Ford Model T

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A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

By contrast, Ford had fallen behind the times with its aging product and its refusal to offer financing. As GM gained ground, even reductions in the Model T’s price were insufficient to revive Ford’s sales. By 1926 the Model T’s market share had fallen to 30 percent of cars sold in America, from its peak of 55 percent three years earlier. Ford ceased production in May 1927, shortly after the 15-millionth Model T had rolled off the line, then spent a year retooling its factories to build a new, more modern replacement, the Model A, which was launched in 1928. Tellingly, it could be purchased on an installment plan, had a closed-body design—and was offered in four colors.

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As car ownership came within reach of more people, in cities and countryside alike, some of the initial objections to the automobile, such as the noise and dust, came to be seen as a price worth paying for the greater freedom, convenience, and affordability it offered compared with horse-drawn vehicles. Perhaps surprisingly, given that Europe had been the birthplace of the technology, this happened in America first, thanks to one car in particular: the Ford Model T. 5 You Are What You Drive A family’s motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family. —SINCLAIR LEWIS, BABBITT, 1922 THE CAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING Anyone who wanted to buy a car in America in 1908 had no shortage of options.

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Many of these advertisements also refer to the cars’ performance and reliability, as indicated by their prowess in speed trials, hill climbs, and long-distance endurance races. This was a way to reassure potential buyers that as well as making them look good, the cars in question would not cause them embarrassment. What use, after all, is a car that indicates your wealth and status if it breaks down outside the opera? So the approach taken by the Ford Motor Company for its new Model T, which was launched in October 1908, was (like the car itself) something of a departure from the norm. Most of the advertisement is text, not imagery, and rather than being aspirational, its tone is practical and no-nonsense: “high priced quality in a low priced car … the Ford car will run more miles for less money than any other touring car manufactured.”

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The cars, being finely crafted and having multiple options, often broke down, requiring experts to fix them, and experts were expensive and in short supply. In one fell swoop, Ford’s Model T eliminated these two utility blocks. The Model T was called the car for the great multitude. It came in only one color (black) and one model, with scant options. In this way, Ford eliminated investments in image in the use phase. Instead of creating cars for weekends in the countryside—a luxury few could justify—Ford’s Model T was made for everyday use. It was reliable. It was durable; it was designed to travel effortlessly over dirt roads and in rain, sleet, or shine.

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By keeping the cars highly standardized and offering limited options and interchangeable parts, Ford’s revolutionary assembly line replaced skilled craftsmen with ordinary unskilled laborers who worked one small task faster and more efficiently, cutting the time to make a Model T from twenty-one days to four days and cutting labor hours by 60 percent.5 With lower costs, Ford was able to charge a price that was accessible to the mass market. Sales of the Model T exploded. Ford’s market share surged from 9 percent in 1908 to 61 percent in 1921, and by 1923, a majority of American households owned an automobile.6 Ford’s Model T exploded the size of the automobile industry, creating a huge blue ocean. So great was the blue ocean Ford created that the Model T replaced the horse-drawn carriage as the primary means of transport in the United States. General Motors By 1924, the car had become an essential household item, and the wealth of the average American household had grown.

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But is creativity a black box? When it comes to artistic creativity or scientific breakthroughs—think Gaudi’s majestic art or Marie Curie’s radium discovery—the answer may be yes. But is the same true for strategic creativity that drives value innovation that opens up new market spaces? Think Ford’s Model T in autos, Starbucks in coffee, or Salesforce.com in CRM software. Our research suggests no. It revealed common strategic patterns behind the successful creation of blue oceans. These patterns allowed us to develop underlying analytic frameworks, tools, and methodologies to systematically link innovation to value and reconstruct industry boundaries in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Difference between Accuracy and Precision John Wilkinson Boulton and Watt steam engine Joseph Bramah Henry Maudslay Maudslay’s “Lord Chancellor” bench micrometer (courtesy of the Science Museum Group Collection) Flintlock on a rifle Thomas Jefferson Springfield Armory “organ of muskets” Joseph Whitworth Crystal Palace Whitworth screws (courtesy of Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com) “Unpickable” Bramah lock Henry Royce Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (courtesy of Malcolm Asquith) Ford Model T Ford Model T (exploded) Henry Ford Ford assembly line Box of gauge blocks Qantas Flight 32 (2010 incident) (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau) Frank Whittle (courtesy of University of Cambridge) Turbine blades (courtesy of Michael Pätzold/Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de) Rolls-Royce Trent engine Qantas Flight 32 failed stub pipe diagram (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau) Early Leica camera Leica IIIcs Hubble Space Telescope Hubble mirror being polished Null corrector Jim Crocker (courtesy of NG Images) Roger Easton (courtesy of the U.S.

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Scott, The Crack-Up, 307 fixtures (devices that hold workpiece absolutely secure), 100n, 102 flatness: of surface plates, 75–76, 119–20 of Whitworth’s billiard table, 124–25 flintlocks, see muskets, flintlock flour-milling machinery, 102 f number of lens, 219n Ford, Henry, 129, 131, 155–67, 157, 276 altruistic motives of, 155–56 early years of, 156–58 first motor car experiments of, 158–59 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, utilized by, 169–71 mass production assembly line created by, 160–67 Royce compared to, 131, 155–56, 158–59, 165–66 Westinghouse threshing engines in origin story of, 156–58 Ford Foundation, 166 Ford Model T (Tin Lizzie), 129, 155–56, 157, 160–67 decreases in price of, 165, 167 magneto assembly for, 164–65 production line for, 160–67 Ford Motor Company, 152, 155–67 complaints about SKF bearings at, 170 Edsel, 236 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, introduced at, 169–71 incorporation of, 131, 159 interchangeable parts essential at, 161n, 166, 170 Model A, 159–60 Model T, see Ford Model T (Tin Lizzie) precision’s role at Rolls-Royce vs., 131, 166–67 production line at, 160–65 “For want of a nail . . .” proverb, 244 foundries, electronic, 278n fountain pens, 58 France: Anglo-French rivalry over inventions and, 87n automobiles made in, 137–39 British wars with, 39n, 66, 73 decimal time in, 349n postrevolutionary Republican Calendar in, 333–34 social implications of precision as concern in, 90, 92, 117 standards for length and mass created by, 334–40; see also metric system system of interchangeable parts developed in, 87–94, 97, 98, 102 Franklin, Benjamin, 90, 222–23 French Academy of Sciences, 335 French Revolution, 59, 66, 92 frequency: Doppler effect and, 260–61 units of measurement and, 347–48 friction problem, in early clocks, 32–33, 35 Gainsborough, Thomas, 38–39 Galileo, 222, 332, 348 Galileo global navigation system, 270 Gascoigne, William, 77 Gaudy Night, 105 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, 167–71, 169 author’s introduction to, 2–4 Ford Motor Company and, 169–71 interchangeable parts and, 170 Johansson’s invention of, 167–68 gauges: go and no-go, for ensuring cannonball fit, 87 in gun manufacture, 89, 98–99, 100 gearwheels: from Ancient Greece (Antikythera mechanism), 24–27 producing, 4–5 uses for, 5–6 wooden, in Harrison’s clocks, 32–33 Gee, 259, 262 George III, King, 36, 74n George VI, King, 194–95 Germany, turbojet-powered aircraft developed by, 179, 184, 190–91, 195 Gernsback, Hugo, 181 glassblowers, scientific, 7 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 255 Global Positioning System (GPS), 37, 265–74 Doppler-based navigation system as precursor of, 259–65, 267 Easton’s invention of, 260, 265–68 ever-more-precise calculations of, 272–73 freed for civilian use, 269–70 major achievements of nineteenth-century cartography checked against data from, 273n military uses of, 269 other nations’ similar systems, 270 Parkinson’s vision for, 267–68, 268 run from tightly guarded Schriever Air Force Base, 270–72, 271, 272 time data for, 352–53 GLONASS, 270 Gloster Aircraft Company: experimental aircraft powered by jet engine (Gloster E28/29, or Pioneer), 190, 191–94 Gloster Meteor fighters, 192 Goddard Space Flight Center (Maryland), 234, 250–51, 294 Gould, Rupert, 34n graphene, 298 grasshopper escapement, 33 gravitational constant, 298 gravitational waves, detection of, 20–21, 300–306 see also LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) gravity: Bramah’s lock design and, 57 clock mechanisms and, 33, 354 link between time and, 354–55 pendulum swings and, 33, 333, 349 Whitworth’s measuring machine and, 121, 122 Great Britain: Anglo-French rivalry over inventions and, 87n divergent paths of industry in U.S. vs., 114–15 trading fortunes and, 31 War of 1812 and, 81–85 wars fought by, in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 39, 66–71 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (London, 1851), 111–27, 112 arrangement of exhibits at, 115–16 Bramah’s “challenge lock” picked at, 112n, 124, 125–27 Crystal Palace built for, 112, 113–14 extraordinary zeitgeist of the time and, 111–13 financing of, 113 great big iron machines displayed at, 114–16, 117–18 Hunt’s concern about social implications of machines displayed at, 116–17 origin of idea for, 112–13n Whitworth’s instruments and tools displayed at, 118–23 Great Trigonometric Survey of India, 273n Greece, Ancient: astronomers from, 26n gearwheels from (Antikythera mechanism), 24–27, 36 lost-wax method in, 204 measurement of time in, 27 Greenwich Royal Observatory, Harrison’s clocks at, 30–37 restoration of, 34n winding of, 30–31 Gribeauval, Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de, 87, 89, 92, 98 Guier, William, 259–62 Gulf War of 1991, 269 guns: Blanchard’s lathe for stocks of, 101–2 both precision and accuracy crucial in making of, 105 breech-loaded single-shot rifles, 97–98 French system of interchangeable parts applied to American precision-based manufacturing of, 97–100 Johansson’s invention of gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, and, 167–68 machines first used to make components of, 98, 99–100 rudiments of mass production assembly lines in manufacture of, 161n Victoria’s opening shot in 1860 Grand Rifle Match, 107–10 see also muskets, flintlock Hall, Bishop Joseph, Works, 331 Hall, John, 97–98, 99–100, 102 handcrafting: Antikythera mechanism and, 24–25, 27 Blanc’s standardization system and, 89–90, 92, 98 eliminated in Ford’s assembly line, 165, 166–67 Japanese appreciation for, 308, 309–10, 314, 316, 319–29 machine tools vs., 35, 38, 60, 72–73, 98–99 at Rolls-Royce, 6, 131, 152–55, 165, 166 social consequences of move away from, 72–75, 89–90, 116–17 and survival of craftsmanship in France, 92 in Whitney’s gun factory, 96–97 Hanford, Wash., cleanup site, 19–20 Harpers Ferry Armory (Va.), 98, 99, 102, 161n Harrison, John, 24, 30–37, 47, 67, 105, 267n balance mechanisms in clocks made by, 33, 35 Board of Longitude prize and, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35–36 large pendulum clocks made by (H1, H2, and H3), 30–31, 32–34, 35 restoration of clocks made by, 34n sea watches made by (H4 and K1), 31–32, 34–36 testing of clocks made by, 34, 35–36, 39 winding of clocks made by, 30–31, 33, 35 Harrison, William, 35–36 Hattori, K., and Company, 311–13 Hattori, Kintaro, 310–12 Heinkel Company, 184, 195 Heinkel He 178, 190–91 Heisenberg, Werner, 212–13, 298 Die Physik der Atomkerne, 275 Herbert, George, 244n Herschel family (William, Caroline, John, and Alexander), 229–30n Hiroshima, atomic bomb dropped on, 281 Hitler, Adolf, 187, 191 Hobbs, Alfred C., 124, 125–27 Hoerni, Jean Amédée, 284–85, 286n, 287 Hooker, Sir Stanley, 139 hour: defining, 28, 334, 349 displayed by mechanical clocks, 28–29 Hubble, Edwin, 2321 Hubble Space Telescope, 229–53, 230 cost of, 232 delays in launch date of, 243n first images from (First Light), 234–35, 251 flaw in main mirror of, 234, 234–43; see also Perkin-Elmer Corporation High Speed Photometer in, 247, 248, 250 money matters and, 237n news of failure announced to press, 235–36 placed into orbit, 230–32, 233 public reverence for, 229–30 repair of, 244–51 second images from (Second Light), 251–52 size and appearance of, 232–33 teacup affair and, 238 ultimate success of, 252–53 Wide Field and Planetary Camera in (Wiffpic), 247–48, 249 Hucknall Casings and Structures plant (Rolls-Royce), 209–10, 211, 229 Hunt, Robert, 116–17 hydraulic press, 57–58 India, Great Trigonometric Survey of, 273n Individual and the Universe, The (Lovell), 215 Industrial Revolution, 39, 41, 44, 51, 73, 74n, 111, 304 integrated circuitry, 286–99 devices made possible by, 287–88 Noyce’s work in genesis of, 286, 287, 288n printing with photolithographic machines, 277, 277–78, 286–87, 294 see also microprocessor chips; transisters Intel, 288–92 ASML machines bought by, 275–76, 277, 277–78 Chandler, Ariz., fabrication plant of (Fab 42), 275–76, 277–78, 291–92 first-ever commercially available microprocessor made by (Intel 4004), 288–89, 290, 292 founding of, 288 mutual dependency of ASML and, 278 interchangeable parts, 63, 71, 105, 114, 276, 312 in Ford’s mass production assembly lines, 161n, 166, 170 for guns, 84–85, 86, 87–100 system of, developed in France, 87–94, 97, 98, 102 interferometers: classic, 300 laser, 242–43 LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), 20–21, 299–306, 303, 305 null connector as, 240–41 internal combustion engine, 158 aircraft powered by, 178–213; see also jet engines International Astronomical Union, 344 International Committee on Weights and Measures (1960), 345–46 International Metre Commission (1872), 338 International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), 339 International Prototype Meter (IPM), 339 International System of Units (SI), 16–17n, 346 iron, 38, 39 cannon making and, 39, 41–44 Japanese handcrafted objects made of, 309–10 lathes made of, rather than wood, 61, 64 machines to manufacture pulley blocks made of, 71 smelting and forging, 40–41, 43, 49 steam engines made of, 46, 48–52 Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring technique for, 42–44, 49–52, 304–6 Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale, 41 Ito, Tsutomi, 321–22 Jacula Prudentum, 244n James Webb Space Telescope, 231n, 294, 295, 299 Janety, Marc Étienne, 336, 337 Japan, 308–29 bamboo objects handcrafted in, 325, 326 fondness for handcrafting in, 308, 309–10, 314, 316, 319–29 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in (2011), 322, 323–25 Living National Treasures of, 325–26 rigorous appreciation of perfect in, 308–9, 314 timekeeping traditions in, 310–11 urushi (handmade lacquerware) of, 326–28, 327 Westernization in, 310, 311 see also Seiko Japanese Railways, 313–14 Jay, John, 92–93 Jefferson, Thomas, 52 Blanc’s flintlock system and, 90, 92–94, 96 Whitney’s contract and demonstration and, 95, 96 Jet Age, inauguration of, 193 jet engines, 173–213 alloys for blades in, 200, 201, 203 Americans’ initial lack of interest in, 179 bird strikes and, 203n British public told of, 194 complexity within, 196–97 experimental aircraft fitted with, 190, 191–94 financial backing for development of, 184–85, 189 first passenger and freight aircraft with, 198–99 French forerunner of, 179 German development of, 179, 184, 190–91, 195 hot environment in, 187, 199–201 invention of, 178–94, 179; see also Whittle, Frank keeping blades cool inside, 197–98, 198, 199–203, 204, 206 manufacturing process for single-crystal blades in, 203–6 no tolerance whatsoever in making of, 206–7 power of piston engine vs., 182–83 propulsive jet of air produced by, 182, 187 Quantas Flight 32 and failure of, 174–78, 178, 196, 207–12, 208, 229 revolutionary novelty of idea for, 186 Rolls-Royce, 196–213, 205; see also Rolls-Royce jet engines single moving part in, 180 stress of takeoff and landing cycles on, 210 testing of prototypes, 187–90 turbine blade efficiency and, 198 Whittle’s eureka moment and, 182–83 Whittle’s patent and, 183–84 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL (Pasadena), 247–48, 350 Jo blocks, see gauge blocks, or Jo blocks Johansson, Carl Edvard, 3, 167–71 bought out by Ford, 170–71 gauge blocks, or Jo blocks, created by, 167–68 Johns Hopkins University: Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at, 259–62 Space Telescope Science Institute at, 234, 251 Johnson, Claude “CJ,” 148–50, 151 Jones, Alexander, 27 Kai Tak Airport (Hong Kong), 195–96 kelvin, definition of, 346 Kiev, author photographed with Rolls-Royce outside city gates of, 133–34 Kilby, Jack, 288n kilogram, 336–40, 346–47 cast in platinum as étalon (standard), 337, 339–40, 348 now defined in terms of speed of light, 348 relationship of meter to, 336–37 see also metric system Kilogram of the Archives, 336 Klein bottle, 7n Kodak, 237n Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shooting down of, 269 krypton, standard unit of length based on, 344–45 Kyoto, temples of, 308 landscape photography, lenses for, 226 lasers, 351 in LIGO’s measuring instrument, 301, 305, 305–6 in manufacture of microprocessor chips, 293–94, 296 presumed to be precise, 242 lathes, 61–65 for gun stocks, designed by Blanchard, 101–2 invention and evolution of, 61 iron vs. wood, 61, 64 Maudslay’s improvements to, 61–65 screw-making, 63–64 for shoe lasts, designed by Blanchard, 19n, 101 slide rest and, 62–63, 64–65 latitude, determining, 30n leadscrews: of bench micrometers, 77–78 of lathes, 61, 62–63 Leica, 221, 222, 227–28 cameras owned by author, 219–20 lenses made by, 220, 224–25, 227–28 Leitz, Ernst, 222, 227 Leland, Henry, 168 length, standard unit of, 334–40 cast in platinum as étalon (standard), 336, 337, 339–40 mass in relation to, 336–37 meridian of Earth and, 334–36, 337 now defined in terms of time, 348 pendulum swing and, 332–33 redefined as wavelength of light, 342–45 Wilkins’s proposal for, 332–33 see also metric system Lenin, V.

