This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250.
America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org. I turned off news altogether.
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait. It feels like it's trying to divide people. If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting.
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She starts dating Howard Hughes. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane.
So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode, Spotlighting Groundbreaking Innovators like Hedi Lamar and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ionic 5.
Goodbye. Yeah. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. to search for the Our American Stories podcast. Go to the iHeartMedia app.
to Apple Podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next story is about the man whose legacy. Sits in your garage. Our storyteller.
is Richard Snow. Snow worked at American Heritage Magazine for nearly four decades and was its editor-in-chief for 17 years. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of Henry Ford. Let's take a listen.
Henry Ford is among the strangest and in some ways the least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal of the latter part of his life a building on some empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan, a A vast museum devoted to American history.
Now, It's an endlessly fascinating place. Ford collected on the grandest possible scale, Well, when he revered Thomas Edison all his life, I don't think he admired any living person more. and he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had Lived in and seven carloads of New Jersey dirt so. the buildings could literally sit on their native soil.
Um And when he went to get the Wright Brothers cycle shop, he also brought the. pretty little Queen Anne house the the brothers had grown up in. and it was wooden building stood on stone. Foundation. He had the mortar knocked out between the stones and reground so it would be on its same cement.
This tells a good deal about his Immense capacity for taking pains. The whole museum tells a lot about the man. It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a very interesting place to be. He loved mechanisms of all kinds. He loved watches.
So, in the village, there are three watchmakers. But there's no attorney's office, there's no nice little country bank, because he thought lawyers. and bankers were all leeches. And there's something else about that place I felt. When Ford was a young man, and all the time he was working to establish himself.
He had a magical ability to draw people to him, to trust him, to make them work for him and do it happily. One of his early friends called that the magnet. He said, No, that's Henry. He's got the magnet. And I felt a dim tug of that magnet's pull All the time I was in his museum, I.
And that's what uh made me want to write a book. about him. But of course, I started the book with considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more about Than Henry Ford. And this wasn't helped when I told a friend what I was going to be writing about, and he said.
Isn't that story about as well known as The Nativity? That's certainly what I'd been worried about. But after I spent a while with him, I began thinking. But maybe the story wasn't Also, well known after all, or actually, rather, that it was so well known that we don't even realize it was his story. What I mean is that everybody knows the name and the comment about history being made, and that he built a lot of cars.
But the true breadth of his accomplishment is now so much a part of the world We inhabit that his influence is around us like the air we breathe and as invisible.
Okay. Every century or so our republic has been remade by a new technology. 170 years ago it was the railroad and in our time it's the microprocessor. These technologies do more than change our habits. They change the way we think.
A Thoreau listening, who saw the railroads come in, listening to the trains steaming past Walden Pond, wrote. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than ever they did in the stage office? And of course, anyone over the age of twenty, younger than that, And it's simply your environment knows what the computer and the internet are doing now.
Well In between the steam locomotive and the Mac, came Henry Ford's Model T. And When Ford was quite elderly, he was speaking with a Dearborn high school boy who was. Doing a article on him for for the high school newspaper and Florida got very sentimental about the one-room schoolhouse and square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful these old days were and um The boy wasn't an easy sell on this, and he said, Well, that's all very well, Mr. Ford, but We live in the modern age. Lord said, Young man, Don't tell me about the modern age.
I invented the modern age.
Now You'll notice he didn't say I made a hell of a lot of cars. He said basically he had. fashioned the world he and the boy were living in. It's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim And I've come to think it's very largely true. There there is a mystery to him.
Certainly, his close associates felt so. Almost every one of his high lieutenants. It's interesting reading them one after another. They'd all say, well, we worked on this and we were very close on that. But I never really understood him.
I never understood mister Ford. Nobody called him Henry. Uh the Reverend Samuel Marquis, who spent years working with Ford, wrote, In spite of a long and fairly intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one mental picture of which I can say, this is the man as he is, or as I know him. There are in him lights so high and shadows so deep. that I cannot get the whole of them in proper focus.
At the same time, And you're listening to one heck of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller. Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Ford. When we come back, more of the man who invented the modern age. Here. on our American stories.
