Flashback, August 1896: Henry Ford Meets Thomas Edison

When the obsessed 33-year-old tinkerer Henry Ford met Thomas Edison for the first time in mid-August 1896, he found encouragement from the older businessman for his gas-powered enterprise—planting the seeds for friendship that lasted to the death of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Perhaps the most famous public instance of their interaction was their 1921 road trip, when they were joined for part of the way by President Warren Harding—an event depicted in Mark St. Germain’s 1995 play, Camping with Henry and Tom.

But I became far more fascinated by their mutual admiration society—and each man did to create and maintain it—while reading Edmund Morris’ 2019 biography Edison.

The occasion for their first encounter was the annual meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, an organization founded by Thomas Edison and associates in 1885 to encourage research and the exchange of technical information, ideas and solutions.

Already employed for the last five years at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Ford first approached his hero surreptitiously, snapping a picture of the straw-hatted inventor asleep on the porch of the meeting’s venue, the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach (now the location of the Kingsborough Community College’s Marine and Academic Center Building).

Later that night, he seized his chance for a more open encounter as more than 40 business executives, drinking and puffing cigars inside at a banquet, were conferring about the possibility of electric-powered vehicles. This represented a natural new area of interest for Edison, who was already changing society with, among other innovations, the electric light bulb and the electric power plant.

At one point Alex Dow from Detroit Edison pointed out Ford, his chief engineer, to the great man, and said, “There’s a young fellow who has made a gas car.”

Two months, a drive through the streets of Detroit with his new "Quadricycle" had already demonstrated Ford’s gift for self-promotion. He further evidenced it as he sat by and laid out his plan to the hearing-impaired Edison.

Despite his own interest in a storage battery for horseless carriages, Edison recognized the practical of the proposal he was hearing, telling Ford, “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I see a great future.”

It wasn’t until 1912, though, that their friendship became closer, when Ford, flush with his burgeoning success with the “Model T,” invested $1.2 million into the Edison Storage Battery Co. as a potential triggering device for automobile self-starters.

A few years later, Edison invited him down for a visit to his Fort Myers, FL, winter home, and for more than a decade the two went off on cross-country auto excursions, usually in the company of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and/or the naturalist John Burroughs.

What drew the two men into a closer friendship. The most obvious commonality, present in their first encounter, was a Midwestern plain-speaking style. But Morris also points to their “shared disdain for Ivy Leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new.”

They differed in subtle ways in their relationships with families, and more significantly in how they viewed politics.

While Edison maintained a complex, often demanding, even bumpy relationship with his sons, Ford was positively abusive to Edsel, publicly humiliating his ideas in front of other employees and subjecting him to so much stress that he suffered for years from severe ulcers before finally dying from stomach cancer at age 49.

And, while the workaholic Edison often neglected his two wives (and even disclaimed knowing anything about women at all), Ford, many biographers believe, engaged in adultery with his secretary, a relationship that may have resulted in a son out of wedlock.

Furthermore, although Edison expressed the sporadic anti-semitic remark, he employed Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities in his labs. 

In contrast, Ford was not content to vent virulent attitudes on camping trips with Edison and other friends, but through distributed a paper he bought, the Dearborn Independent, circulated through his company’s dealership a 91-part series based on the vicious and fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ford passed along this material to his friend, Edison sent back a note acknowledging the gift, Morris notes, while being careful not to endorse its views.

From the mid-1920s on, even as many ordinary Americans began to eye Ford more critically than when he had been a rising folk hero, the auto magnate led the nationwide celebration for Edison as the grand old man of American inventive genius. In October 1929, he and President Herbert Hoover attended "Light's Golden Jubilee," a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Edison's incandescent lamp.

Ford paid homage to his friend that day by announcing the Thomas Edison Institute, an initiative in which he bought, dismantled, and reassembled hundreds of historic buildings and artifacts—including, notably, the legendary Menlo Park lab complex.  

Now Greenfield Village, it continues to give tourists and students, together with the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a vivid sense of the worlds that these two industrial giants left behind and created.

Flashback, August 1919: Henry Ford Goes on Automotive Holiday with Famous “Vagabonds”

Long before Dinah Shore exhorted TV viewers to “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” automobile magnate Henry Ford and three famous friends were doing their version of the same thing, in the first high-profile linking of the car with outdoor recreation.

