A Note From Bob

Thursday. On this date in 1863, on a farm west of Detroit in what is now Dearborn, Michigan, a boy was born who would grow up disliking almost everything about farm life except the machinery. He left at sixteen for the machine shops of the city. He came back, eventually, with a tractor. In between he built a car cheap enough that the men who assembled it could afford to buy one, and in doing so he rearranged the American map, the American workweek, and the American idea of what a wage was for. He also spent his later years saying things that no honest account of him can leave out. Fifteen questions on Henry Ford today. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

The Quadricycle in a brick shed behind a rented house. The Model T, and fifteen million of them. The moving line at Highland Park that cut a chassis from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes. The five-dollar day, the Sociological Department that came with it, the peace ship, the River Rouge, the ugly pages of the Dearborn Independent, and a company his own family had to wrestle back from him. He is not a simple man to admire, and he is impossible to leave out. How well do you know him? 12 questions.

The Answer

The moving assembly line worked, and the men hated it. In 1913 Highland Park turned over its workforce at roughly 370 percent. To hold fourteen thousand jobs, Ford hired about fifty-two thousand people that year. Workers walked off mid-shift and stopped the whole line behind them. Five dollars a day was the fix, and it worked with almost embarrassing speed: turnover fell to about 54 percent in 1914 and to roughly 16 percent the year after. The side effect is the part everyone remembers, that a Ford worker could now buy a Ford. But Ford was not inventing the consumer economy that January. He was buying back a workforce that industrial America had spent the previous forty years learning to use up. Today's second quiz is about those forty years.

On This Day

Eight years after Ford was born, on July 30, 1871, the Staten Island ferry Westfield sat in her slip at the foot of Whitehall Street on a warm Sunday afternoon, loaded with families going to the shore. Her boiler let go. More than eighty people were killed, and some counts run well past a hundred. A piece of the boiler recovered from the dock was judged to be unsound iron. Jacob Vanderbilt, brother of the Commodore and president of the line, was charged with manslaughter, and nothing came of it. That is the Gilded Age in one afternoon: astonishing machinery, thin oversight, and a bill that landed on the passengers. Thirty questions on the era.