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Foreword: Far More Than Just a Machine
- University of Washington Press
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ix ForeWord Far More Than Just a Machine William Cronon If I were to ask my students who invented the automobile, I suspect their most likely response would be Henry Ford. That answer would be wrong, but wrong for the right reasons. Although there are a number of candidates for the first creator of a road vehicle powered not by animals but by steam or electricity or petroleum, no one person can be given credit for the transportation technology that ultimately changed the face of the planet over the course of the twentieth century. By the time Ford began adding gasoline engines to four-wheeled vehicles in the 1890s, he was one of a small legion of inventors all trying to do the same thing. He became famous in 1904 when one of his cars set a new land speed record of more than ninety miles per hour, but that is not why my students (and most of the rest of us) remember his name more than anyone else associated with the early history of the automobile. It was his invention of the wildly popular Model T in 1908 that assured his place in history and in our memories. Ford’s Model T may not have been the first automobile, but it was the first to make a compelling case that owning and operating a car might become a normative experience for most Americans. By embracing a robustly simple design that any reasonably competent mechanic could maintain, by using standard interchangeable parts, and by manufacturing the vehicles by arranging workflow along an assembly line (a technique he introduced in 1913), Ford was able to reduce his costs of productionsomuchthathecouldrepeatedlycutthepriceofthese“Tin Lizzies,” successfully marketing them to middle-class customers and even to his own workers. When his employees began quitting because of the grueling pace required by the assembly line, Ford doubled their wages by introducing the five-dollar workday, which had the indirect effect of making it more possible for these working-class Americans to purchase the cars they were building. Ford eschewed changes in style, famously remarking that his customers could have the car in any color they wanted as long as it was black, and this too held down costs even though it opened the door to the changing styles and brands that by x || ForeWord the 1920s would characterize one of Ford’s most successful competitors , General Motors. But that lay in the future. By the end of World War I, half the cars in the United States were Model T’s. That is why my students would not be entirely wrong if they guessed that Henry Ford invented the automobile, for that error hides a deeper truth. Although we tend to think of a car as a single object—that is, after all, the way we purchase it—it actually consists of myriad different parts, each of which has behind it a complex history of invention, development, and use. The internal combustion engine has quite a different history than the petroleum distillates that power it, the generator providing the sparks to ignite that fuel, the drive shaft that conveys rotational energy to the wheels, or the rubber with which the tires on those wheels are made—and this list only scratches the surface of all the different pieces that must be brought together if a car is ever to make it out of the garage and onto the road. Ford’s genius was to figure out a way to assemble these parts in the cheapest possible way, which in turn enabled him to sell more than fifteen million Model T’s by 1927. But the car itself is hardly the end of the story. If most of us take utterly for granted the complex inner mechanisms beneath the hoods of our automobiles, the same is no less true of complex features of the highways and street systems on which we operate these vehicles and the landscapes through which we drive. Although a passing familiarity with the history of transportation technologies quickly leads one to conclude that the twentieth century was the age of the automobile just as the nineteenth century had been the age of the railroad, most of us rarely stop to think about what that actually means. In truth, the rise in the United States of a culture in which mass ownership of automobiles became typical constituted one of the most sweeping cultural and environmental revolutions in human history. What Ford and his fellow...