Unlike Shore, Ford didn’t have to resort to TV ads—newspapermen (they were almost all men then) eagerly followed him and friends Thomas A. Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs around as the famous men roughed it, with—and it’s hard not to appreciate the irony, given the challenge from the Far East to the auto industry in the closing decades of the century—their own personal Japanese chef in tow. “The Four Vagabonds,” the reporters soon called the friends. (No, despite what you might have thought, it’s not the name of one of those bands of aging musicians that PBS trots out regularly for those fundraisers aimed at baby boomers--nor, in this case, am I referring to the actual vocal harmony radio stars of the early 1940s.)

Nowadays, as Detroit emits sounds less like a Rust Belt than like a death rattle, it’s hard to recall the period from about 1910 to 1930, when it was identified not with an arthritic industry that imperiled the environment but with vigorous young enterprises that allowed you to enjoy nature more. Its romance with the media and the public then is something akin to what Silicon Valley experiences today.

When Sinclair Lewis wanted to create a tycoon—practical, forward-looking, intelligent but not especially cultured—as his representative American amid decadent Europe in Dodsworth, he made his eponymous hero an auto-company executive from the Midwest metropolis of Zenith. For many years, until they learned better, Americans thought of Henry Ford in much the same light.

On this particular jaunt, when Ford mugged for the cameras as he enjoyed nature by day, he let loose with the ugliest of anti-Semitic tirades by night. It was a small preview of what would shock the public within a few years—and damage his reputation with historians in the years afterward.

Ford and his friends had been taking these jalopy journeys for the past five years. It was a way they could combine business with pleasure. On August 5, for instance, the group found themselves in upstate New York—specifically, Green Island, on the Hudson River, where Ford paused for a photo op: carving his initials into what became the cornerstone of one of his company’s manufacturing plants.

In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Ford recalled that these excursions were fun, “except that they began to attract too much attention.” Only one word accurately describes that observation: bunk. (Which, come to think of it, is what he labeled history.)

At this point, Ford already could use as much favorable publicity as he could get. As I mentioned in a prior post, he’d just been involved in a libel suit in which, under withering cross-examination, his abysmal ignorance of history was exposed for all to see. (Benedict Arnold was “a writer, I think,” he averred.)

Now, away from lawyers looking to make fun of him, Ford could relax—putting his feet up after long hikes in the woods, telling tall tales in his country-boy fashion—and, certain that he was among friends, giving vent to his deep, ineradicable anti-Semitic strain.

In researching Henry Ford and the Jews, biographer Neil Baldwin found, in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, Burroughs’ account of these campfire rants, set down in the naturalist’s pocket journal.

Ford probably didn’t think any of the other “vagabonds” would take issue with him. Edison, for instance, was something of the same type as Ford: from Midwestern Protestant stock, obsessed not just with a product but with the entire industrial infrastructure for producing it in mass quantities, and, as the years went on, increasingly eccentric. (Now in old age, he was prone to such incidents as firing an employee in the morning, then later in the day, after snapping about why he wasn’t around and being told he’d been dismissed, ordering that he be rehired.)

Something else united the two: anti-Semitism. Edison expressed his dismay about the Jewish “natural talent” for making money, in this fashion: “While there are some ‘terrible examples’ in mercantile pursuits, the moment they get into art, music and science and literature, the Jew is fine. I wish they would all stop making money.”

While not pretty, that paled next to the sheer, all-encompassing viciousness of Ford’s comments, as set down by Burroughs:

“Mr. Ford attributes all evil to the Jews or Jewish capitalists-the Jews caused the war; the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbing all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy which Edison talked about last night.”

Two questions spring to mind upon reading that last flabbergasting sentence:

1) Why didn’t Ford--a pacifist who, during World War I, funded a “peace ship” that crossed the Atlantic--recognize the internal contradiction that Jews both caused the war and impeded the efficiency of the Navy?

2) What was the great environmentalist Burroughs doing with this creep?

The second question is easier to answer than the first. In his autobiography, Ford remembered that Burroughs had declared early on that the automobile “was going to kill the appreciation of nature.” Ford challenged him on that point, even sending him a car to test whether his proposition held up.

Once the now-elderly conservationist learned to work the controls of the Model T, he was enthralled by the new machine and became a fast friend of Ford.

That did not mean, however, that he did not see the auto exec’s faults, and as Ford prattled on, increasingly revealing his ignorance, Burroughs felt compelled to correct him. Ford finally crossed the line when he assailed railroad titan Jay Gould as a “Shylock” and the epitome of greed.