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For more than a century now, the agreed-upon name that Sir Charles and Sir Henry chose has become a universal denominator of excellence, its dominance unchallenged, its reputation sealed—and all based on a renown for accuracy, exactitude, and mechanical perfection machined down to the finest and most unforgiving of tolerances. AT ABOUT THE same time as the Ghost’s birth, but four thousand miles away, at a factory in Detroit, Michigan, quite another kind of car was just establishing itself, though it was as different from the handmade paragons of Cooke Street and Derby as it was possible to be. It was the Ford Model T, and it appeared on the roadways of America in October 1908, shortly after the first Silver Ghosts began their wanderings through England and Scotland. Henry Royce had offered up precision for the few. Henry Ford wanted precision to be available to the many. “I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” he declared in 1907.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

By 1900 shipyards in the UK, Germany, and France were routinely launching passenger ships that needed more than 10 000 t steel to make. The third transportation segment that eventually created enormous demand for steel also originated before 1900 – but the age of mass car ownership in the USA only began with Ford's Model T in 1908. Late-nineteenth century industrialization also created enormous new markets for steel in the steelmaking industry itself (due to its massive expansion that required greater numbers of larger blast furnaces and steel mills), in the new electrical industry (starting in the early 1880s, and requiring heavy machinery including boilers and steam turbogenerators, as well as steel for transformers, transmission towers, and electrical wires), in oil and gas extraction and transportation (steel for drilling pipes, drill-bits, well-casings, pipelines and vessels, pipes and storage tanks in refineries), as well as in traditional textile and food-processing industries, where advancing mechanization resulted in the adoption of a greater array of steel-based machines and other processing and storage equipment.

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Additionally, electric arc furnaces, first introduced in 1902, began to be used more frequently to convert the growing stocks of scrap metal into high-quality steel. The first cars of the 1890s created only a small demand for steel because they had simple wooden bodies and were made in small numbers: only once mass-production took hold (with Ford's Model T introduced in 1908) did the auto industry become the leading consumer of steel, with its demand rising from about 70 000 t in 1910 to 1 Mt by 1920 (Hogan, 1971). For many decades the idea of producing noncorroding steel on a mass scale was rejected by nearly all metallurgical experts. Harry Brearley is usually credited with inventing commercial stainless steel (containing nearly13% chromium) in 1913 (an innovation readily embraced by Sheffield's famous steel cutlery makers) but contemporaneous advances were made in Germany and in the USA (Cobb, 2010).

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In 1901 Maybach revealed Mercedes 35, the prototype of all modern vehicles whose four-cylinder engine had power of 26 kW but whose aluminum block and honeycomb radiator lowered its weight to just 230 kg, yielding a mass/power ratio of 8.8 g/W. The second order-of-magnitude improvement came during the twentieth century with the transformation of cars from expensive oddities into affordable machines. The world's first mass-produced car, Henry Ford's Model T launched in 1908, was initially powered by a 2.9-l four-cylinder engine with a mass/power ratio of about 15 g/W but by the time the car's production ended (in 1927, although the production of replacement engines continued until August 1941) the ratio had declined to less than 5 g/W. By the early 1930s, even such powerful engines as Pierce Arrow's powerful V-12 rated less than 4 g/W, and gradual changes before and after World War II eventually brought the mass/power ratio of commonly used automotive engines to less than 2 g/W by the 1950s and to less than 1.5 g/W by the mid 1960s: even Ford's 298 V8 for the 1965 Mustang rated just 1.4 g/W.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne

call centre, Firefox, Ford Model T, HyperCard, Menlo Park, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, sunk-cost fallacy

If you want simplicity, if you want to be seen as an innovator, then it’s the mainstream customers you should be aiming at. The Ford Model T wasn’t the first car ever built, but it was the first one made with the mass market in mind. Henry Ford revolutionized the motor industry because he aimed squarely at the typical person. Simplicity was at the heart of his vision: We will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be…small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed…after the simplest designs modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one. — Henry Ford, on the Model T All of Ford’s innovations (his use of production lines, the price point of his car, the easy-to-maintain engine design) came as a result of his desire to focus on creating a simple product that was suitable for the mainstream.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

As bicycles surged in popularity, riders demanded road improvements to make cycling safer, faster, and more enjoyable. In 1904, a national road census found that only 7 percent of roads in the United States were covered in stone or gravel; the other 93 percent were dirt.2 Bicyclists found common cause with motorists when the Ford Model T and other early automobiles came on the market. Even though those paved roads allowed automobiles to go much faster than a bicycle and eventually push the bicyclists, along with the other road users, off the street almost entirely, it was not clear how automobiles might transform mobility in their quest for supremacy.

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Their efforts contributed to an uptick in electric vehicle sales, but it paled in comparison to the growing number of vehicles with internal combustion engines, especially once World War I had begun. The second problem had to do with production. The EVC never produced a standardized vehicle, and none of the other electric vehicle manufacturers succeeded at streamlining their production processes before Henry Ford introduced the gas-powered Model T. As a result, customers could buy an internal combustion vehicle at a much lower price than an electric one, and even though the electric vehicle was quieter, offered a smoother drive, and started more easily (the early internal combustion vehicles needed to be hand cranked), it struggled to compete.

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The electric vehicle’s days were numbered, sales of its internal combustion counterpart were growing every year, and the streetcar remained the most important way for many urban residents to get around. However, due to the recession that year, there were a lot of people left without work who needed to find an alternative income, and they turned to unregulated transportation. Production of the Ford Model T had begun in 1908, so by 1914 it was possible to find cheaper used models. That was especially the case in Los Angeles, where the automobile was more common than anywhere else in the United States. Even as most people kept using streetcars, which typically cost five cents per ride, some people felt there was room for another service that was not restricted to tracks, could take more liberty with routes, and, naturally, could generate a quick source of income for drivers.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Edison with his phonograph photographed by Mathew Brady in April 1878. Photograph from Brady-Handy Collection of the Library of Congress. xv Figure 1.1    Evolution of average male body heights in Western Europe, 1550–1980. Data from Clio Infra (2017). Figure 1.2    The bestselling American car in 1908 was Ford Model T weighing 540 kg. The bestselling vehicle in 2018 was not a car but a truck, Ford’s F-150 weighing 2,000 kg. Images from Ford Motor Company catalogue for 1909 and from Trucktrend. Figure 1.3    Millennium of stalagmite accretion illustrating linear and exponential growth trajectories. Figure 1.4    Graphs of expected height-for-age growth (averages and values within two standard deviations) for boys and girls 2–5 years old.

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As a result, new houses built in 2015 are about 2.6 times larger than was the 1950 average, but for many of them the mass of materials required to build them is four times as large. The increasing mass of American passenger cars has resulted from a combination of desirable improvements and wasteful changes (figure 1.2). The world’s first mass-produced car, Ford’s famous Model T released in October 1908, weighed just 540 kg. Weight gains after World War I (WWI) were due to fully enclosed all-metal bodies, heavier engines, and better seats: by 1938 the mass of Ford’s Model 74 reached 1,090 kg, almost exactly twice that of the Model T (Smil 2014b). These trends (larger cars, heavier engines, more accessories) continued after World War II (WWII) and, after a brief pause and retreat brought by the oil price rises by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s, intensified after the mid-1980s with the introduction of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs, accounting for half of new US vehicle sales in 2019) and the growing popularity of pick-up trucks and vans.

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These trends (larger cars, heavier engines, more accessories) continued after World War II (WWII) and, after a brief pause and retreat brought by the oil price rises by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s, intensified after the mid-1980s with the introduction of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs, accounting for half of new US vehicle sales in 2019) and the growing popularity of pick-up trucks and vans. Figure 1.2 The bestselling American car in 1908 was Ford Model T weighing 540 kg. The bestselling vehicle in 2018 was not a car but a truck, Ford’s F-150 weighing 2,000 kg. Images from Ford Motor Company catalogue for 1909 and from Trucktrend. In 1981 the average mass of American cars and light trucks was 1,452 kg; by the year 2000 it had reached 1,733 kg; and by 2008 it was 1,852 kg (and had hardly changed by 2015), a 3.4-fold increase of average vehicle mass in 100 years (USEPA 2016b).

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Designing Smart Vehicles for a Smart World,” Ford Motor Company, http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/677-5-dollar-a-day (accessed June 26, 2019). 4. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 11. 5. “Ford Model T,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T (accessed June 26, 2019). 6. Peter Huber, The Bottomless Well (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 7. Joel A. Tarr, “Urban Pollution—Many Long Years Ago,” American Heritage (October 1971), reproduced by Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages, http://www.banhdc.org/archives/ch-hist-19711000.html (accessed June 26, 2019). 8.

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In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the industrial world when he doubled the pay of his highly productive assembly-line workers to $5 a day.2 Ford reasoned that a higher-paid workforce would be able to buy more cars and thus increase his business.3 Others followed suit. The market for automobiles was elastic. The Model T Ford went on sale in 1908 for $950; due to productivity improvements, its price had dropped to $269 by 1923.4 In 1909, Ford produced 10,666 vehicles; in 1923, the company sold more than 2 million.5 By 1927, the Ford Motor Company had sold 15 million of its Model T “flivvers.” As a spillover from their explosive success, automotive companies also created a large demand for other products and services that employed millions of workers—steel, coal to make the steel, glass, rubber, machine tools, auto dealerships, gas stations, oil fields, mechanics, and so on.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Fences, railroad tracks, and guarded gates restricted access to the plant, which came to resemble a fortress, in contrast to Highland Park, which was situated in a busy urban neighborhood, with public sidewalks alongside the factory buildings.40 Ironically, while the Rouge was being built out to produce everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and varied models than Ford, which still only sold the Model T (though it offered luxury cars under the Lincoln nameplate). By 1927, as sales diminished, it became evident that something had to be done. Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools and rebuilt 25,000 more. New molds, jigs, dies, fixtures, gauges, and assembly sequences had to be created.

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The steel mill had become the modern sublime.68 CHAPTER 4 “I WORSHIP FACTORIES” Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory IN A 1926 ENTRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Henry Ford (or the publicist who ghostwrote the article) defined “mass production” as “the modern method by which great quantities of a single standardized commodity are manufactured.” If anyone knew about the manufacture of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” it was Ford. His Model T, introduced in 1908, turned the automobile from a luxury plaything into a mass-consumer good. Prior to then, automobile companies typically manufactured at most a few thousand cars a year. By 1914, the Ford Motor Company was rolling out nearly a quarter of a million Model Ts annually. By the time the company stopped selling the iconic model in 1927, fifteen million had been produced.1 Henry Ford’s worldwide fame stemmed as much from the methods his company used to make the Model T as from the car itself.

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He built his first car in 1896, proving his models’ worth by racing them. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with investors who supplied the capital needed to take on the expensive business of making automobiles. In 1907 he wrested control of the firm from his partners. Aiming at rural America, Ford conceived of the Model T as a lightweight vehicle, sturdy enough to withstand the terrible roads that farmers depended on but simple enough for them to repair themselves and for him to produce at a price they could afford.9 Sold through a network of independent distributors, the Model T proved an instant hit.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

World steel production trebled between 1950 and 1970, with plants becoming much larger. In other sectors production increased radically in efficiency, but without necessarily needing increases in scale. Agriculture is a good example. Cars in the long boom The mass production of motor cars was pioneered in the United States by one company and one car, Ford and the Model T. At its peak in the 1920s the Model T was produced at an annual rate of 2 million, and by the time production ceased in 1927 15 million had been built. Ford was at this time easily the largest car manufacturer in the world, and had made America easily the most motorised nation in the world.

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The latter was a factor in the relative decline of the electric car, except in some cases of centrally-controlled fleets.15 The Model T Ford, in production from 1908 to the late 1920s, easily out-produced all other cars in its time, and provides some particularly stark examples of the significance of maintenance. A key feature of the car was that it was made from interchangeable parts. This allowed the assembly to be carried out without fitters, and it also had implications for maintenance. Henry Ford himself noted that the Model T was designed for ease of maintenance; no special skill was required for repair or replacement: I believed then, although I said very little about it because of the novelty of the idea that it ought to be possible to have parts so simple and so inexpensive that the menace of expensive hand repair work would be entirely eliminated.

