Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Ford Motor Company
The Model T Ford made the world we live in. On the 100th anniversary of the company Henry Ford founded, his biographer Douglas Brinkley tells how.
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford proclaimed to the public when he announced the machine that would change America and indeed the world.
After one Ford changed America, another accomplished something almost as amazing
Decades after they were first cobbled together by enthusiastic amateurs, they are coming to be recognized as perhaps the supreme folk art of the American century
The scene was faintly outrageous. Purists turned their heads away in disgust, the unintiated gaped, and a few of the anointed smiled.
THE IMPERIUM OF modern television advertising was born in desperate improvisation
It was 1945, and everybody needed everything. If you knew how to build a car, a house, or a washing machine, you could sell it faster than you could make it.
When American cars ruled the world
THE CURRENT VOGUE FOR PUSHING TO SELL AMERICAN AUTOMOBILES ABROAD can certainly be called overdue. No one has seriously tried such a thing in generations.
Charles Sheeler found his subject in the architecture of industry. To him, America’s factories were the cathedrals of the modern age.
In the fall of 1927 the Philadelphia advertising agency N. W.
He invented modern mass production. He gave the world the first people’s car, and his countrymen loved him for it. But at the moment of his greatest triumph, he turned on the empire he had built—and on the son who would inherit it.
Part One The Creator
A leading authority picks the top ten. Some of the names still have the power to stir the blood. And some will surprise you.
Few enterprises for any alleged expert in a given field can be more hazardous than the compilation of a “best” or “worst” list.
A scrappy and reckless farm boy from Ohio became America's most legendary race car driver, and his widely publicized victories in Henry Ford's racing cars helped the aspiring entrepreneur launch Ford Motor Company
—a complex man
One of the most remarkable facts about Henry Ford is that his fame and the Ford legend were born almost simultaneously, and born full-grown. Both came late in life, when he was fifty. The industrialist, we may say without exaggeration, was little known until he suddenly became a world celebrity. He was tossed into international eminence on January 5, 1914, when the Ford Motor Company startled the globe with its “Five Dollar Day.”
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