Uh Lee Habib here and I'm inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country's 250th birthday coming soon. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to OurAmerican Stories. Go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Any amount helps. Go to ouramericanstories.com and give.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ionic 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedi Lamar.
Want the full story? Take a listen. Hedy, she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him, but incredible innovator.
Right. She says he's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well. Give us examples. I know.
They do. get along intellectually. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane.
She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius.
Check out our new episode, Spotlighting Groundbreaking Innovators like Hedi Lamar and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ionic 5. Goodbye. With my mom and dad living in Orange County, when we bring my five and seven year old to visit, we are sometimes in for a two-hour drive that could feel like 10. No, as an avid camper, I know all about this.
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Search Lingo Kids in the App Store or Google Play. Lingo Kids: Everything Kids Love. Professional wrestling fans, the action continues every week. That means this. It's total non-stop action!
TNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AMC. For showtimes and more information, visit TNA Wrestling.com. And we continue with our American stories and with Richard Snow. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age. The Rise of Henry Ford Let's pick up.
where we last left off. A reporter who met him in 1915 was harsher about this duality of nature. There's a fascinating little illusory trick which may be played with one of the Ford portrait photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered, A benign, gently humorous expression dominates. When the other side is covered, the look is transformed into one of deadly malevolent calculation.
This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy hollow eyes. The pale eyes one would associate with a visionary or a killer. Mm. Visionary and killer. Ford was full of contradictions right from the very start.
Well, whatever is mysteries by the time That reporter wrote that. A great many people are trying to figure him out. He was on his way to becoming the richest American, and once Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, he was easily the most famous. Yeah. This man who lived to read about the atomic bombs falling on Japan was born three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg.
july, eighteen sixty three, on a farm in Dearborn. His Father had been born an Irish tenant on an Irish tenant farm, and he always seems to have felt. A sort of grateful surprise that he now owned not only. a farm of his own, but a prosperous one. Henry felt a little differently.
He loved everything about the farm except the farming. He said, My earliest recollection is that Considering the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I still feel about farming. There are clouds of folklore about Ford's boyhood, a lot of them sent up by Ford himself. But it does seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting Onto machinery burdens that people had borne since biblical times.
He said, Even when I was very young, I suspected that farm work might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics, although my mother always said I was a born mechanic. He very early began taking things apart to see how they would work, and he always got them back together. But what he took apart and got back together. often ran better.
A neighbor said that every clock in the Ford household shuddered when it saw it coming, but he did more harm than good with the clocks, and by the time he was twelve he was repairing neighbors' watches.
Now the next year when he was thirteen, his mother died. And he expressed the loss uh in the you know the best way he knew how. He said The house was like a watch. without a mainspring. And it was perhaps the nearness of her death that that made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he called the most important, biggest event.
of my early years. His father was driving him into town in his wagon, family wagon, when they came upon a steam farm engine moving their way. Here is how clearly Ford described it sixty years later. I remember that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than horse drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels.
I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses. But this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the rear wheels. The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair. He was proud of it. He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt put on to drive the machinery.
He told me that the engine made 200 revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. And here, Ford, so much of whose early youth is elusive. Makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his life took a course that would. change everyone else's. This last, he means the engine running in neutral while not driving the wagon.
It's a feature which is incorporated into modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which are easily stopped and started. but it became very important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into automotive transportation. Ford followed that farm engine for the rest of his life.
My toys were all tools, he wrote when he was in his sixties. He added, and they still are. But of course, as a teenager, he had to learn to use those tools, and he couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that. Detroit had standing timber all around, there was lake shipping, there was iron ore, and the city took advantage of all of this. When Henry Ford turned 17 and left home to go there, already had 120,000 residents.
ten railroads speeding it. and it was home to a thousand different manufacturing businesses, little machine shops scattered everywhere.
Now, Ford spent a few months in business school there, and that was the only time in his life when his handwriting was legible. But his real education came from the machine shops. He held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he worked with. he had an almost instinctive sense. of machinery.
Even at the end of his life, he could look at ten identical carburetors laid out on a bench and point to the one that had something wrong with it. Yeah, and he loved being among machines, but a few years later, he was back in Dearborn on the farm. He'd been lured there by his father with the promise of 40 acres of land and his 80 acres. His father still hoped. Henry would become a farmer too.