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Despite some investment in new designs for steam locomotives, prompted by the oil crisis of the 1970s, the move towards diesel and electric traction was too powerful for steam to compete. From maintenance to manufacture and innovation Maintenance sometimes also means a significant remodelling as with battleships and bombers. Similarly, small-scale maintenance workshops could be and were used to change things, sometimes as soon as they were bought. For example, in the 1920s a Ford Model T buyer ‘never regarded his purchase as a complete finished product. When you bought a Ford you figured you had a start – a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware.’45 Many things could be bought by mail order, another great American invention, but the first thing E.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

At the end of the 1880s, the decade that saw the introduction of the first automobiles and adoption of the first streetcars, the total of these large draft animals had reached 17.5 million (Figure 1.4). The first tractors for field work were introduced during the 1890s but the total horse and mule count rose to 20 million by 1900. Large-scale expansion of electric streetcars, the construction of the first subways, the introduction of mass-produced passenger vehicles (starting with Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908), and growing tractor sales took place before World War I—but the horse and mule count peaked only in 1917 at just over 26.6 million, a third above the 1900 level. By 1930 urban horses were almost completely displaced by electricity and internal combustion engines, but the total tractor count was still less than one million and the United States still had 18.9 million horses and mules, more than in the early 1890s.

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Edison’s battery—in commercial production until 1975 (used mainly in underground mining and by railroads)—did nothing to prevent the triumph of internal combustion engines. New York’s Electric Vehicle Company had first reduced its operation to occasional rides in Central Park and went bankrupt in 1907, even before Ford introduced his Model T in October 1908. No major move toward electric road transport took place until the very end of the 20th century. In 1995 the California Energy Commission set the target of 2% of all new vehicles sold in the state to be electric in 1999, but no commercial electrics were actually sold (Lazaroff 2001).

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During the 1860s, the first decade of the modern oil industry, the most important refined product was kerosene for lighting (replacing whale oil) and lubricants; waxes and asphalt were useful non-energy byproducts. By 1880 kerosene was 75% of the total output of US refineries, gasoline just 10% (USBC 1975). After 1882 electricity began to displace kerosene in urban lighting, but by 1908, when Ford Motor Company introduced its mass-produced and affordable Model T, US kerosene output was still three times that of gasoline. The subsequent growth in American car ownership was quite rapid. Annual sales rose from 180,000 in 1910 and 1.5 million in 1916, registrations of all motor vehicles went from more than 1 million in 1913 to more than 10 million in 1921, and by 1929 nearly half of all households owned a vehicle (USBC 1975).

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

And every day vehicles come out with new power-sucking features, such as onboard computers and entertainment systems. All of these energy-using features are just further examples of how the falling cost of consuming energy has led us to consume ever more of it. Add it all up, and the vehicle idling beside you on a North American street is probably less efficient than a 1908 Ford Model T. So much for the great benefits that energy-saving technology has bestowed. From a conservation point of view, the bad news doesn’t end there. America’s gasoline consumption is not just about average fuel mileage per vehicle. It’s also about how many vehicles are on the road. Here, too, we hear the loud echo of the rebound effect.

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Though today’s car manufacturers and regulatory bodies worry that battery-powered cars may be too slow, an electric car was clocked at over 100 kilometers per hour (that’s 62 miles an hour) in 1899. And while we keep hearing that current battery technology just can’t provide electric cars with sufficient range, a Detroit Electric managed to go 211 miles on a single charge back in the days when city trolleys were pulled by horses. Around the time that Ford’s first Model T was rolling off the assembly line, electric cars were more popular than internal combustion models, and it is not hard to see why. They were quiet and clean and reliable, particularly in comparison to the clattering and often dangerous gasoline-powered cars they were competing against for market share.

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Jevons pioneered the concept of the efficiency paradox in his 1865 treatise “The Coal Question,” noting how coal-saving technological change in the production of steel ultimately boosted the demand for coal. The phenomenon was initially known as Jevon’s paradox. p. 91 The fuel efficiency of a 1908 Ford Model T was somewhere between 25 and 17 miles per gallon. Assuming it is the lower figure, many SUVs do worse than their forebears 100 years ago; and if it is the higher figure, even many sleek family vehicles do worse (cbs5.com/local/Model.T.Ford.2.434954.html). p. 95: The story about the threat posed to the British electrical grid by soccer supporters watching their new plasma televisions comes from “Plasma screens threaten eco-crisis,” by David Smith and Juliette Jowit, which appeared in The Observer August 13, 2006 (www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/aug/13/energy.nuclear industry).

Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Division of labour explains why workers on a car production line each add some 1. http://www.discovery.org/a/2073 Chapter 1 • Adam Smith21 part to the basic chassis, why busy bankers do not answer the phone themselves but have PAs, and even why we buy pork chops at the shop rather than reliving the BBC sitcom The Good Life and rearing our own pigs. For businesses, division of labour has been central to production systems since the Ford Model-T car became the first automobile to be mass produced on moving assembly lines using pre-manufactured parts. More recently this has led to the growth in outsourcing, which both magnifies the specialisation of the job of making individual parts and also exploits different countries’ absolute advantage in what they do.

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Index A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) 2, 5–6 Adelman, Irma 110 American Economic Association 170 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations see The Wealth of Nations anarchism 156 apartheid system in South Africa 199 Ariely, Dan 234 Arrow, Kenneth 191, 213 AT&T 22 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Austrian School of Economics 121–2 autarky concept 184 bank bailouts in the financial crisis 162 Bank of England 161 Barro, Robert 43 Barro-Ricardo equivalence 43–4 Becker, Gary (1930– ) 193–216 approach to human behaviour 212–15 building human capital 200–2, 210 early life and influences 195–7 economic perspective on discrimination 196–7, 198–9 Economics of Discrimination (1957) 196–7, 198–9 economics of the family 213–15 family decision making 203–6 key economic theories and writings 197–212 long-term impact 212–15 new home economics 203–6 Nobel Prize (1992) 194, 195–6 on crime and punishment 207–10 on drug addiction 210–12, 215 rational choice model 197, 212– 15, 216 verdict 215–16 Becker–Posner Blog 215 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 181 Bergmann, Barbara 206 Bergson, Abram 182 Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function 182–3 Bernanke, Ben 77, 159, 162 Bernoulli, Daniel 229 bias in decision making 222–5 in financial decision making 225–32 Bitcoin currency 138 Black, Fischer 187 Blinder, Alan 215 Bloomsbury Group 94 Blunt, Anthony 94 boom and bust cycles see business cycles Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 Brown, Gordon 3, 42 Burgess, Guy 94 Burns, Arthur F. 147 Bush, George H.W. 139 business cycles 57, 65 Hayek’s explanation 123–6 Samuelson’s oscillator model 174–5 Butler, Eamonn 162 Cambridge School of economics 74, 86 Cambridge spy ring 94 capital flow controls 113 capital-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 capitalism exploitation of the working class (Marx) 56–8, 62–3 Index239 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 seeds of its own downfall (Marx) 56–8, 61–3 capitalist production process (Marx) 54–6 Carlyle, Thomas 33 cartels evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 central banks control of economic activity 161 over-expansion of credit 123–4 central state planning, Hayek’s opposition to 134–6, 140 certainty effect 229, 230 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 Chapman, Bruce 19 Chicago School of economic thought 146, 160, 194 China savings and investment imbalance with the US 113 trade imbalance with the US 45 choice architecture 234 Churchill, Winston 98 classical economics 40, 54 Coase, Ronald 73 cognitive biases (Kahneman) 222–5 communism 19, 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 company bailouts in the financial crisis 162 comparative advantage 35–8, 183–4 complex adaptive systems, science of 138 complex financial products 61–2, 187 computer-games-based money 138 confirmation bias 227 consumer demand marginal rate of substitution 180 revealed preference theory 180–1 consumption smoothing concept 149, 163 Corn Laws, attack by Ricardo 33–5 costs of production, relationship to value 75–7 credit expansion, as a driver of boom and bust cycles 123–4 crime and punishment, views of Becker 207–10 Darling, Alistair 112 Das Kapital (Marx) 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 decision making biases and errors in financial decisions 225–32 heuristics and bias in 222–5 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 under risk 228–32 demand side economics 127 depression Keynesian interventionist view 92–3, 94, 105–6 see also Great Depression (1930s) dialectic style of analysis 52, 54 Diamond, Peter 179 diminishing marginal utility 82 discrimination economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 car production 20–1 in daily life 20–1 divorce rates 205 drug addiction, views of Becker 210–12, 215 Dubner, Stephen 234 Eastern Europe, influence of Hayek 140 Ebenstein, Larry 158 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson, 1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 Economics of Discrimination (Becker, 1957) 196–7, 198–9 Efficient Market theory 111, 112, 187 240Index elasticity of demand 82–4 Elizabeth II, Queen 158 emerging markets, offshoring of jobs to 41 endogenous growth 202 endowment effect 232, 234 Engels, Friedrich 52, 58–61 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 European Central Bank 161 exchange rates, impact of trade on 185–6 expected utility theory (EUT) 228, 229–30, 232 externalities 85 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 Fama, Eugene 160, 187 family decision making economic perspective 183, 203–6, 213–15 welfare decision making 183 fiat currency 152 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 financial decision making, biases and errors in 225–32 financial economics, work of Samuelson 187 First World War 95 Folbre, Nancy 206 Ford Model-T car, assembly-line production system 21 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson, 1947) 168, 169–70 Fox, Charles James 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) 234 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free market system view of Adam Smith 13–14, 16–18 view of Hayek 131–3 view of Friedman 155–7 free rider problem in public goods 177–8 Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman, 1980) 158 free trade, influence of Adam Smith 22–3 Freeman, Richard 201 frictional unemployment 155 Friedman, David 156 Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 94, 110, 145–64, 190–1, 196 advocate of the free market 155–7 belief in individualism 155–7 criticism of Keynesianism 149–50 early life and influences 147–8 economics in action 160–3 fiat currency 152 Free to Choose (1980 ) 158 influence of the Great Depression (1930s) 148 influence on modern economic theory 158–60 limited role of government in the economy 152, 155–7 long-term legacy 157–63 monetarism 151–2 monetarist rule 152 monetary policy 151–2 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment 153–5 new explanation for the Great Depression 150–1 Nobel Prize in economics (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 permanent income hypothesis 148–50 role of money supply in the economy 151–2 verdict 163–4 Friedman, Rose (formerly Rose Director) 147, 148, 157, 158, 160 FTSE-listed plcs 86 Funk, Walter 108 Funk Plan 108 Galbraith, J.K. 159 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 40 Index241 general equilibrium theory 8 genetically modified foods 42 geographical effects in economics 84–6 Giffen goods 84 global financial crisis (2007–8) 92, 174 and Keynesianism 111–13 global stimulus package 113 Marxist view 61–3 global free trade influence of Adam Smith 22–3 influence of Ricardo 40–2 global public goods 177–8 global recession (2009) see Great Recession (2009) gold standard, criticism by Keynes 95, 98, 107 government debt and the Great Recession (2009) 43 taxpayer view of (Ricardo) 38–9 government role in the economy anti-central planning view of Hayek 134–6, 140 Keynesian view 92–3, 94, 105–6 view of Adam Smith 9, 10, 16–18 view of Friedman 152, 155–7 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 19, 22–3, 85, 92 explanation of Friedman and Schwartz 150–1 influence on Friedman 148 influence on Keynes 99–100 role of the Federal Reserve 159 Great Recession (2009) 23 and government debt 43 arguments against protectionism 42 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Greece, sovereign debt crisis 113–14 Greenspan, Alan 111–12, 235 Grossman, Michael 212 Hansen, Lars Peter 160 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 110, 111, 119–42 business cycle theory 123–6 clash with Keynes 120, 126–31 collapse of the Soviet Union 140 early life and influences 120 emphasis on individual freedom 134–6, 140 explanation for boom and bust cycles 123–6 First World War 121 focus on supply side economics 127 influence in Eastern Europe 140 influence on George H.W.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Roads, previously open to anybody who wanted to use them, whether on a bicycle, on foot, or on a horse, had to be given over exclusively to the gasoline engine. And this process was slow and difficult. Even in the interwar years, many people did not actually welcome this new technology into their lives. They saw it as an invader, a dangerous killer of children and a creator of noise and smoke. Even the Ford Model T, which made up more than half of the cars on America’s roads in the 1920s, was used mostly in rural areas. Urban Americans continued to use public transport. When the 1896 act passed, it was controversial. The railway companies worried that it would take traffic away from them. Others feared that the noisy new vehicles would scare horses.

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Footage of New York City from the early twentieth century shows people walking in the streets—not stuck to sidewalks but right in the middle—with a level of ownership unimaginable today. By the mid-1930s there were already more than 30 million cars on American roads—at a time when the population of the United States was only a little more than a third of what it is today, at around 120 million. Henry Ford’s Model T, constructed on a revolutionary assembly line at Highland Park in Detroit, had brought cheap motoring to a mass market; more than 15 million of the cars were manufactured between 1918 and 1927. At a time when the average salary in America was around $3,000 a year, the Model T sold for just $850, well within the range of affordability for even working-class families.

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Yet from the mid 1920s until the mid 1990s, and later in some poorer countries, gasoline was routinely mixed with tetraethyl lead, a particularly poisonous chemical variant of lead invented by German chemist Carl Jacob Löwig in the 1850s. In the 1920s, GM was trying to beat the enormous success of Henry Ford’s Model T. But the firm needed a competitive edge. In the 1920s, climate change was not a concern, but fuel efficiency was—many feared that America’s oil wells, then being newly exploited, would run out quickly, and gasoline prices were rising. Scientists paid by General Motors discovered that by mixing tetraethyl lead with gasoline, you could increase the “octane,” and so reduce the engine-damaging “knock” that gasoline then on sale inflicted on engines starting up.

Policing the Open Road by Sarah A. Seo

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, jitney, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, strikebreaker, the built environment, traffic fines, War on Poverty

If at any point during the traffic stop an officer suspected drugs inside the car—or liquor in the early twentieth century—criminal procedures empowered the officer to start investigating; if the officer’s suspicions were confirmed, the individual almost certainly faced arrest, a severe sentencing regime, and an “eternal” criminal record. Confronted with the authority of the police to inspect and to intrude, the automobile was not quite the unmitigated freedom machine it was celebrated to be. In fact, driving, or even just being in a car, was the most policed aspect of everyday life.14 Print advertisement for the 1924 Ford Model T. Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford, THF116860. This automobile paradox offers a sense of how completely cars transformed the conditions of freedom in the twentieth century. Motorized vehicles offered unprecedented mobility, but at the same time their mass adoption created mass chaos that threatened everyone’s safety.

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They also prohibited motorized vehicles on certain roads; determined who among cars, horses, carriages, and pedestrians had the right of way; and specified how fast a car could overtake horse-drawn coaches and trolleys. According to one legal eagle, San Francisco even regulated “the angle at which motorists should make turns from one street into another.” In a short time, the number of regulations multiplied exponentially. In 1905, three years before the introduction of Ford’s Model T, a treatise on municipal corporations mentioned the automobile in just one line: “Bicycles, tricycles and automobiles are ordinarily considered vehicles and entitled to the use of that part of the street or highway set aside for them.” Tellingly, another treatise published just seven years later in 1912 devoted two entire sections to the regulation of “the running of automobiles.”

