From the acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who "writes with
verve and a keen eye" ("The New York Times Book Review"), comes a
fresh and entertaining account of Henry Ford and his invention of
the Model T--the ugly, cranky, invincible machine that defined
twentieth-century America.
Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new
technology: 170 years ago the railroad changed Americans'
conception of space and time; in our era, the microprocessor
revolutionized how humans communicate. But in the early twentieth
century the agent of creative destruction was the gasoline engine,
as put to work by an unknown and relentlessly industrious young man
named Henry Ford. Born the same year as the battle of Gettysburg,
Ford died two years after the atomic bombs fell, and his life
personified the tremendous technological changes achieved in that
span.
Growing up as a Michigan farm boy with a bone-deep loathing of
farming, Ford intuitively saw the advantages of internal
combustion. Resourceful and fearless, he built his first gasoline
engine out of scavenged industrial scraps. It was the size of a
sewing machine. From there, scene by scene, Richard Snow vividly
shows Ford using his innate mechanical abilities, hard work, and
radical imagination as he transformed American industry.
In many ways, of course, Ford's story is well known; in many more
ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a
fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest
invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took
twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade
later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and
so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford
created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country
changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then
he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an
ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved
beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a
vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an
infinity of household devices.
A highly pleasurable read, filled with scenes and incidents from
Ford's life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive
competition with other early car manufacturers, "I Invented the
Modern Age "shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a
popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the
remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know
it.
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