Ford didn't want the farmland, but he went because he did want To be perceived as a more stable citizen, and the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen in love with an 18-year-old named Clara Bryant. He'd better at a New Year's Eve dance he loved dancing all his life. And he married her in 1888, and she turned out to be a great choice. She was steady and staunch and brave. and had such complete faith in him that he took the calling of the Great Believer.
And being married to Henry can't have been easy for her at first because over the next ten years they lived in ten rental houses. And all during that time, Ford was experimenting with creating a machine that would do what the steam traction engine had, which was drive itself. He knew all about steam engines by now and decided they were simply too heavy to power what he had in mind.
So he began to look to gasoline in the internal combustion engine. He started building a car in the woodshed behind his rented house. Woodshed makes it sound like too modest a thing. It was actually a rather substantial little brick building. You can see it.
or a replica of it today in uh Greenfield Village. Eh, it was a lonely and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch. When Ford needed a carburetor, a He had to invent one. He didn't even have a name for it. The word hadn't come into the language yet.
And he worked on his first car for months and and felt it was finally ready in June of 1896. And it gives a good idea of the intensity of purpose with which he the concentration with which he worked that it was only when he was ready to take it out on its trial run that he discovered it was too big to fit through the woodshed door.
Well, he fixed that with an axe and Got his car started and coaxed its two-cylinder engine into life and drove off into his future and ours. The car worked, and he improved it. and finally got it running well enough to convince a Detroit Lumber Tycoon to finance what Ford called the Detroit Automobile Company. And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything. on building automobiles in those days.
Years later, Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said, Of course there was no demand for an automobile. There never is. for a new product. Um And you've been listening to Richard Snow tell the story of Henry Ford.
My toys were all tools, he recalled. They still are. and, my goodness, they were. And Detroit at the turn of the century, we're talking about the 1890s and the time that Ford went there. And started to work there.
There were a hundred thousand-plus citizens. Ten railroad lines fed the city. and there were all kinds of manufacturing shops and concerns. And of course Ford.
Well this is living large. being amongst all of those people making all of those machines. And it's interesting, the first ten years of his marriage, ten separate rentals. working on his car for months. And as he put it, Of course there was no demand for the automobile.
There never is for a new product. And he was cutting new ground, Henry Ford. When we come back, more of the story of the man who invented the modern age. Here. on our American stories.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ionic 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamar.
Want the full story? Take a listen. Hetty, she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him, but incredible innovator.
Right. She says he's a, quote, very strange man. Oh. But they do get along really well. Give us examples.
I know. They do. get along intellectually. And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane.
She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings, and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius.
Check out our new episode, Spotlight and Groundbreaking Innovators like Hedi Lamar and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ionic 5. Goodbye. Mom, can I have Lingo Kids? Seth, Lingo Kids, please.
When did we become the Lingo Kids house? No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs. This week it's Lingo Kids. Why Lingo Kids?
Because it's the best thing ever. You can play games with astronauts, wild animals, and superheroes. With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs, and shows, Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.
So, no dinosaurs? And dinosaurs! Favor kids! Everything kids love. Download it for free.
Professional wrestling fans, the action continues every week. Watch CNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AMC. It is like electronic. Christianity blowing through your Don't miss the adrenaline, the drama, and the total non-stop action. No one can ever be as fun as- This right here!
Don't miss the action of TNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AM Sing. For show types and more information, visit TNA Wrestling.com. And we continue with our American stories and Richard Snow, the author of I Invented The Modern Age. The rise of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off.
And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything. on building automobiles in those days. Years later, Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said, Of course there was no demand for an automobile. There never is.
for a new product. Uh And that runs totally counter to the old saw about invention being the necessity being the mother of invention. Yeah. Very often it's exactly the other way around. Being the mother of necessity, as nobody wanted an iPhone until they had one in their hand.
Anyway, Ford got his comedy started and seems instantly to have lost interest in it. I just wandered away, wouldn't show up. Nobody knows why. Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars. More likely, he resented working for anybody.
He never liked having a boss. And um Said something that he then went on to ruin a second company, and he was still able. For a third throw of the dice to find a circle, smaller, but a real circle of investors for his next enterprise. which he founded in nineteen oh three with twenty eight thousand dollars capital paid in. This one bore his own name, the Ford Motor Company.
and it would last.