Not so, Burroughs demurred. He knew from personal experience that Gould, his childhood wrestling playmate, was a thoroughgoing Presbyterian.

In 1921, Burroughs became the first of the “vagabonds” to be claimed by death. The group survived for a few more years, even adding President Warren Harding—and the friends’ wives—on the trips. But eventually, the press of business became too much.

By that time, Ford was attracting far more unwelcome media attention. A paper he funded, The Dearborn Independent, became one of the most flagrantly anti-Semitic media outlets in the nation (a remarkable feat in a decade when the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a renaissance). The paper even reprinted perhaps the primary anti-Semitic tract of the last century, the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the 1930s, whatever lingering admiration many Americans felt for Ford vanished when goons hired by his aide Harry Bennett resorted to violence against union organizers such as Walter Reuther.

This Day in Chicago History (World’s Columbian Exposition)

May 1, 1893—Two years after construction began –and nearly 22 years after a fire devastated the city—Chicago opened the World’s Columbian Exposition in a massive complex that highlighted both the recovery of the metropolis and the nation’s growing technological and commercial prowess.

After a few introductory remarks, President Grover Cleveland switched an electronic key that sent the fair’s dynamo engines into motion, and instantly water flowed from fountains, flags unfurled, the statue Republic was unveiled—all just hinting at what awaited the 129,000 who had paid admission that day to see this massive venue promoting man’s progress in science, industry and culture.

Behind the event lay ferocious competition, with the winners being the city of Chicago, which outbid New York, Washington, DC, and St. Louis for rights to the expo, and the team of George Westinghouse and Nicola Testa, who outbid Thomas Edison for the rights to power the displays with their own polyphase alternating current system.

Architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham, the director of works for the expo, overcame massive public and private hurdles (not to mention a panic on the nation’s markets) to open the expo on time. His design for the project – including grand boulevards, classical building facades, and lush gardens—represented what is generally considered the first example of a comprehensive planning document.

Among the highlights of the expo:

* The Ferris wheel, built by George W. Ferris to dominate the fair’s midway;
* A system of lagoons and waterways created by Frederick Law Olmsted that were fed by Lake Michigan, serving as reflecting pools, waterways for transportation, and oases for footsore summer visitors;
* The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, the largest building in the world at the time at over 19 stories high;
Consumer products making their debut, including Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, Pabst Beer, Aunt Jemima syrup, and Juicy Fruit gum; and
* The World's Congress Auxiliary, whose daily presentations and lectures covered subjects including ethics, authors, economics, labor, and the week-long Congress of Religions.

Created to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America (or, if you will, the first European encounter with America—the Indians never knew they were lost!), the “White City” also inspired other aspects of Americana – the Pledge of Allegiance (recited for the first time at the dedication of the expo) and visitor L. Frank Baum’s “Emerald City” in his “Wizard of Oz” series of books.

This Day in Scientific History (Edison Patents Phonograph)

February 19, 1878 – Inventor Thomas Alva Edison secured US patent No. 200,521 for the phonograph, the first machine to record someone’s voice and play it back.

Edison came up with the idea in the second half of 1877 (the precise date remains uncertain, though he filed for the patent in December). He tested his cylinder phonograph with the old nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb.”

“Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best,” Edison later claimed. But, at the time of his patent, he only conceived of music recording as a secondary use for his new machine. He expected the primary market would involve “Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.” But the hearing-impaired inventor was not so stubborn that he wouldn’t oblige his public.

Edison’s invention took the democratization of music to another level. From now on, people need not be satisfied with sheet music, but could listen to the best of modern music—Caruso, Tchaikovsky, etc.—in their own homes.

Robert V. Bruce’s entry on “The Wizard of Menlo Park:” in The Reader’s Companion to American History (edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty) points out that Edison was “clumsier in entrepreneurship than in invention, distracted by the demands of management, [with] his inventive genius ebbing with age.” What could he mean?

I got a pretty good idea of what Bruce was talking about when I visited the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J. The ugly red-brick buildings were where Edison and his group of “muckers” labored long hours to come up with more than half of his 1,000 inventions.

One anecdote illustrates Edison’s unique brand of management style as he aged. In the morning, annoyed with an associate, he told him he was fired and should be off the premises by noon. By the end of the day, struggling with a knotty technical problem, he asked where the employee was. “You fired him this morning,” he was told. “Well, get him back,” the great man answered.