, will then engender further—and usually faster—second-, third-, and fourth-generation innovation. Men such as Henry Ford—and Isaac Rice—therefore can be categorized as accelerators, catalysts in creating commercial applications from pure science, and thereby creating the consumer demand that prompts the research that keeps the process vibrant.
The degree to which the profit motive is required to pr
opel creativity—or whether it crystallizes or corrupts the process—can be debated, but what is not in doubt is that men such as Henry Ford will always be patrolling the fringes, eager to convert ideas to cash. And it is that alchemy, more often than not, that defines the process we call innovation.
* * *
*1 The three-page entry could not be less Fordesque, with phrases like “It was out of social strife thus engendered that the idea began to emerge that possibly the difficulty lay in the neglect of scientific manufacturing principles.”
*2 Eventually, “Fordism” would be parodied to devastating effect in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times.
*3 The New York Times, in December 1911, had run an article whose headline read, “Trades Interested in Motor Vehicles.” The article listed a number of businesses, most prominently breweries, where a well-made truck would be welcome to replace horse-drawn carts.
To Nancy and Lee
Abbreviations are as follows:
HA—Horseless Age
MA—Motor Age
MW—Motor Way
MWo—Motor World
NYT—New York Times
SciAm—Scientific American
PROLOGUE: A DAY IN COURT
1. Sorenson, My Forty Years with Ford, 1.
CHAPTER 1: POWER IN A TUBE
1. Automobile, October 1899, 27.
2. Bryant, “The Silent Otto,” 186.
CHAPTER 2: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
1. Frances Murray, “Henry Rogers Selden,” New York State Unified Court System, nycourts.gov/history/legal-history-new-york/luminaries-court-appeals/selden-henry.html.
2. Greenleaf, Monopoly on Wheels, 7.
3. Technical World, September 1906, 2. This revelation was part of a long interview Selden gave reporter Leroy Scott at a pivotal point in the trial.
4. Selden’s son later claimed that his father’s interest in horseless carriages was spurred by his Army mount, who was so willful that he almost killed Selden by trying to run him into a tree, but this seems less likely than the version in Selden’s deposition, which also might be spurious.
5. SciAm, May 13, 1876, 1.
6. As applied to gas turbines, the Brayton engine has a compressor, a burner, and an expansion turbine. Ambient air is compressed and passed through a heat exchanger for preheating. The preheated charge goes to a combustor, where fuel is ignited, and the hot compressed air then flows to an expander, where the thermal energy is converted to shaft work. The hot exhaust gases from the expander are sent to the heat exchanger, where they are cooled and then discharged.
CHAPTER 3: MADE IN GERMANY…
1. Bryant, “The Origin of the Four-Stroke Cycle,” 189.
2. Ibid., 192.
3. Engineering, December 1900, 357. Engineering engaged Daimler to write a narrative of the development of his motors, but Daimler died before it could be completed. Paul Daimler, using his father’s notes, completed the account. Slanted toward Daimler’s contributions, to be sure (and away from Maybach’s), this article is nonetheless by far the best record of the development of the Daimler-Maybach engine ever published in English.
4. Ibid., 359–60.
CHAPTER 4: …PERFECTED IN FRANCE
1. Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing, 6.
2. Ibid., 14.
3. Automobile, October 1899, 22.
CHAPTER 5: AN UNEASY ROMANCE WITH THE HORSE
1. Notorc, “Does Mourning Become the Electric? 1: The Rise of the Electric Automobile,” Postscripts (blog), December 28, 2006, notorc.blogspot.com/2006/12/does-mourning-become-electric-1-rise-of.html.
2. Greenleaf, Monopoly on Wheels, 59.
3. Musselman, Get a Horse!, 29.
4. “A Memorial to Congress on the Subject of a Road Department,” February 1893.
5. Greenleaf, Monopoly on Wheels, 59.
6. Maxim, Horseless Carriage Days, 47.
7. Ibid., 88.
CHAPTER 6: EARLY AMERICANS
1. Garrett, “Illinois Commentary,” 178.
2. Ibid., 176.
3. Duryea, America’s First Automobile, 5. Charles died in 1938, taking credit for the design and virtually all of the components of the Duryea automobile. In 1942, Frank broke decades of silence and wrote this book to “set the record straight.”
4. Quoted in Garrett, “Illinois Commentary,” 177.
5. Garrett, “Illinois Commentary,” 180.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Musselman, Get a Horse!, 40.
9. The magazine’s name was changed to The Automobile in 1909 and Automobile Industries in 1917, as it remains today.
10. HA, October 1895, 7.
11. Ibid., 17.
12. Other companies were at this point building gasoline automobiles, key among them Haynes-Apperson (Elwood Haynes being the inventor of stainless steel). While some initiated improvements to automaking, none would play a significant role when the industry began in earnest.