Now, as investors not unreasonably wanted the Ford Motor Company to build. Expensive cars. In 1907, the Packard Gray Wolf sports car, though that term wouldn't exist for another 40 years. costs ten thousand dollars and a nice suburban house might go for eighteen hundred dollars Now, work that calculation out today, and if prices have stayed relative, the house would cost maybe $1.2 million, and a Dodge Viper would cost $6 million.
So, of course, it was more desirable to sell.
something worth thousands of dollars and something worth hundreds of dollars. Ford believed exactly the opposite. Make the car cheaper. You'll do better selling lots of low-priced cars to farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this, he said, told one of the backers of his new company, is make one automobile like another automobile, just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory.
or a match like another match when it comes from a match factory. But how to do it? How to do it? The car should be simple and durable. useful to farmers.
Ford might have hated farming, but he loved the farm life, or rather the virtues of loyalty and and steadiness that he order that he saw in it. The car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair, rugged enough to negotiate the truly dreadful roads at the time. versatile enough to be hooked up to a band saw or a thresher or a pump.
Now by 1940 he was a success. But he saw hidden inside every car he built the ghost of a much. Greater car, and in 1908 he called together his most trusted executives and started designing one in a sealed-off room. in his factory. And here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would.
and its inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative end. A contradiction is because the car he was building would be at once as perfectly simple as he could make it, and yet. immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance, have four cylinders when no inexpensive car had more than two. And the engines in multi-cylinder cars tended just to be fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain.
Ford wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal. And while his helpers were trying to figure out how to do this, Ford had another thought. Slice off the top. That is, have the engine in a single casting with the uh its four cylinders wholly accessible. and then fit a cylinder head on top of it, like a hat, and bolt that down.
And that's how. Car engines are built to this day. The steering wheel, American cars, and all cars. was almost in always on the right. Ancient tradition on that because the steam locomotive engineer sat head and right hand in his cabin.
Ford thought it belonged on the left, put it there and. There it stays unless you're English. The materials in the body would be cheap as he could make them, but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel, which was a light, tough, very expensive alloy, quite new to the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet from his first Model A and now is currently selling the Model S.
So he named the new car the Model T and put it on the market in October of nineteen eight. Very briefly, in 1879, a Rochester patent attorney named George. Selden looked at a gasoline engine and thought, hey, this could make a wagon go, and drafted a patent, said that it would be attached to the wheels of the car, though he didn't say how that would happen. And then he sent it into the patent office, but in those days You could put off a patent for 17 years by making tiny modifications to your wording and stuff, and he kept it alive. Basically, until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing.
And then, incredibly, he got a patent on the idea of the automobile. And he got money backing him and started to exact ransom from all the car makers. Even the young General Motors finally rolled over. And only Ford. Forum uh fought on, fought him alone, patent litigation was extremely expensive.
Ford was spending two dollars a car on the but he stuck it out right till the end and he won. And that and that there he got you know, he actually got headlines that read things like, God bless Henry Ford.
Now, the bottled tea is no longer any sort of force in our lives. But I think it refuses to look placid or quaint or to acquire that gloss of appeal that the Bad. Time puts on so many ugly things. and that high unlovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the boxy antiques power to change a world. The car was tall because the ruts were deep.
Thanks in part to the vanadium steel, it was both tough and light, only 1,100 pounds. and could scramble over marshy terrain that would immobilize heavier cars. For what became so ubiquitous an American fixture, it had many eccentricities. beginning with what forward called a planetary transmission. A collector, a friend of mine who owns a model, he told me once that he could leave it parked anywhere.
Nobody would ever steal it because nobody could figure out how to drive it. Three petals sprouted from the floor. One on the right was the brake, the one in the middle put the car in the reverse, the one on the left made it go forward and low gear when pressed to the floor and in high gear when released. The driving gears were all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened. But with all those pedals on the floor, not one was an accelerator, that was a lever on the steering wheel which you thumb downward to feed more gas to the engine.
And when you wanted to know how much more gas you had to feed, you left to feed, you stopped, climbed out, lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the gas cap beneath it. And pull In the tank with a wooden stick marked like a ruler, but with gallons instead of inches. But for all the f Fussing. The car. required, it went.
