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I Invented The Modern Age
Richard Snow
The Rise of Henry Ford
Scribner
May 2013
On Sale: May 14, 2013
Featuring: Henry Ford
386 pages ISBN: 1451645570 EAN: 9781451645576 Kindle: B008J4N768 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
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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