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This inside-out claim invoked the public / private framework of classical legal thought, and Reich was thinking of the legally constituted private realm when he wrote that the “good society must have its hiding places—its protected crannies for the soul.” Only in these sanctuaries, hidden from the intrusive gaze of the state, could individuals live freely. By “hiding places,” Reich referred not to the sanctity of one’s home but to the automobile. This was an odd claim as a matter of law. Ever since Henry Ford perfected the mass production of the Model T, courts had held that cars fell within the public sphere of regulation and policing, which was why officers could stop and question Reich as they pleased.3 For Reich, who had been struggling in secret with his sexuality at a time when every state but one still had sodomy laws on the books—Illinois was the first to repeal its law in 1961—the private sphere represented suburban domesticity.

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

At another meeting, he suggested that the company insist that all newspapers and magazines that wrote about Volkswagen or its cars submit their articles in advance for examination and approval “so that unfriendly articles will no longer be published.” The KdF Wagen, now known as the Volkswagen, went on to be produced in numbers that far surpassed Ford’s Model T and exceeded even the wildest expectations of its prewar planners. Conceived by a totalitarian government bent on military conquest, the people’s car lived up to its name only when there was peace, when Germany was a democracy and Western ally, and the company had access to markets worldwide.

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Decades later, when Volkswagen tried to tap nostalgia for the Beetle with the New Beetle, which evoked the contours of the original Ferdinand Porsche design but featured modern mechanics, the car sold well in the United States but poorly in Germany. On February 17, 1972, a few months before Ferdinand Piëch began work at Audi, Volkswagen passed a historic milestone. Production of the Beetle reached 15,007,034 cars, overtaking Ford’s Model T as the most-produced car ever. It was perhaps the ultimate vindication of Ferdinand Porsche’s original vision. But the vision was running out of road. In 1972, Volkswagen sales declined by 14 percent, to 1.5 million vehicles. Of those, 1.2 million were Beetles, an illustration of how dependent the company was on a single model line.

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CHAPTER 5: CHIEF EXECUTIVE 33 During the 1950s, Volkswagen: Markus Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik: Der Weg zum Global Player (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG, 2008), 46. 34 An early ad by the New York agency: Bob Garfield, “Ad Age Advertising Century: The Top 100 Campaigns,” Advertising Age, March 29, 1999, http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/ad-age-advertising-century-top-100-campaigns/140918/. 34 Hahn liked Bernbach’s lack of pretension: Interview with Carl Hahn, March 31, 2016. 35 Volkswagen exported 330,000: Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik, 60. 36 overtaking Ford’s Model T: Ibid., 90. 36 In 1961, the West German government: Steven Parissien, The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Automobile (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 124. 37 despite his close association with Hitler: Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: ECON Verlag, 1997), 939. 37 Porsche’s attempts to design: Anton Hunger and Dieter Landenberger, Porsche Chronicle, 1931–2008 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2008), 63. 39 Piëch saw the parent company: Ferdinand Piëch, with Herbert Völker, Auto.Biographie (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 2002), 80. 39 Clean Air Act of 1970: “Hearings Set on Automobile Pollution Control,” Environmental Protection Agency press release, March 4, 1971, http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/hearings-set-automobile-pollution-control. 39 The European Union . . . did not have: “Assessment of the Effectiveness of European Air Quality Measures and Policies, Case Study 2: Comparison of the US and EU Air Quality Standards & Planning Requirements” (DG Environment, Oct. 4, 2004), http://ec.europa.eu/environment/archives/cafe/activities/pdf/case_study2.pdf, p. 1. 39 Piëch solved the emissions problem: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 81. 40 Behles was sidelined: Ibid., 86. 41 who were duly astonished: Ibid., 105. 41 By 1984, he had nine children: Ibid., 126. 43 he forbade such duplication: Ibid., 124. 43 Piëch worried about how to get: Ibid., 123. 44 Audi unveiled its first TDI model: Oliver Strohbach, “Das große Wettbrennen: Mit dem TDI Von Malmö nach Kopenhagen,” Dialoge.Online (Audi online magazine), http://audi-dialoge.de/magazin/technologie/01-2015/134-das-grosse-wettbrennen. 44 Piëch was proud of the innovation: Audi website, “TDI Chronicle,” http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/themes/2014/08/Light_my_fire/TDI_chronicle.html. 45 there was even a TDI Club: TDI Club website, https://www.tdiclub.com/. 46 When Böhm celebrated his ninetieth: “Audi Betriebsrat—Fritz Böhm wird 90 Jahre alt,” AutoNewsBlog, Dec. 21, 2014, http://www.auto-news-blog.de/audi-betriebsrat-fritz-bohm-wird-90-jahre-alt/. 46 Hahn commented that Piëch’s ascension: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 135. 46 The manager found another job: Ibid., 110. 46 Piëch saw the man as overly: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 141. 47 the weeping family members: Ibid., 142. 47 The last—the 21,529,464th: Lupa, Volkswagen Chronik, 188. 48 Volkswagen had not kept pace: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 184–87. 48 Volkswagen lacked early warning systems: Piëch, Auto.Biographie, 147. 48 Hahn believed that he had been made: Carl H.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

And there was nothing special about American cars: a leading British car expert wrote in 1906 that “progress in the design and manufacture of motor vehicles in America has not been distinguished by any noteworthy advance upon the practice obtaining in either this country or on the Continent” (Beaumont 1906, 268). Two years later all that changed when Henry Ford (1863–1947) introduced his mass-produced, affordable Model T, built to meet the rigors of American driving: his achievement and legacy are explained in the next chapter. And two unlikely pioneers—Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville (1871–1948) Wright, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio—were the first innovators to power the first successful flight by a light internal combustion engine when their airplane lifted briefly above the dunes at North Carolina’s Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 (McCullough 2015).

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Major substitutions resulted in coal getting replaced by fuel oil and diesel oil in shipping (starting before World War I, accelerating during the 1920s) and then in railroads (starting during the 1920s), by fuel oil (and then by natural gas) in industrial, institutional, and household heating, and by liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons as feedstocks for the petrochemical industry (after World War II). The first new large market was created by the introduction of affordable automobiles, starting before World War I with Ford’s Model T, and by the rapid post–World War II rise in car ownership; the second one began with the introduction of jet engines in commercial aviation during the 1950s, an innovation that changed flying from a very expensive and a rare experience to a mass global industry (Smil 2010b). The oil industry could meet this expanding demand because of a multitude of technical advances that have affected every aspect of its operation.

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The most important changes have included an approximate doubling of compression ratios and their lower weight and a rising power, resulting in a falling mass/power ratio: it declined from nearly 40 g/W in 1900 to just around 1g/W a century later. America’s first mass-produced car, Ransom Olds’s Curved Dash, had a single-cylinder, 5.2 kW (7 hp) engine. The engine of Ford’s Model T, whose production ended in 1927 after 19 years and 16 million units, was three times as powerful. An increase in the average power of American cars was interrupted by OPEC’s oil price rises of the 1970s but resumed during the 1980s: the average car power rose from about 90 kW in 1990 to about 175 kW in 2015 (USEPA 2015).

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

Inevitably, though, despite the support of its shareholders and the optimism expressed in its own promotional magazine, Air Line News, the company stopped building and went bust in 1915. There was a lot stacked against the interurbans: the hostility of the railroad companies, the limited market they served, the cheapness of the construction (which increased operating costs), and ultimately, after the war, the advent of the Ford Model T and other cheap cars. Yet for a while, the big railroads felt threatened by this crude competitor, not least because many interurbans were backed by powerful electricity companies. Despite the fact that interurbans seemed to cater to a rather limited market and ran, at best, hourly trains with single cars, some railroads were so fearful that they ran concerted campaigns against them and were quick to challenge them in the courts at every available opportunity.

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A few interurbans stuttered on until after the Second World War, but soon succumbed to the automobile, which not only destroyed their remaining customer base but eyed jealously all that extra space next to the highways. Interestingly, the authors of the key history of the interurbans suggest that they could have been as damaging to the conventional railroads as the Ford Model T, whose very invention stymied their development and killed them off: “Both [interurbans and the Model T] threatened the position of the railroad train as the principal means of passenger transportation; by 1960 [when the book was published] the automobile was providing 90 per cent of intercity passenger miles.”

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., 264–265 Fast Flying Virginian, 265 Fencing, 42, 81–82, 191, 270 Ffestiniog Railway, 174 Field, Ben, 183 Fillmore, Millard, 57 First World War, 261, 269, 270, 288–292, 293–296, 321–322 Fish, Stuyvesant, 249, 250 Fisk, Jim, 157, 241–244, 247 Fitch, John, 5 Fitchburg Railroad, 166 Flagler, Henry Morrison, 35, 225–226, 288, 302 Flewellen Hospital, 116 Florida East Coast Railroad, 225 Florida Railroad, 103 Ford Model T, 283, 284, 306 Fort Laramie, Treaty of, 129 Fort Sumter attack, 97, 98, 119 Fosse Way, 2 Fourth of July specials, 35 Four-Track News, 269 Foxwell, E., 264–265 Franco-Prussian War, 171 Franklin, Benjamin, 220 Freight services, 82–83, 197, 198, 213–214, 300, 306, 307, 315–316, 319, 321–322, 322–323, 326, 327 collapse and turnaround, 345–351, 355, 357–358 competition with passenger services, 350 French Revolution, 233 Fuller, William, 109–111 Fulton, Robert, 7 Fulton Chain Railroad, 224 Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, 69, 70 Galton, Douglas, 47–48 Garfield, James A., 157–158 Garrett, Franklin, 118 Garrett, John, 104 Gas-engine locomotives, 310 General, The, 110–111 General Electric, 286 General Motors, 310, 311, 330–331 George, Henry, 252–253 Georgia Central Railroad, 195 Georgia Railroad, 49, 93 Gettysburg, Battle of, 108 Glacier National Park, 270 Gordon, Sarah H., 19, 30, 78, 79, 89, 99, 163, 165, 217, 355 Gould, George, 259 Gould, Jay, xxv, 188, 234–235, 238, 241–244, 246, 247, 250–251, 259, 278 Grand Canyon, 270 Grand Crossing intersection, 194 Grand Trunk Railroad, 287 Granger movement, 255, 256, 257, 272 Granger railways, 70–71, 168, 346–347 Granite Railroad, 17 Grant, Cary, 266 Grant, Ulysses S., 113, 151 Grasse River Railroad, 224 Grasshoppers, 169 Great Chatsworth Train Wreck, 256 Great Depression, 302, 303, 306, 308–309, 314, 316, 317, 322 Great Northern Railroad, 177, 178, 235, 246, 249–250, 270, 272, 287, 288, 300, 301–302, 316 Great Southern Mail Route, 162 Great Southwest Railroad strike, 234 Great Wall of China, 141 Great Western Railway, 59–60, 219 Greeks, ancient, 2 Greenwood & Augusta Railroad, 164 Greyhound Lines, 303 Grierson, Benjamin, 111 Groundhog Days, 276 Gunpowder, 38, 55, 139, 142, 167 Guns, railway-mounted, 116 Hamilton, Alexander, 62 Harding, Warren, 307 Harnden, William F., 82–83 Harpers Ferry, 94–95, 109 Harriman, Edward, 248–250 Harrison, Benjamin, 200 Hartford & New Haven Railroad, 167 Harvey, Fred, 209 Haupt, Herman, 66, 105–109, 112, 114, 117, 166, 290 Havana Special, 226 Hayes, Rutherford, 234 Hayne, Robert, 91 Hearst, William Randolph, 237 Hell on Wheels towns, 143, 148, 179 Hemingway, Ernest, 226 High-speed rail, 351–352, 359 Hill, James J., 177, 235, 246, 272, 300 Hoboes, 205–206, 317–318 Holbrook, Stewart H., 20, 22, 34, 56, 57, 66–67, 82, 111, 199, 205, 219, 220 Holliday, Doc, 173 Homestead Act, 130 Hood, John, 114 Hoosac Tunnel, 165–167, 287 Hopkins, Mark, 131 Horse Soldiers, The (film), 111 Horseshoe Curve, 66, 105 Hospital trains and ambulance, 115 Housatonic Railroad, 83 Hoxie, Herbert, 137 Hudson River Railroad, 85, 240 Hudson tunnels, 287 Humming Bird, 335 Huntington, Collis P., 131, 151, 250 Huntington, Henry E., 282 Hurricane Agnes, 333–334, 338 ICC.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

A CLASH OF VALUES In the early years of the twenty-firs century, when working cell phones and other IT products are discarded by their owners after eighteen months of use, it is difficul to imagine a massproduced consumer product created without planned obsolescence in mind. But that is exactly the way Henry Ford created his Tin Lizzie. The Model T was a reliable product marketed at the lowest possible price. For this reason, Ford was able to withstand competition for years. But the durability of the Flivver was problematic to its manufacturer because it postponed repetitive consumption. On average, one of Ford’s cars lasted eight years, about two years longer than any other automobile.

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By 1920, 55 percent of all American families—nearly every family that could afford a car—already owned one. That same year, a minor economic depression resulted in a drastic shortfall in sales for all manufactured goods. This “buyers strike” created a crisis at Ford and at General Motors, which were both in the midst of costly expansions. Ford needed the revenue from Model T sales to pay for its new Rouge River plant. In the coming year, Henry Ford (unlike William Durant at General Motors) successfully resisted borrowing money from a J. P. Morgan consortium to cover his operating and expansion costs. This minor financia miracle left him with absolute autonomy over the Ford Motor Company.

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Varnishes that could suspend enough color to finis an automobile had to be applied by hand and dried very slowly; and they were easily damaged by rain. By 1911 Ford switched to spraypainted enamels and force rooms (drying ovens) that baked the finis onto cars. Unfortunately, this process discolored the pigments suspended in the enamel. In 1914 Ford simply stopped offering the Model T in any color except black. This strategy succeeded because no large competitor could offer a comparatively priced alternative. By the 1920s, Dodge and GM also had a blackonly policy for their highest volume models.14 In 1921, when control of GM shifted from William Durant to DuPont,all of this changed.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. … Without mitigation, the peaking of world oil production will almost certainly cause major economic upheaval.”12 The Oil Panics of 1916 and 1918 One of the first major oil depletion scares occurred near the turn of the last century. The Ford Model T automobile was a novelty in 1908, with sales of just 10,000 cars. By 1914, sales were up to 200,000, with gasoline selling for 16 cents per gallon. Oil was plentiful, and a 1914 oil glut generated a price drop from $1.05 to $0.55 per barrel. But in July, World War I began. Several years before, in 1911, the US Navy, with some foresight, initiated production of nimbler US battleships powered by oil rather than coal.