It went and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove. And you're listening to Richard Snow, who's the author of I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. Go and buy this book. You won't put it down. And the importance of Ford's courage can't be underestimated.
No one understood the man, that's true. He probably didn't understand himself. but few would describe Ford as anything but courageous. and he had the courage of his convictions, no doubt, as do entrepreneurs throughout history. The Wright brothers, we learned from David McCullough, had that same kind of courage.
And not that manufacturing excellence, by the way, mass marketing and mass manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the Wright brothers. And by the way, he did what nobody was thinking about back in those early days of automobiles. Generally, everyone was just trying to make expensive cars, and here's Ford trying to make them affordable. And though the Model T had many eccentricities, It worked. and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove.
When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Henry Ford. Here. on our American stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks.
Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ionic 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedi Lamar. Want the full story? Take a listen.
Hetty, she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch The Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him, but incredible innovator. Right. She says he's a, quote, very strange man.
But they do get along really well. Give us examples. I know. They do. get along intellectually.
And in fact, she helps him design a faster plane.
She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings, and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius.
Check out our new episode, Spotlighting Groundbreaking Innovators like Hedi Lamar and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ionic 5. Goodbye. Mom, can I have Lingo Kids? Sax!
Lingo Kids, please! When did we become the Lingo Kids house? No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs. This week it's Lingo Kids!
Why Lingo Kids? Because it's the best thing ever. You can play games with astronauts, wild animals, and superheroes. With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs, and shows, Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.
So, no dinosaurs? And dinosaurs! Favor kids! Everything kids love. Download it for free.
Professional wrestling fans, the action continues every week. Yes! It's total non-stop action! TNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AMC. For showtimes and more information, visit TNAWrestling.com.
And we continue with our American stories and the story of Henry Ford. Let's pick up where we last left off with author Richard Snow. Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told it to President Wilson when he met him, about the farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have him buried in his Model T and The lawyer.
Well wanted to know the reason for this. The man said, Because I ain't been a hole yet that it couldn't get me out of. And when it was time to stay put and do some farm work, you could take off a rear wheel and hook it up to a thresher or sawmill. The owner was expected to know how to do that, and indeed to maintain the car generally. Uh Midwestern A man named Alfred Stevenson, who owned a succession of Model T's in the twenties, wrote about this.
He said, The whole car was simple, accessible. In the evening you could tighten the bands, look at the timer, clean the plugs. A weekend would do nicely to reline the bands or grind the valves, clean the carbon, or maybe tighten the rods. A four-day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine or the rear end. If any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience, you had merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew but would come over and help.
Uh The ramifications of this were far-reaching and frequently unexpected. In the Second World War, for example, German tanks were often superior to their American counterparts. But that advantage was cancelled by how quickly a disabled Sherman could be get itself prepared and and back into action, and the Germans were baffled and dismayed to find that among his many other accomplishments uh Henry Ford had created a whole generation of mechanics. But perhaps the Model T's most profound impact, what made it the single most significant automobile ever built? was social.
In 1918, A Georgia farm wife wrote Henry Ford. Your car lifted us out of the mud. It brought joy into our lives. The Model T broke the age-old isolation of the farm in Less than a decade. And wherever it went it spun out behind it A new civilization of highways and roadside fixtures like motels and, of course, gas stations, and a new way of thinking about space.
And time and In the 1930s, John Steinbeck looked back with a sort of sardonic awe on what it had done in just half of his lifetime.
Now, of course, the Model T could never have had such an effect. had it not been deployed in enormous numbers, And this, even more than the car itself, is the measure of Ford's genius. A number of car companies were turning out one hundred cars a day during the model these early years, and that demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture But there is a fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production. And it was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age. The bottled tea was a success, Ford could sell as many as he could make.
And the way to make them, he believed, lay in precision and speed. Precision meant parts so scrupulously manufactured that one would always. fit where it belonged without any time consuming shaping or filing. Uh speed lay in breaking down the manufacturing process into ever smaller segments. This began in the spring of 1913 with the magneto, which generated the electricity to fire the plugs.