13. HA, October 1895.
14. “Charles B. King,” Automotive Hall of Fame, automotivehalloffame.org/inductee/charles-king/751.
15. An excellent first-person biographical sketch of King appears in King’s own Personal Side Lights of America’s First Automobile Race.
CHAPTER 7: THE SELF-CREATED MAN
1. Rae, ed., Henry Ford, 4.
2. Wik, “Review of Henry Ford,” 312.
3. While Ford’s My Life and Work, as will be shown, is unreliable as an account of Ford’s life and work, as a polemic, it is quite valuable as a statement of Ford’s philosophy and values.
4. Snow, I Invented the Modern Age, 17. The Nevins quote was taken directly from My Life and Work without attribution.
5. See, for example, Curcio, Henry Ford, 7.
6. Ford, My Life and Work, 22.
7. Ibid., 29.
8. Snow, I Invented the Modern Age, 26.
9. Ford, My Life and Work, 26–27.
10. Ibid., 604n.
11. Ibid., 117.
12. Ibid., 33.
13. See, for example, Nevins, Ford; Curcio, Henry Ford; and Snow, I Invented the Modern Age.
14. Simonds, Henry Ford: His Life, His Work, His Genius, 47.
15. Curcio, Henry Ford, 27.
16. Ford, My Life and Work, 30.
17. Quoted in Olson, Young Henry Ford, 98.
18. Detroit Free Press, March 7, 1896, 4.
19. Quoted in Olson, Young Henry Ford, 72.
20. Snow, I Invented the Modern Age, 56.
21. “As for the rest of the carriage,” Nevins wrote, “Ford undoubtedly learned much from King, for he was present while the latter was developing his test wagon.” “He could see what was being built there,” Oliver Barthel noted. King also obtained a chain for Ford to use to drive the quadricycle, to replace the belt that Ford originally planned to install. Ford, 153.
22. Simonds, Henry Ford: His Life, His Work, His Genius, 18. Although this table-pounding assertion has been widely cited by other biographers, Simonds cites no source. In My Life and Work, Ford dates his meeting with Edison to 1887, which isn’t possible since Ford didn’t begin working for Edison until 1891 (though it is possibly a typo), and places it in Atlantic City; his recollection of Edison’s response, while equally enthusiastic, was a good deal more thoughtful and measured. Other accounts have the meeting taking place when Edison visited Detroit in 1898 and sought out his employee to encourage him.
23. Snow, I Invented the Modern Age, 68.
CHAPTER 8: SPEED
1. A 1.2-mile “race” was held in 1887 from Paris to Neuilly that featured only two competitors in steam-powered vehicles, Georges Bouton and Albert de Dion, partners in the De Dion–Bouton Company.
2. There is insufficient room in these pages to even begin to detail examples of Bennett’s odd behavior. On May 19, 1918, a week after his death, The New York Times published “Anecdotes About Gordon Bennett,” which recounts just a few examples of the caprices he foisted on his employees.
3. Harmsworth, Motors and Motor-Driving, 12. Three years later Chasseloup-Laubat would set the world’s first land speed record, just under 40 miles per hour, in an electric car.
4. HA, November 1895, 53.
5. King, Personal Side Lights, 18.
6. Maxim, Horseless Carriage Days, 51–52.
7. King, Personal Side Lights, 19.
8. Chicago Times-Herald, November 29, 1895, 1.
9. Rock Island Argus, November 29, 1895, 1.
10. Ibid.
11. San Francisco Call, June 14, 1899, 2. These items did not appear under Bennett’s byline, of course, but were all attributed to the Herald and almost certainly originated with Bennett himself.
12. Ibid., June 15, 1899, 3.
13. Ibid., June 19, 1899, 4.
14. Sydney Morning Herald, September 7, 1899, 5.
15. Automobile, February 1900, 455.
16. New-York Tribune, June 15, 1900, 4. There was no further report on the dog.
17. HA, July 4, 1900, 14.
18. Automobile, June 1900, 297.
CHAPTER 9: A ROAD OF ONE’S OWN
1. Ford, My Life and Work, 36.
2. Leonard, Tragedy of Henry Ford, 19.
3. Ford, My Life and Work, 39.
4. Automobile Club of America [yearbook], 1900. Also among the members were a number of automobile pioneers, such as Hiram Percy Maxim.
Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age Page 35