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Index air quality, 206 Alaska, 65, 128 heavy oil, 166 oil sands, 168 Algeria, 23, 41 aluminum, 105–6, 107 alternatives, oil and energy, 115, 210–2, 214–9 Angola, 23, 142 anticlinal traps, 140 Arab–Israeli war (1973), 63, 115 Arctic region, oil and gas, 146 Association for the Study of Peak Oil, 88, 124 Athabasca sands, 168–9 available oil, 119 Azadegan oil field, 138 Bahrain, 23 Baker Hughes drill-rig count, 141–2 Baku, 160 barrels, origin as measure, 20 batteries, 108, 214–15, 228 battleships, 62 bbl, barrel, origin, 20, 52 bell-shaped curve see logistic curve Berman, Arthur, 144 bets, 103–4 biodiesel, 212–13 biofuels, 210–13 bitumen, 168 Bohai Bay oil field, 138–9 Bolivia, oil reserves, 144 booking of oil reserves, 125–6 BP coal endowment estimate, 180 oil price, 77–8, 115–6, 154 oil production, China and India, 76 oil production decline data, 65 oil reserves, 23, 126 Brazil oil reserves, 144 oil shale, 172 Brent Blend, 41 British Petroleum see BP Brookhart, Maurice, 174 Brown, Harrison, 106 Buffett, Warren, 215 Burgan Greater oil field, 71 CAFE standards, 197–9 effects, 199–205, 223–4 California gold, 156, 157 heavy oil, 166 oil sands, 168 California Energy Commission, 47 Campbell, Colin, 124 Canada oil reserves, 122, 132–3 oil sands, 27, 29, 122, 132, 136, 168–70 232 Index Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 169 Canadian Oil Sands Limited, 169 Cantarell Greater oil field, 71 carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10, 216 carrying capacity, 61 Carter, Jimmy, 64 Cathles, Larry, 128–9 cellular phones, 107, 108–9 central limit theorem (CLT), 94 Charpentier, Ronald, 93, 139–40 Chevron advertising, 16 capital spending, 141 oil discoveries, 139, 144 oil exploration, 22, 141 oil reserves, 23 stock buy-back, 141 China carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10, 217 coal, 180–1, 216, 217 discoveries, 138–9 economic growth, 152–3 GDP, 147 industrial growth, 74–5 liquid fuel from coal, 176–7 oil consumption, 74–6, 147–53 oil imports, 36 oil production, 75–6 oil shale, 172 oil-use intensity, 150–1 vehicle ownership, 204–6 Churchill, Winston, 62 CIA, 64 “clean” coal technology, 216–17 Club of Rome, 59–61 coal combustion in power plants, 216–17 conversion to liquid fuels, 173–4 formation, 180 synthetic fuel from, 176–7 coal reserve-to-production ratio, 180–1 coal resources, 180–1 Colorado, 170, 176 Columbia, oil reserves, 144 commodity prices trends, 103–7 volatility, 105 commodity scarcity, 98–103 communications systems, 109–10 ConocoPhillips, 22, 23 conservation of mass, 10 consumer price index (CPI), 56, 77–8, 83 cooking oil, 213 copper, 103–7 corn, 211–12 Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, 197–9 effects, 199–205, 223–4 corruption, 217 “cracking”, 63, 174 CPI, see consumer price index crude oil, 18 finding and lifting/production costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 crushed stone, 105–6 cumulative production, 28 Cushing oil field, 62 Daimler, 214 Darwin, Charles, 1 Deffeyes, Kenneth, 93 Deming, David, 89–90, 95, 97 dental fillings, 108 developing nations, future oil demand, 146–54, 204–6 discoveries, 29–30, 66–7, 70, 72–4, 127–8, 138–40 Diesel, Rudolf, 175, 212 diesel composition, 19 energy density, 19 importance, 175 as preferred automobile fuel, 181 diesel cars, 175–6 DOE see US Department of Energy Index Drake, Edwin, 1, 160 drilling rigs, 141–3 drilling-to-discovery ratio, 90 dry gas, 18 economic petroleum reserve, 218–19 economic rebound, 199–200 Ecuador OPEC membership, 23 political stability, 217 efficiency and consumption, 199–204 gains, 196–9, 220 Egypt, 23, 112–13 Ehrlich, Paul, 103–4 EIA see Energy Information Administration El-Badri, Abdalla Salem, 25 electric cars, 213–15 Electric Vehicle Company, 213, 214 electricity, 213 endowment see oil endowment and natural gas endowment end-use services, 109, 213–15 energy density, 19 Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, 199 Energy Information Administration (EIA) oil reserve estimates, 2, 134, 164–5 oil sands estimates, 169 oil statistics, 26 Energy Policy Act of 2005, 212 Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, 197 energy security, 199, 218, 221 enhanced oil recovery (EOR), 162 environment, 220 Estonia, 173 ethanol, 19, 38, 211–12, 214 Europe coal-fired power plants, 217 oil imports, 36 exploration constraints, 222 233 exploration expenditures, 140–1, 143 global distribution, 143 exploratory drilling, success rate, 131 Exxon Mobil advertising, 16 capital spending, 141 discoveries, 144 oil exploration, 141 oil reserves, 23 revenues, 21–2 stock, price and buy-back, 21, 141 field growth, 28, 127, 134–6 finding costs, 42–3, 133–4 Fischer, Franz, 173 Fischer-Tropsch process, 173–4, 176 Fisher, William L., 92 flaxseed, 99–100 Ford Model T, 62 fossil fuels combustion, 209–10 consumption, 3 conversion, 173–5 definition, 17 FRS, DOE Financial Reporting System, 21–2, 52–3, 56, 137, 141, 143, 182 fuel economy, 197–204, 223–4 fuel oils, 19, 167–8 fungible commodity, 36 GAO reports, 2, 12, 65 gas-to-liquid (GTL) process, 174–5 gasohol, 211 gasoline, 41–9 and carbon dioxide emissions, 209–10 composition, 18–19 consumption, 197–8 cost components, 41–3 cost percent of disposable income, 115 energy density, 19 petroleum product, 38 running out, 64 234 Index gasoline consumption, efficiency and, 199–204 gasoline price, 44–9, 51, 117, 201, 217 by country, 45 elasticity, 45–7 factors determining, 41–2 next delivery, 47, 51 oil price and, 44–5, 206, 217 price gouging, 48 spikes, 116 spot price, 47–8 subsidies, 45 tax, 45 trends, 115–17, 201 variability, 47–9 Gaussian distribution, 93–4 Germany, 173 Ghana, 139 Ghawar oil field, 71–2 giant oil fields numbers discovered, 70 oil volume in, 70–1, 138, 140 production decline, 72 gold depletion predicted, 106 in seawater, 159 gold reserves, 158, 192 gold resource pyramid, 156–60 gold rushes, 156 Goldman, Alan, 174 Göring, Hermann, 174 gouging, 48–9 Green River Formation, 170–1 Greene, David L., 208 gross world product (GWP), 148 GTL see gas-to-liquid process Gulf of Mexico, 22, 114, 128–9, 136, 139 Hamilton, James, 117–18 heavy oil, 165–8 global, 166–8 US, 165–6 Hirsch report, 2 Hitler, Adolf, 174 horses, 206–7, 209 “Hotelling” economic theory, 117 Hubbert, M.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

Strutting the stage in a black T-shirt with a microphone clenched in his hand, Musk outlined Tesla’s plan to cut battery costs in half and produce a $25,000 mass market electric car. Honk! Honk! For all the hype and excitement, the electric car was still too expensive to compete with petrol. It was an ambition reminiscent of Henry Ford’s launch of the Model T car over a hundred years earlier, which had ushered in the motoring age by making cars affordable for the working man. Cars at the time had been luxury items but Ford had been determined to get the price below the average yearly wage. Just as Ford had pioneered the moving assembly line to lower costs, Musk needed to scale up battery production.

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It was reminiscent of remarks a hundred years earlier by Ford’s key lieutenant Charles Sorensen: ‘If others would not provide enough steel for our needs, then we would. It was just as simple as that.’4 In the meantime, Musk would have to rely on the green barons – the companies that controlled the emerging clean energy supply chain. A hundred years ago Ford’s Model T had created fortunes for the early oil drillers and refiners, leading to the creation of the global oil industry and some of the world’s largest companies. Now Musk had kickstarted a similar raw material rush. ‘The spice must flow … the new spice,’ Musk said, referring to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune, which detailed the struggle for control of a planet that produced the spice necessary for space navigation and the extension of life.

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‘At last the battery is finished,’ Edison wrote in the summer of that year.19 He had spent over a million dollars of his own money on the venture. But the delay in getting the improved battery to market turned out to be fatal. In the years Edison spent perfecting his battery, the internal combustion engine had gone from strength to strength, raising the bar against which batteries would have to compete. A year earlier Ford had unveiled his Model T, which quickly became a mass-market car. Edison’s grand announcements about his earlier battery had fed a feeling that electric vehicles constantly disappointed people’s expectations. The ‘unwarranted promise by the daily newspapers of a 200-mile battery has proved a serious obstacle to the introduction of electric vehicles’, one electric vehicle enthusiast noted in 1909.20 By the end of the decade the balance of power between Edison and Ford had changed.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Specifications, Prices, Quality Adjustments, and Disposable Income for Selected Best-Selling Auto Models, 1906–1940 Sources: Kimes and Clark (1996). NDI after 1929 from NIPA table 2.1. NDI before 1929 from HSUS 1965 series F9. The automobile revolution began in earnest with the appearance of Henry Ford’s Model T, which began production in late 1908 and continued in production until 1927. The second column of table 5–2 lists the introductory Model T of 1909–10, which was introduced at a price of $950. The genius of Ford’s design combined several elements. The car had relatively high horsepower (22 horsepower) for its weight (1,200 pounds), its gear torque allowed it to pull itself through mud that would have stranded heavier vehicles, its unique two-pedal planetary transmission eliminated the need to shift gears, and it was simple and easy to service by farmers, who had ready access to parts through mail-order catalogs.

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By 1913, the moving assembly line made mass production a reality, breaking up the labor processes into repetitive motions as the cars slowly moved past each worker performing his task. Also by 1913, Ford had established a network of almost 7,000 dealers and reached small towns having as few as 2,000 inhabitants; 65 percent of Ford dealers were in rural areas.89 After the Model T became ubiquitous, its unique network of dealers and service stations selling tires, batteries, spare parts, and the cars themselves created the same sort of networking advantage that Apple and Android enjoy today in their smartphone duopoly. The differences between the quality attributes of the Model T and any post-1925 car are as night and day.

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Throughout the era when the Ford lacked widely desired accessories, a giant after-market developed to sell new steel fenders for safety and streamlined style, as well as tops, radiator hoods, and mundane items such as a gas gauge.94 By the early 1920s, the Sears catalog offered 5,000 different accessory items for the Model T.95 Mass production kept the price of the Model T much lower than that of most competing cars, and its price in both nominal and real terms continued to decline throughout its two-decade production run, during which 15 million Model T Fords were produced. In fact, by 1914, the Model T had taken over 46 percent of the U.S. market for new automobiles, rising to almost 55 percent in its peak year of 1923, when 1.8 million were produced and sold.96 Table 5–2 compares the 1910 and 1923 Model T’s in adjacent columns. There was little change in specification except for an increase in weight owing to the conversion of previously optional features to standard equipment.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski

Charles Babbage, classic study, Ford Model T, invention of movable type, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman

Craftsmen, especially furniture-makers and boatbuilders, appreciated the convenience of screws that were self-centering and could be driven with one hand. Industry liked socket-head screws, too, since they reduced product damage and speeded up production. The Fisher Body Company, which made wood bodies in Canada for Ford cars, became a large Robertson customer; so did the new Ford Model T plant in Windsor, Ontario, which soon accounted for a third of Robertson’s output. Within five years of starting, Robertson built his own wire-drawing plant and powerhouse and employed seventy-five workers. In 1913, Robertson decided to expand his business outside Canada. His father had been a Scottish immigrant, so Robertson set his sights on Britain.

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

Their target market: high-income people who drove luxury vehicles. Once again, Elon knew failure was a very strong possibility. And again, just like with SpaceX, he felt the stakes were too high not to try at all. NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S CAR COMPANY The auto industry is not known for welcoming newcomers. Ford Motors? Started selling the Model T in 1908. General Motors? Selling cars for more than a century. Honda Motor Company? Founded in 1948. And the list goes on. These companies occupy sprawling campuses, manufacturing facilities, and salesrooms across the United States. One Ford assembly plant alone covers five million square feet.

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ELON MUSK NET WORTH: More than $23 billion TITLES: Tesla (CEO), SpaceX (CEO), The Boring Company (CEO), Neurallink (CEO), Open AI (co-founder) Got an interview with Elon? Better know the answer to this question. Rumor is he wants to know what was the biggest problem you faced, and how you solved it! GARAGE: What’s in Elon’s garage? In addition to driving Teslas, Elon also owns a Jaguar Series 1 1967 E-Type Roadster and a Ford Model T given to him by a friend. Elon Musk, June 14, 2018. (Photo by Kiichiro Sato, AP Photo.) BIBLIOGRAPHY Abramowitz, Rachel. “Robert Downey Jr. Is Ready to Play the Hero in ‘Iron Man.’” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 2008. www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-downey27apr27-story.html. Anderson, Chris.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In America, it has been associated with openness and opportunity: making it possible for people who were born in obscurity to rise to the top of society and for ordinary people to enjoy goods and services that were once confined to the elites. R. H. Macy, a former whaling skipper with a tattoo on one of his hands, sold “goods suitable for the millionaire at prices in reach of the millions.” Henry Ford, a farmer’s son, trumpeted the Model T as “a car for the common man.” Amadeo Giannini, an Italian immigrant, founded the Bank of America in order to bring banking to “the little guy.” Pierre Omidyar, another immigrant, created an electronic bazaar, eBay, for ordinary people to engage in free exchange. America’s rise to greatness has been marred by numerous disgraces, prime among them the mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of millions of African Americans.

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The first Model T, produced in 1908, was a category killer: powerful for its weight (22 horsepower and 1,200 pounds), easy to drive by the (admittedly challenging) standards of the day, light and strong thanks to the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength of regular steel, and capable of negotiating dirt roads (all America’s hard-surfaced roads in 1900, laid end to end, would not have stretched from New York to Boston, or 215 miles).14 Ford reduced the price of the Model T from $950 in 1910 to $269 in 1923, even as he improved the quality. The number of cars on America’s roads increased to 468,000 in 1910 and 9 million in 1920, and an astonishing proportion of these were Tin Lizzies: 46 percent in 1914 and 55 percent in 1923.15 Motorcars quickly added to the amount of power at the disposal of ordinary people: the horsepower embodied in motorcars surpassed the horsepower embodied in work animals (mostly horses) in 1910 and in railroads by 1915.

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This saved an enormous amount of time and effort: instead of having to unload your produce at the station, reload it onto a horse and cart, and then transport it to its final destination, you could take it all the way from origin to destination in a single journey. The combustion engine arguably transformed the lives of the 44 percent of people who lived in rural areas even more than the 56 percent who lived in cities. Henry Ford made sure that his Model T was capable of surviving rural America’s dismal roads by providing it with independent wheel suspension, rugged parts, easy-to-repair engines, and even kits to help farmers turn their car into a tractor.8 Farmers destroyed some 9 million working animals, particularly horses and mules, during the decade, freeing pastureland for more remunerative uses, and replaced them with motorized vehicles of various sorts.9 The number of tractors increased from about 1,000 in 1910 to 246,000 in 1920 to 920,000 in 1930.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In 1914, Detroit was the first city to erect a stop sign and in August the same year, Cleveland installed the first electric traffic signals. Only 4,000 cars were sold in the U.S in 1900, representing approximately one car for every 20,000 residents. At this time, it’s fairly safe to say the car was still a niche product. Henry Ford released the iconic Model T in 1908, but there was still less than one car for every 400 residents. It wasn’t until 1914, one year after Ford’s moving assembly line had been in full swing, that the car became part of the average American experience. By 1914, the U.S. boasted 1.7 million cars, or about one car for every 60 residents.