It took a worker twenty minutes to to assemble one when One worker. Put it together. Put another together. Ford separated the process into 29 steps. And rather than one worker doing 29 things, 29 workers would do one thing.
as the parts moved past their stations on what was the, you know, the first modern assembly line. Before it had taken twenty minutes, now it took thirteen minutes.
So would the engine, then the transmission, then the upholstery. the axles and the radiators, finally the whole car itself. Always, Ford said, bring the work to the man. not the man for the work. When Ford first unveiled his Model T, it took 12 and a half hours to make one.
A little more than a decade later it took exactly a minute. Before the Model T was done, a car was coming off the line every 10 seconds. Ford made his millionth model T in 1915, his two millionth in 1917, and so on for a while, a million cars a year, and then in the early 20s two million. And he always lowered the price. He flew directly in the face of All principles of monopoly capitalism, which of course hold that if you have a desirable item that you alone own and other people want, you raise the price, not forward.
He said every time I shave a dollar off the price, I gain a thousand new customers.
So the car had begun at $850 and ended two decades later at $295. In 1909, the company made a profit of $220.11 on each car. With the moving assembly line up and running, the profit fell to $99.34, and that was fine with Ford. And then in 1914, he announced that he was raising the base pay in his shop. To $5 a day.
This was twice the going rate for industrial work, and it caused a sensation. He understood that it would be big news. I don't think he would, I don't think he'd. Quite prepared for the astonishing response it got. People came in from all over the country, and in fact, he finally had to discourage them by saying he would only hire people who had lived in or around Detroit for two years or more.
Ford's workers became his customers. No man who bolted together a Packard Gray Wolf could ever own one. every Ford. Worker. who wanted to, could own afford.
So Ford also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which We still live. During the Great Black Diaspora after the First World War, up north to Detroit, the African Americans knew there were two shops. Only two shops that were worth applying to. Packard might give you a job, and Ford probably would give you a job. And he actually had blacks running gangs of whites with the power to fire them, which I think was not, I can't think of another American industry in 1924 where that would have.
where that would have applied at all. And in the end, he had to give it up. The last Model T came off the line, probably. six or seven years later than it should have in nineteen twenty seven. Ford had made fifteen and a half million of them, and when production ceased there were more than eleven million still on the road.
And of course, there was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight, it was the biggest story of 1927. Car sales dropped. everywhere. in a boom time as people waited the sea What was coming?
It took the factory, of course, several months to retool. And when the new car, Ford had started over fresh by calling it the Model A, was announced that December. The New York World said. The excitement could hardly have been greater had Powah, the sacred white elephant of Burma, elected to sit for seven days on the flagpole of the Woolworth building. It sold well, 800,000 in its first year.
But Chevrolet.
sold a million that same year. And The Ford Motor Company would never again be making one out of every two cars on the American road. In any event. That was Henry Ford. How really to assess the true impact of this man at It may still be too early.
We're certainly still immersed in the modern world he created. I think Will Rogers many years many years ago came pretty close um When he said to Henry Ford with None of his usual Folksiness. It may take a hundred years. to tell whether you hurt us. More than you helped us.
But you certainly didn't leave us where you found us. Um And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing, and production by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Richard Snow. What a storyteller and what a story to tell. He's the author of I Invented the Modern Age, The Rise of Henry Ford.
And there's so much to unpack here. My goodness, the stories about World War two that we'd always heard, that Americans could just get under the hood of anything and fix it.
Well, this happened because of Henry Ford. He turned America into a nation. of auto mechanics and tinkerers. I mean to this day, That's why there are autozones. And my goodness, the story of what he did, bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process, the first modern assembly line, and bringing the work to the man.
And of course, bringing the speed with which he could produce one of his cars from twelve hours to one minute ten years later. and millions and millions rolled off. The assembly line all totaled 15 and a half. million Model T's. And the thing I think most important contribution of Henry Ford's as it relates to capitalism and monopoly.
Is that he did that thing no one expected someone with such market dominance to do, which would generally be rip off the American public and raise prices. always working to lower the price. And at the same time, he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers, doubling their wages and turning his workers. into customers. That Will Rogers line was the best of all.
It may take a hundred years to tell whether you helped us or hurt us, but you sure didn't leave us where you found us. The story of Henry Ford The story of the modern age and the man who invented it. Here on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
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