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How can we keep all the good things about cars - something that’s still point to point, on demand, personal and flexible? Something (relatively) affordable and individual. But we need to find ways to tackle the hitherto insoluble: the deaths, the injuries, the pollution, the spiralling costs. The delays. The wasted capacity. We need to reinvent mobility. Today, about a century after Ford introduced the Model T and mass motorisation, nearly a billion cars and trucks move people and goods along the world’s roadways and consumers spend trillions of dollars each year on personally owned vehicles (including the costs of fuel, depreciation, financing, insurance, taxes, parking, and time) to experience the resulting mobility benefits of personal transport.

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Average weight has risen steadily, which means that many of the advances in fuel savings have been offset or reduced by additional safety equipment and crash protection. For model year 2012, U.S. cars averaged 3,482 pounds and light trucks averaged 4,779 pounds, as shown in the graph below, while for comparison, the original Ford Model T only weighed 1,200 pounds. Image Courtesy Rand Corporation As mentioned already, considering the sheer number of journeys and the variables involved, car travel is remarkably safe. Improved brakes, stability and survivability have contributed perhaps as much as they reasonably can, while the one remaining constant is the controller (human driver).

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

Probably nothing summed up their lack of sophistication and the improvised nature of their operation more than the fact that drivers often resorted to finding water for their steam locomotives from the nearest shell hole because of the lack of any consistent supply. Another example of improvisation on these light railways was the use of Ford Model T cars mounted on a rail chassis. The idea according to legend came from a Miss Bowen Cooke, the daughter of Charles Bowen Cooke, the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Western Railway, while listening to an officer on leave in Paris complaining about the inadequacy of front-line transport.

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Davis, Jefferson Dawnay, General de Wet, Christiaan Décauville company Deighton, Len Denikin, General Anton Denmark Department of Military Railways Deraa Derby Deutsche Bank Dien Bien Phu, battle of Dimapur Dinton station Dnieper, river Dniester, river Doctor Zhivago Donetz Dornisoara Dover Dresden Dunanreanu, Nicolae Dunkirk Dunkirk evacuation Dvina, river dynamite East Prussia Eastriggs Eboli Edinburgh Egypt Eisenbahntruppen Elbe, river Elburz mountains elephants Engineer and Railway Volunteer Staff Corps Est railway Estcourt Estonia Eugénie, Empress Fakhri Pasha Farakka Faversham Fayolle, Capitaine Feisal, Prince Feldeisenbahnabteilung Feldmann, Lieutenant Ferdinand I, Emperor ferries Ferro, Marc Festing, General Francis Finland First World War Arab Revolt battle of Passchendaele Brusilov offensive defence of Verdun Eastern Front and evacuation of wounded German spring offensive Marne battles and Middle East preparatory phase and diplomacy ‘Race to the Sea’ and railway safety and railway timetables Schlieffen Plan Somme battles supply operations US entry Western Front Flanders Fleming, Peter Flensburg Fliegende Hamburger train Folkestone Fontenoy Ford Model T cars Fort Sumter France allied invasion and ambulance trains colonial interests and Crimean War and Italian wars and Plan XVII railway accidents railway system railways and First World War railways and Second World War size of armed forces and Vietnam War Franco, General Francisco Franco-Prussian War and subsequent wars francs-tireurs Frankfurt Franz Ferdinand, Archduke Franz Joseph, Emperor Fratesti Fredericksburg, Virginia French Resistance French secret services Fuller, William Fusan Gabel, Christopher Galatz Galicia Gallieni, General Joseph-Simon Gallipoli Ganges, river gares régulatrices Garland, Herbert Garrett, John Gaza Geddes, Sir Eric Geneva Genoa George V, King German South-West Africa German-Danish War Germany and air raids and ambulance trains colonial interests railways and First World War railways and Second World War size of armed forces unification see also Prussia Gettysburg, battle of Ghazala Gibraltar Gilinsky, General Girard (engine driver) Girouard, Edouard (Sir Percy) Glasgow Glubb Pasha gold Gordon, General Charles George Gorgopotamus Viaduct Göring, Hermann Görlitz Granson, battle of Grant, General Ulysses Great Central Railway Great Eastern Railway Greece Gretna Junction Grey, Sir Edward Grierson, Colonel Benjamin guerrilla attacks see also sabotage gunpowder torpedoes Gurlt, Dr Hagenau Haifa Haldane, Captain Hamburg Hamilton, J.

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World by Dominic Chinea

Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, The Spirit Level

Johansson’s spanner became the inspiration for another design that became so popular in the USA and Canada that the brand name Crescent is now forever associated with the tool. Another Swedish toolmaker was involved, this time a chap called Karl Peterson, who set up the Crescent Tool Company in 1907 in Jamestown, New York. He definitely got something right because the next year, its Crescent adjustable spanner, or wrench, was being supplied along with each new Ford Model T, the first affordable assembly-line-produced car. The Model T car went on to become the biggest-selling car of all time, a record that stood until the 1970s. Nearly 20 years later, Charles Lindbergh gave Crescent a big helping hand by stating that on his famous solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927 from New York to Paris, all he took with him was “gasoline, sandwiches, a bottle of water and a Crescent wrench and pliers”.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

It is noteworthy that we are still regulating some aspects of cars more than one hundred years after they were invented, for example, by requiring lights to be turned on during the day, mandating seat belts, or limiting carbon dioxide emission levels. These regulations were certainly not part of the initial years of the automobile industry, but they were thought of after years of observation and experience. Imagine if regulators demanded automatic daylight sensors or inflatable air bags in 1910, two years following the Ford Model T introduction. Not only were these needs not thought of; even the basic technology behind these capabilities wasn’t yet invented. The lesson here is that we do not really know what we need to regulate when a new technology is in its infancy of adoption. Government Interferences Targeting Bitcoin primarily, several governments did not feel comfortable with a currency that was not backed by a sovereign country’s institutions.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

., and Tiffany & Company. Unfortunately, the battery had a flaw that sent Edison and his team back to the drawing board again. In the end, the alkaline storage battery Edison finally perfected had virtually no chance of gaining popularity among consumers no matter how reliable it may have been. Ford’s Model T, introduced in 1909 along with its reliable internal combustion engine, had become the standard for consumer autos. Henry Ford, who had once worked for the Edison Illuminating Company’s generating stations, had beat Edison at his own game. He had even come up with the pithy quote, “The customer can have any color he wants so long as it’s black,” he was reported to have said about the Model T.

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See specific countries and inventions Evans, Mathew, 148 Ever Ready, 182, 183 Eveready, 179, 183, 214–15, 220, 229, 231, 249, 252, 272 Eveready Hour, The, 220 experimentation, 6, 11–38, 78, 186 early–mid nineteenth century, 46–50, 51–68, 69–96, 97–131 early–mid twentieth century, 198–212, 213–50 human, 53–56 mid–late nineteenth century, 108–130, 131–40, 141–68, 169–94 trial-and-error, 149 See also science; specific inventors Fairchild Semiconductor, 264 Faraday, Michael, ix, 69–78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 120, 121, 126, 149, 176, 177, 186, 210, 223 Experimental Researches in Electricity, 149 First Law of Electrolysis, 239, 249, 271, 272 motor, 75, 75, 76–77, 92 “farm radios,” 224 Fessenden, Reginald, 209–240 Field, Cyrus, 118–21, 123, 126 financial industries, 106, 116, 219 speculation, 134–39 telegraph and, 133, 134–39 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1–2 The Great Gatsby, 156 fix-it shops, 238 flashlights, 181–82, 182, 183, 214, 215, 235, 243, 255 flat film battery, 277–78 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 165 Fleming, Sir John Ambrose, 208–209 Ford Model T, 175 France, 23, 27, 29, 33, 35–36, 46, 58–60, 72, 98–99, 112, 120, 129, 147, 260 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 28, 29–38, 43, 88, 101, 186 electrical experiments, 30–38 Experiments and observations on electricity, 33–34 Franklin chimes, 21, 29 frauds, 210–11, 259 electrical devices, 161–63, 163, 164–68 French telegraph, 112 frog experiment, 39–40, 40, 41–44 fuel cell, 67–68 future, battery, 279–82 Gale, Leonard, 105 Galileo, 14, 15, 17 Gallows telephone, 159 Galvani, Luigi, 39–46, 53, 162, 186 battery, 39–46 galvanism, 52–56, 63 galvanometer, 74 mirror, 124–25, 125, 126, 127 Galvin, Paul, 230–33 Gassner, Carl, 179 Gassner battery, 179–81 Gates, Bill, 202–203 Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 101, 132 General Electric, 206, 209, 210, 217, 248 generators, electric, 76, 146, 148–53 dynamos, 151, 156, 211 germanium, 244, 245, 251, 259–60 Germany, 17, 19, 28, 95, 101, 176, 228, 260 Gernsback, Hugo, 199–204, 204, 205–206, 222, 223, 243 GI Bill, 236 Gibson, William J., Lectures on Natural Philosophy by Professor Henry, 87 Gilbert, William, 10–15, 19, 23 De Magnete, 11–15, 16 Gisborne, F.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

To another, he said, “I have not worked out for myself anything in the nature of a business philosophy. I see no reason why I should for I cannot imagine a better one than my father has held.” Privately, like his father, Edsel felt the tug of ambition and a need for public accomplishments that would push his World War I embarrassment permanently into the shadows. The legacy of Ford Motor Company—Fordism and the Model T—belonged to Henry. So, at the age of twenty-eight, Edsel went in search of a legacy of his own. It was the Roaring Twenties, a time when science was king and anything felt possible. When it came to the Fords, not even the sky was the limit. Years earlier, when Edsel was fourteen years old, he had set out to build Detroit’s first airplane, in a barn on Woodward Avenue.

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He made the first flight across the English Channel in the summer of 1909, moving the London Daily Express to declare that “Great Britain is no longer an island.” That same year, in Dearborn, Edsel and Van Auken modeled their flying machine after Blériot’s. It had a single fabric wing, a wooden skeleton, and a tricycle landing gear, the parts machined at the Highland Park Ford factory. For power, they mounted a Model T engine, drilled full of holes to lighten the weight, in the plane’s nose. On the day of the maiden flight, Edsel and Van Auken towed the airplane to a field behind a Ford car. Van Auken agreed to pilot the thing (Edsel was forbidden by his father). As Edsel stood by holding his breath, Van Auken motored along the grass and lifted off, sailing six feet over the earth as the Model T engine buzzed like a gnat.

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If the Air Corps was willing to spend $200 million—an unfathomable gamble at the turn of 1941—“we will build and equip a plant capable of turning out one Liberator bomber an hour,” Sorensen said. Edsel smiled at the audacity of it all. Sorensen looked at him. Then he glanced over at Edsel’s son, Henry II, who was following the meeting silently. He saw something in young Henry’s eyes—the same look he could recall seeing so many years ago in Henry Ford’s eyes, back when they were building the first Model T at Highland Park. It was a look of excitement and determination, the knowledge that something great was about to happen. On January 8, 1941, without any official approval from Washington, Edsel Ford announced that his family would begin immediately with plans to build a new type of factory.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

To solve the problem of the length of time needed for the car’s paint to dry, Ford used his own special recipe for japan black, a lacquer that dried in forty-eight hours, much faster than any other formula or color he tested. Ford’s approach to production slashed the price tag of one of his company’s cars to an affordable $825 when it was introduced in the market in 1909; by the mid-1920s, Ford’s Model T sold for less than $300. Ford maintained strict rules, both on the factory floor and in his workers’ homes. When high employee turnover was threatening efficiency, he increased wages, implementing the “five-dollar day”—but the rate was only granted to those who met the standards of Ford’s “sociological department,” which gathered details about the character of employees and monitored their drinking, spending, and even their household tidiness.

…

By 1920, GM was a conglomerate to which company after company had been added with little consideration for how they might all fit together or how information might flow to key decision makers other than through Billy Durant himself. Yet despite the company’s size and scope, GM’s car lines were getting beaten by Ford’s ubiquitous Model T. Durant was ignominiously forced out by his investors after they hired an outside consultant to “evaluate the efficiency of General Motors’ management” and found that the buck stopped with Durant—all information, decisions, and financial resources flowed through him, leaving the company paralyzed during the severe economic downturn of 1920.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Capitalism’s future was contingent upon the democratic ability to correct for excesses, with regulatory oversight being the price of consent of the governed. And as this balance became refined in the unfolding century, the American’s stake in capitalism as a consumer would grow to become as important as his citizenship in its democracy. PART THREE An early Ford Model T advertisement, 1908. Twenty-one AUTOMOBILES While the Progressive era introduced government intervention across a wide range of commercial activity and in regulating market behavior, including activism in areas like conservation and land management, the free market emphasized that it was private hands that made the useful and transformative things, the ingredients of modern society and ease of living.

…

At a trial in future years battling the Dodge Brothers in a shareholder suit, one that prompted him to buy everyone out, he even disputed the notion that a company was primarily in business to make money. He expressed the inverse: Profits were the fuel of the industrial artist to make the products that he chose to; money was an ingredient, not the purpose. This rise of the Ford Motor Company, powered by the Model T’s profits, into a de facto sole proprietorship, stood in stark contrast to another automotive entity that embodied exactly what it meant to be a corporation. In the same year of the Model T’s launch, Billy Durant of Buick mapped out his vision of an automotive corporation. After Durant became involved with Buick, it grew from producing a few dozen cars in 1904 to over eight thousand per year by 1908.

…

It was light and strong: The Model T pioneered the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength and greater flexibility than the traditional steel used in automobile bodies. Ford introduced a new gearing system for his transmission. According to the account of Ford’s most trusted engineer, Charles Sorensen, the Model T had been a four-year, secretive project in development from the company’s founding, an unprecedented level of research and development spent on a car that was designed to retail for less than $1,000. But the Model T, upon its launch, was not particularly cheap. Ford’s vision had not been to build an inexpensive car but to build an advanced, reliable, easy-to-use car and then lower its price.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Capitalism’s future was contingent upon the democratic ability to correct for excesses, with regulatory oversight being the price of consent of the governed. And as this balance became refined in the unfolding century, the American’s stake in capitalism as a consumer would grow to become as important as his citizenship in its democracy. PART THREE An early Ford Model T advertisement, 1908. Twenty-one AUTOMOBILES While the Progressive era introduced government intervention across a wide range of commercial activity and in regulating market behavior, including activism in areas like conservation and land management, the free market emphasized that it was private hands that made the useful and transformative things, the ingredients of modern society and ease of living.

…

At a trial in future years battling the Dodge Brothers in a shareholder suit, one that prompted him to buy everyone out, he even disputed the notion that a company was primarily in business to make money. He expressed the inverse: Profits were the fuel of the industrial artist to make the products that he chose to; money was an ingredient, not the purpose. This rise of the Ford Motor Company, powered by the Model T’s profits, into a de facto sole proprietorship, stood in stark contrast to another automotive entity that embodied exactly what it meant to be a corporation. In the same year of the Model T’s launch, Billy Durant of Buick mapped out his vision of an automotive corporation. After Durant became involved with Buick, it grew from producing a few dozen cars in 1904 to over eight thousand per year by 1908.

…

It was light and strong: The Model T pioneered the use of vanadium steel, which had several times the tensile strength and greater flexibility than the traditional steel used in automobile bodies. Ford introduced a new gearing system for his transmission. According to the account of Ford’s most trusted engineer, Charles Sorensen, the Model T had been a four-year, secretive project in development from the company’s founding, an unprecedented level of research and development spent on a car that was designed to retail for less than $1,000. But the Model T, upon its launch, was not particularly cheap. Ford’s vision had not been to build an inexpensive car but to build an advanced, reliable, easy-to-use car and then lower its price.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

After learning that no steelmaker in America could produce it, Ford Motor Company hired an English metallurgist to design methods for producing it commercially. Because vanadium steel required a hotter furnace than typical steel, Ford worked with a specialized steel company in Canton, Ohio, to test and produce the alloy. Vanadium steel would become, in the words of Ford, “our principal steel.”20 In 1908, Ford finally had his universal car. The Model T was the culmination of all his years of tinkering and designing and testing. It had a twenty-horsepower engine, weighed twelve hundred pounds, and could reach forty-five miles an hour. It had an entirely new design: the Model T was the first production car that had its steering wheel on the left (the better to see oncoming traffic) rather than the right (the better to see rural ditches).

…

Ford had put a rudimentary assembly line in place in 1906, when manager Walter Flanders had had the idea of giving each worker a specific task to perform in the assembly of the Model N and placed the chassis on a truck to be pushed from station to station. But the real breakthrough came in 1912, when William Klann, a foreman at the Ford Motor Company, visited the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Chicago and saw how quickly the packers could “disassemble” pigs placed on a moving trolley overhead. In 1913, Ford introduced the moving assembly line for one part of the Model T, the flywheel magneto that formed the ignition system for the vehicle. Previously, individual workers would assemble entire magnetos from a pile of materials located next to them. A skilled worker could, on average, complete a magneto in twenty minutes. But Klann broke down the assembly process into twenty-nine different tasks and had each worker perform just one of them, with twenty-nine men located along a moving belt in the order in which assembly typically took place.

…

This may have been good for production numbers, but it was decidedly unpleasant for the man. And it turned out that morale had a greater effect on efficiency than Ford had bargained for. Frederick Winslow Taylor had predicted that the assembly line would roughly double production, but in fact, the differential was much less. In 1909, the first full year that Ford manufactured the Model T and before the assembly line had been introduced, the 1,548 workers in the factory produced on average 1,059 cars a month, or 0.68 cars per worker. In 1913, after the introduction of the assembly line, the 13,667 workers in the factory manufactured on average 15,284 automobiles a month, or 1.12 cars per worker.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

By the 1920s, despite the inflation caused by the First World War, the price tag of a Model T was only $265, and Ford was still finding ways to lower labor costs by an average of 7.4 percent a year. The result of Henry Ford’s relentless drive to lower costs in manufacturing the Model T was one of the most astonishing economic success stories in world history. Over the nineteen years that the Ford Motor Company produced the Model T, it manufactured fifteen million of them. By the end of the model run, the company had more than $700 million in undistributed profits. In 1920 Ford was producing half the cars built in the world.

…

In 1896 he built his first automobile in a carriage house behind where he was living. In the next few years he built several racing automobiles, which broke speed records, and, with the help of several backers, opened the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The company was moderately successful at first. Then in 1908 Ford introduced the Model T. It was designed to be both rugged, to handle the often ghastly roads then in existence (there were fewer than two hundred miles of paved roads in the entire country in 1900, outside of cities) and cheap to manufacture. Its initial price was $850, a fraction of what most automobiles then cost, and its running expenses were equally modest, by some estimates only a penny a mile.

…

Henry Ford asked, explaining his business philosophy of pursuing the mass market. “Get costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.” But there was more to this new mass market than just cheap prices, and some companies were better at understanding it than others. Henry Ford, obsessed with the idea that the Model T was perfect, refused to change the design after 1908, concentrating instead on making it cheaper and cheaper. He even refused to add an electric starter after they became available in 1912, because of the weight of the battery. The starter became standard on other cars almost immediately because it was far safer to use than hand cranking (the crank could, and not infrequently did, break the arm of an unlucky user).

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

For the first few decades of the twentieth century, urban driving was often viewed as a nuisance and motorists were frequently seen as both a danger to public safety and a threat to the normal flows of everyday urban mobility.3 peter norton offers a compelling history of the transition in urban driving from the 1900s to the 1930s, noting that both accidents and confrontations between pedestrians and motorists were common. and while courts tended to rule against city regulations impeding automobility, judges and juries took a favorable view of pedestrians’ implicit right to the streets, almost always siding with them in cases stemming from car accidents in the 1910s and 1920s.4 indeed, norton quotes a Chicago municipal judge from 1913 who ruled against a driver with the justification that “the streets of Chicago belong to the city, not to the automobilists.”5 nevertheless, the economic opportunities seen in Ford’s Model T and the burgeoning auto industry prompted financial/ political elites to push for the inclusion of cars in major U.S. cities by the end of the 1910s—a clear indication that public opinion and public transportation were largely deemed irrelevant when weighed against their own desires for luxury goods and exhilarating hobbies (nearly 90 percent of urbanites did not own automobiles at the time).

…

Within these narrow parameters, corporations and other “green” capitalists prove themselves adept at reframing and repackaging environmentalism not as a radical political movement or a struggle for social justice, but rather, a feel-good lifestyle for a new demographic of consumers who are supposed to be satiated by the eco-friendliness of new automotive interior fabrics, or somehow impressed by the “green” features of new hybrid SUvs—vehicles capable of achieving the futuristic efficiency of Ford’s 1908 Model-T (up to twenty-one miles per gallon).10 in the United States, where the longevity of automobility is firmly secured by the country’s populist support for passive environmental goals and free market capitalism, it is likely that an affordable electric car will make the illusion of never-ending automobility that much more tenable, just as critiques of driving will seem all the more grouchy and unfounded if oil ceases to become the issue. yet buried within the burgeoning love affair with the electric car— or at least the idea of the electric car—is a much dirtier love affair with the invisible protagonist of the impending electric car drama: coal.

…

(Thousand Oaks, Ca: pine Forge press, 2004), 226. nearly half of the hybrid model SUvs scheduled for production in 2009 boasted roughly the same maximum fuel efficiency rating as the Model T (up to twenty-one miles per gallon). See Holly reich, “Eco-friendly interiors,” New York Daily News, March 21, 2008; Ford Motor Company, “Model T Facts,” available at http://media.ford.com/article_ display.cfm?article_id=858; U.S. Department of Energy, “2009 Hybrid vehicles,” in Fuel Economy Guide (2008); Mazda, “Mazda Develops World’s First Biofabric Made with 100 percent plant-Derived Fiber for vehicle interiors,” Mazda press release no. 26889, 2007.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

At one point on their trip, with the Winton stranded, Crocker had to bike twenty-six miles to get gasoline from the nearest town—and then walk back after one of the bike’s tires was punctured. The first drive-up gas station in the United States didn’t arrive until ten years after the men made their journey, and five years after the introduction of Henry Ford’s Model T. On their transcontinental crossing, Jackson and Crocker had to drive through streams and over mountain roads that weren’t designed for cars. They moved boulders by hand, endured thirty-six hours without food after getting lost in Wyoming’s badlands, and got stuck in a swamp that buried the car up to its floorboards.

…

The Renaissance leaders embraced the idea that the public sphere should be beautiful, refined, and appealing so that a society’s richer citizens would never be tempted to withdraw into their private estates, closed off from the world around them. All citizens could then be “uplifted by a pleasing vision of communal life.” It was 1908 when Henry Ford unveiled the first Model T, a product that would reorient the infrastructure of civilization, and around which civilization would reorient itself. Just over a century later, Elon Musk unveiled the Model S at a time when civilization is more than ready for a cultural rebirth—one that could be catalyzed by something as innocuous as a beautiful car that drives itself.

…

., 55 Faraday, Michael, 88 Faraday Future, 82–86, 87, 91, 93, 98, 120, 241–246 Federal Trade Commission, 48 Fein, Bruce, 227 Feng, Changge, 238–239 FF 91 (Faraday Future), 118, 243 FFZERO1 (Faraday Future), 87, 91, 93, 98, 120 Fiat Chrysler, 161, 266 Fields, Mark, 179–180, 266 Filipovic, Robert, 242 financial issues arguments against electric cars, 15, 16 autonomous vehicles and loss of jobs/revenue, 271–272 dot-com crash (2000), 108 problems affecting technology/auto companies, 242–244 Tesla Motors, during and following Great Recession (2007–2008), 6–7, 26, 37, 68, 70, 74–76 Tesla Motors’ investors, 24, 67–68, 76–81 Fisker, Henrik, 33, 71 Fisker Automotive, 71 500E (Fiat), 161 Fletcher, Pam, 162–164, 168 Flexport, 271 Ford, Henry, 28–29, 37, 99, 194, 275 Ford Motor Company Aston Martin and, 156 automobile sales, during Great Depression, 47 electric vehicle plans, 185 Fields and, 179–180 Focus, 54 Ford Smart Mobility, 266 Leach and, 99–100 Model T, 194, 275 Tucker and, 35 Formula E, 97 Formula E Sustainability Committee, 100 Fortune, on Tesla accident, 207–213, 230, 231 fossil fuel industry, 205–234 carbon tax and, 210, 223, 232–234 classic cars and, 193–194 diesel motors, 167–170 displacement issues of, 213–226 electric cars vs. gasoline cars, 14–17, 32, 170–172 hybrid cars and gasoline, 131–132 propaganda of, 203 Tesla criticism and, 205–213, 226–231 Foxconn, 150, 236 Fueling U.S.

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Clarence L. Johnson

Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

“Kid, you’re a coach’s assistant.” He repeated, “You’re a coach’s assistant. Take it or leave it.” “Not me.” And that was that. My next move was to phone the University of Michigan about athletic scholarships. They offered them, and my grades were good enough for admission, so I got in my trusty Ford Model T roadster and drove up to Ann Arbor to try for a scholarship there. My $300 would do no more than pay the tuition. Just about the second thing I found out was that an undergraduate was not allowed to have a car on campus. So I decided to take my car home and then come back to try out for football.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Yet scientific advances over the preceding decades had made it possible to artificially produce temperatures that were positively Labradorian. By the early 1920s, Birdseye had developed a flash-freezing process using stacked cartons of fish frozen at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inspired by the new industrial model of Henry Ford’s Model T factory, he created a “double-belt freezer” that ran the freezing process along a more efficient production line. He formed a company called General Seafood using these new production techniques. Birdseye found that just about anything he froze with this method—fruit, meat, vegetables—would be remarkably fresh after thawing.

…

Hamlin, Christopher. Cholera: The Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009. Hecht, Jeff. Beam: The Race to Make the Laser. Oxford University Press, 2005. Hecht, Jeff. Understanding Fiber Optics. Prentice Hall, 2005. Heilbron, John L. Galileo. Oxford University Press, 2012. “Henry Ford and the Model T: A Case Study in Productivity” (Part 1). http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.php?lid=668&type=student. Herman, L. M., Pack, A. A., and Hoffmann-Kuhnt, M. “Seeing Through Sound: Dolphins Perceive the Spatial Structure of Objects Through Echolocation,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 112 (1998): 292–305.

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Stability is critical; depending how adventurous your cats are, they may physically attack the feeders and try to push them over, or hit them hard enough to trigger a trickle of food dispensing. A flared base isn’t the final solution, but it’s a big step in the right direction. It’s a heck of a lot tougher to knock over a feeder with a bigger “foot” on the ground. It’s off-white. The old feeder, like the Ford Model T, was available in any color customers wanted, so long as it was black. Which meant it did a great job of not blending in with almost any decor, and also showed off its dust collection like a champ. Thank goodness the new model comes in “linen.” These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Gradually, Ford’s cars became cheaper and faster. In 1906, Ford produced his Model N, a 1,050-pound car that he sold for the bargain price of $500, and he sold so many of them (over 8,500) that he leaped into the front ranks of the automotive industry. In 1908, Ford introduced his Model T at the bargain price of $825 (about $19,000 in 2010 currency). Five years later, Ford started producing the Model T on a moving assembly line, which increased his factory’s speed and efficiency. Of course, the process of mass industrialization—dividing complicated manufacturing processes into small, straightforward tasks—long predated Ford. In 1776, Adam Smith was extolling the efficiencies created by the division of labor in a pin factory.

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Chicago’s stockyards switched from pigs to beef when Gustavus Swift introduced a refrigerated railcar that could keep slaughtered beef from spoiling in transit. Like many important innovations, Swift’s great idea now seems blindingly obvious. He put the ice on top, instead of on the bottom, so it melted down onto the sides of beef and kept them cool. Like Chicago, Detroit grew as a node of the great rail and water network long before Henry Ford made his first Model T. Between 1850 and 1890, the city’s population increased tenfold, from 21,000 to 206,000 people. Detroit’s growth was again intimately tied to its waterway, the Detroit River, which was part of the path from Iowa’s farmland to New York’s tables. By 1907, 67 million tons of goods were moving along the Detroit River, more than three times as much as the total amount going through the ports of New York or London.

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While Germans were responsible for the key innovations in producing the automobile, Americans, especially Henry Ford, deserve the credit for mass-producing cars. By the end of the 1920s, Americans had 23 million cars on the road. Cars, unlike trains, functioned reasonably well on the existing roads, which were already being converted to asphalt in the nineteenth century. Henry Ford’s Model T’s were sturdy vehicles, simple enough to be repaired by ordinary people, and they traveled easily at modest speeds even on dirt. But drivers soon realized that cars could run much more quickly on limited-access highways with smooth asphalt paving. America began building a highway network to accommodate the new form of transportation.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

In 1904, for example, there were no automatic machines at Ford. In that year Ford made 1,745 automobiles with a workforce of less than 500. Nine years later, at his Highland Park Factory, Ford was employing 14,000 workers and turning out his first mass-produced car, the Model T, at a rate of 189,000 a year. By 1916 Ford employed 40,000 workers and was turning out 585,000 Model T's a year.22 This THE ROOTS OF MASS PRODUCTION stupendous increase in production was made possible by a record of innovation that makes the rise of Ford perhaps the pivotal event in the history of mass production. Ford deployed the automatic machinery of the American System on a scale far surpassing anything seen in the nineteenth century.

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But from the early 1860s onward there was already a trend toward using moving lines to "disassemble" pork and beef carcasses in midwestern slaughter houses, and in his memoir My Life and Work, Henry Ford himself refers to this squeamish precedent. According to Ford, the concept of the assembly line came "in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers used in dressing beef."29 Whatever the exact origins of the assembly line, its first use at Ford dates from April 1913, when the Model T's magnetos were first put together using this novel method. An engine assembly line was in operation by November 1913, and an assembly line for the Model T's chassis by April 1914. In early experiments with the new methods, Ford achieved spectacular increases in worker productivity.

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In the post-war world, American consumers had become more demanding and were beginning to tire of what Emma Rothschild has called the "functional and uncomfortable" Model T.36 Ford's U.S. market share fell from 55 percent in 1921 to 30 percent in 1926, and to 25 percent in the first half of 1927, when Henry Ford announced the discontinuation of the Model T.37 Those months in 1927 were significant for another reason. It was then that production at General Motors' mass market division, Chevrolet, exceeded Ford's for the first time. Chevrolet's production rose from 280,000 in 1924 to 732,000 in 1926, and to over a million in 1927.38 The technical architect of Chevrolet's success was William S.

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

The interesting thing about the static was that it seemed to rise and fall once a day, which suggested to Jansky that it consisted of radio waves being generated from the Sun, but then over a period of weeks the rise and fall of the static deviated from a 24-hour cycle. Jansky could rotate his antennae on a set of Ford Model T tyres to follow the mysterious signal, and he soon realised the brightest point was not coming from the direction of the Sun, but from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. Coinciding with the economic impact of the Great Depression, Jansky’s pioneering work did not immediately lead to an expansion in the new science of radio astronomy, but ultimately exploring the radio sky has become one of the most powerful techniques used in understanding the Universe beyond our solar system COLLISION COURSE Of the six thousand or so stars we can see from Earth with the naked eye, only one object lies beyond the gravitational pull of our galaxy.

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Some teachers handled him well and some did not, but however they handled him, his pronounced eagerness to learn persisted—he eagerly explored both the countryside and whatever books he could get hold of. In 1913, when he was not quite ten, John helped his father wire their home for electricity (subsequently, they wired the homes of some of their neighbors, too). In 1914, John mastered the owner’s manual of his father’s new Ford Model T, and at eleven he was driving it. John read his mother’s books, including Ruskin and Spenser, and he read his father’s books—including a manual on radiotelephony (wireless sound transmission). When his father ordered an up-to-date slide rule, then decided that he didn’t really need it, John mastered it within a couple of weeks and thereupon became, in his own mind, a nascent mathematician.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.1 Thanks to New York City, the average resident of New York state uses less gasoline than the average resident of any other state, and uses less than half as much as the average resident of Wyoming. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot.

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This same effect operated in the opposite direction beginning in late 2008, when the plunging cost of oil softened the impact, for American consumers, of the spreading global recession. Rising oil prices after 1999 were also responsible for America’s misguided decision to promote the production of ethanol as a gasoline substitute and extender. Ethanol has been viewed as the motor fuel of the future for more than a century—Henry Ford, anticipating eventual petroleum shortages, designed the Model T to run also on alcohol—but it has many disadvantages, both economically and environmentally, and it is not the energy panacea it is often presented to be. U.S. ethanol production is still minuscule, relatively speaking. In 2006, it amounted to less than 5.5 billion gallons.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Oil and its derivatives, such as gasoline or diesel, could hold much more energy for a given volume or weight than could any contemporary battery. Additionally, gasoline-powered cars could be refueled quickly, and that fuel was fairly easy to transport—though it was certainly dangerous. By the 1910 model year, Ford was producing nearly 20,000 Model T’s annually.3 By 1927 that number had skyrocketed so that there was one car for every five Americans, and more than 50 percent of American families owned an automobile.4 Even during the depths of the Great Depression, automotive sales fluctuated between about one and three million units a year.5 With growth came consolidation, and by the 1930s the international auto industry was dominated by three giants: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.

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In a very real sense, the tragedy was also the origin of Japan’s auto manufacturing sector. Just as in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the automobile played a critical role in rescue and reconstruction. Unlike horses, cars could work around the clock. After the earthquake, an enormous number of Ford Model T’s were imported. And as the immediate demands of recovery eased, many of these trucks were converted into public buses.5 They were excellent at navigating the ruins of the city, durable and cheap. From the standpoint of both economics and utility these vehicles held a commanding advantage over the alternatives—mostly pack animals or domestically produced cars and trucks.

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

As long as the early luxury market lasted, most automobile manufacturers, who were able to sell all the high-priced cars 223 E N D O F U R B A N I S M they could produce, spurned the idea of making lower-priced cars at lower unit profits.14 As already recounted in Chapter 1, the Ford Model T changed that. Radically improved assembly techniques allowed management to reduce the retail price of a Model T from $850 to $360 in seven years—while at the same time increasing wages and profit margins.15 From a 1907–8 base of about 7,000 cars, Ford thus achieved more than 110:1 expansion of sales. In the 1916–17 season, Ford rolled out 785,000 Model T’s, each of which required only about 25 percent of the manhours that had gone into the same vehicle a decade earlier.

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The regimes of “automobility” and electrification now spread across the wide world, defining a dramatic turn toward modernity in places as different from the United States and each other as Brazil, Zimbabwe, Egypt, China, and Russia. CITY HALL AND ITS FRAILTIES Just as Henry Ford’s industrial managers were rolling out the Model T, Frank Rice (mayor of New Haven from 1910–17; figure 1.3) busied himself with more pedestrian issues: “There should be uniformity in the construction of our side22 C R E AT I V E D E S T R U C T I O N Figure 1.3. Mayor Frank Rice, c. 1910. NHCHS. walks. Absolute uniformity of materials should prevail in the construction of the walks in a single block, and strong efforts should be made to effect the construction of uniform walks the entire length of the streets of the city.

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On the following Sunday, the Register ran another big ad offering “free motor cars” leaving the corner of Church and Chapel by the downtown Green every hour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to visit Racebrook Estates, boldly described as “New Haven’s Next Big Restricted Suburb.”34 As John Stilgoe asks, “If the Irish were right to desert an island struck by famine and misrule rather than rebelling against the English, why should they not have begun deserting eastern American cities in the 1920s, when a number of complex issues seemingly defied solution?”35 At just about the same moment, one might have asked rhetorically whether Henry Ford might be expected to limit production of his Model T, once sales passed 700,000 per year, so as not to pose intractable problems for those very cities. Or whether Westinghouse Electric should forgo the opportunity to wrap the continent in a grid of alternating current that would change the economics of energy distribution, and of land development, irrevocably.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Children played in the middle of those roads, and adults met one another there. The one thing Bedford Avenue wouldn’t have seen frequently was the automobile. Even during the first years of the twentieth century, cars were so rare that seeing one was still newsworthy. All that changed in 1908, when the first Model T rolled out the doors of Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. The Model T didn’t just change America’s street culture. It’s one of the few machines in history that actually deserves to be called world changing. Before the T, cars were a novelty item for the upper classes and, occasionally, a genuinely useful aid for farmers. Still, the revolution that Ford’s “car for everyone” ignited wasn’t immediate.

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The choice wasn’t especially difficult: Penn offered me a full fellowship, plus a stipend of $75 a week. I promptly went out and bought a “new” 1970 Chevelle. Ten-plus years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I did the same, and headed south on Interstate 95. Destination: Philadelphia. Fifty years after Henry Ford’s Model T had transformed cars from luxury items to necessities, the victory of the automobile looked complete. It also looked, to a lot of people, inevitable: a historical tidal wave that could have taken no other form than the one it did. But it wasn’t really inevitable at all. The revolution that transformed America’s roads, the one that really got under way in the 1950s, was the result of a sequence of decisions—to draft the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, to pass the Rayburn-Wheeler Act, to collude in the National City Lines conspiracy, to build the Interstate Highway System, and to fund the suburbanization of America through the GI Bill—that pushed an entire country in one automobile-rich direction.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

bank run, disinformation, fake news, Ford Model T, indoor plumbing, Scientific racism, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois

In this decade of change, she could vote for a president. She could run for office. She could own property without needing a man’s permission. She could order a drink at an underground club. She could even choose when to have children (a primitive cervical cap had been available for a decade). In 1923, Madge bought a Ford Model T coupe and taught herself how to drive. The car gave her real independence. She gave up her job and talked her friend Ermina Moore into joining her on an adventure—a slow drive across the United States to California. There was no guarantee of following asphalt all the way. The new Lincoln Highway, stitching one coast to the other for the touring motorist, was continuously paved only from New York to Iowa.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

And that effort to increase the power density of our engines, turbines, and motors has resulted in the production of ever-greater amounts of power from smaller and smaller spaces. The evolution of power density can be visualized by comparing the engine in the Model T with that of a modern vehicle. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, which had a 2.9-liter engine that produced 22 horsepower, or about 7.6 horsepower per liter of displacement.11 A century later, Ford Motor Company was selling the 2010 Ford Fusion. It was equipped with a 2.5-liter engine that produced 175 horsepower, which works out to 70 horsepower per liter.12 Thus, even though the displacement of the Fusion’s engine is about 14 percent less than the one in the Model T, it produces more than nine times as much power per liter.13 In other words, over the past century, Ford’s engineers have made a nine-fold improvement in the engine’s power density.

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Power Equivalencies of Various Engines, Motors, and Appliances, in Horsepower (and Watts) Saturn V rocket: 160,000,000 (120 billion W)19 Boeing 757: 86,000 (64.1 million W)20 Top fuel dragster: 7,500 (5.6 million W)21 M1A1 tank: 1,500 (1.1 million W)22 Formula 1 race car: 750 (560,000 W)23 2009 Ferrari F430: 490 (365,000 W)24 1999 Acura 3.2 TL sedan: 225 (168,000 W)25 2010 Ford Fusion: 175 (130,000 W)26 1908 Ford Model T: 22 (16,000 W)27 Average home air-conditioning compressor: 5.6 (4,200 W)28 Honda Cub motorbike: 4 (3,000 W)29 Average lawnmower: 3.5 (2,600 W)30 Dyson vacuum cleaner: 1.68 (1,250 W)31 Toaster: 1.67 (1,250 W)32 Lance Armstrong, pedaling at maximum output: 1.34 (1,000 W)33 Coffeemaker: 1.08 (800 W)34 Cuisinart: 0.16 (117 W)35 Human walking at a brisk pace: 0.14 (106 W)36 20-inch iMac computer: 0.11 (80 W)37 Ryobi 3/8-inch cordless drill battery charger: 0.07 (49 W)38 60-watt lamp: 0.07 (54 W)39 Table fan: 0.03 (25 W)40 Recharging an Apple iPhone: 0.0013 (1 W)41 CHAPTER 4 Wood to Coal to Oil The Slow Pace of Energy Transitions GIVEN OUR CURRENT OBSESSION with Big Oil and Big Coal, it’s worth noting that the fuel source that has had the longest reign in the American energy business is plain old firewood.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

Nowadays almost every establishment sports the red-and-white-striped shield that is the Union Pacific logo. If ever there existed a railway company town, this is it, and as the railroad’s fortune goes, so goes that of North Platte, Nebraska. Trains take passengers—and freight, for that matter—only so far: they travel from station to station, not from house to house. And when Henry Ford created a machine, his Model T, a flivver, that for a few hundred dollars and some stoicism on the driver’s part would indeed allow a rider to drive himself and his passengers to and from his very home, that changed everything, once again. So far as human cargo was concerned, the brief supremacy of the train was brought suddenly low by the motor car.

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But it didn’t break (it didn’t brake, either, for the first model was not so equipped), and the Duryea Motor Wagon Company was swiftly founded, made fifteen cars, raced one of them creditably against a German Benz in a contest held on Thanksgiving Day in 1895, and helped spawn a new American business: making and selling automobiles. Ransom Olds and his Oldsmobile came next, then Henry Ford, the Model T, and mass production, and soon the sound of lobbying by the two-wheelers faded to a dull roar while that from the four-wheelers of the new automobile industry rose in a crescendo and became deafening. In 1894, the American government seemed to be listening. Officials were sensitive enough to make the connection between roads and the needs of men like old Mr.

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The bureau got it in 1919, when Thomas Harris MacDonald was plucked out of Iowa, and made its chief, a post he would hold on to like a limpet for the next thirty-four years. His appointment came at a propitious moment in the nation’s history. The Great War was over and the troops were home. A period of prosperity had settled on the country; cars were being bought, and Henry Ford’s Model T began to be available. Dwight Eisenhower’s cross-country expedition had been concluded, its reports were out, and suggestions for road improvement were on every official table. Men had been crossing the country by car since a Vermont doctor improbably named Horatio Nelson Jackson had done so on a bet in 1903.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

After all, should we refuse to use antibiotics, X-rays, microwave ovens or pacemakers because the scientific discoveries which led to their creation were the product of lucky accidents?* You would have to be a deranged purist to adopt this view – and you would also end up hungry, bored and quite possibly dead. As with scientific progress, so too with business. The iPhone, perhaps the most successful product since the Ford Model T, was developed not in response to consumer demand or after iterative consultation with focus groups; it was the monomaniacal conception of one slightly deranged man.* And yet, in the search for public policy and business solutions, we are in the grip of an obsession with rational quantification.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

“The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid–nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.”

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

In reality, our educational system operates largely according to the dictates of an industrial system: a consistent drive toward greater standardization and measurement, an overt promotion of a utilitarian STEM-focused curriculum, and even a physical synchronization through the use of bells to signal changes and breaks—all as if kids are little Ford Model T’s rolling off a Frederick Taylor–designed assembly line. To most people, this sounds ridiculous. It’s common knowledge that we all learn in different ways. Learning is a cumulative process that involves neurological, physiological, and emotional development. This means we all absorb, incorporate, and apply knowledge at different paces.

The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

In her model (see Chart 1.2 overleaf), technological revolutions have two consecutive lives. The first, which she calls the “installation period”, is one of exploration and exuberance. Engineers, entrepreneurs and investors all try to find the best opportunities created by a technological big bang, such as Ford’s Model T in 1908 and Intel’s first microprocessor in 1971. Spectacular financial successes attract more and more capital, which leads to a bubble. This is the “gilded age” of any given technology, “a great surge of development”, as Ms Perez calls technological revolutions. 5 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY 1.2 2.1 The life and times of a technology Recurring phases of each great surge INSTALLATION PERIOD Turning point DEPLOYMENT PERIOD Degree of diffusion of the technological revolution Previous great surge MATURITY SYNERGY (Golden age) FRENZY (gilded age) Next great surge IRRUPTION Big bang Crash Institutional adjustment Next big bang Time Source: Carlota Perez The second, or “deployment”, period is a much more boring affair.

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What agitates worriers in the West is the movement of work abroad, regardless of whether it is then outsourced or performed in-house. But the reality is more complicated than they acknowledge. A well-established model The age of mass mechanisation began with the rise of large, integrated assembly lines, such as the one Henry Ford built in 1913 at Dearborn, Michigan, to make the Model t. Over the course of the 20th century, companies reorganised industrial production into ever more intricate layers of designers, subcontractors, assemblers and logistics specialists, but by and large companies have mostly continued to manufacture close to where their goods are consumed.

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They have then grown internationally by producing overseas, for new customers, the same goods they produce and sell to their customers at home: 87% of foreign direct investment is made in search of local markets, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. Products and brands have become global, but production has not. Conversely, white-collar work continues to be produced in the same way that Ford produced the Model t: at home and in-house. Bruce 113 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY 4.1 2.1 Distance no object Transport costs Telecom costs Revenue per ton mile, cents* $’000 per year† for two Mbps fibre leased line, half circuit‡ 8 India Air freight 80 Rail Philippines 60 6 4 1,000 100 10 Barge 500 40 (inland waterways) 20 2 United States 0 0 1980 85 Source: McKinsey Global Institute 90 95 99 750 1996 97 98 250 Ireland 99 2000 0 01 *Revenue used as a proxy for prices; adjusted for inflation †January figures ‡International leased line for India; long-distance domestic leased line in the US Harreld, the head of strategy at ibm, reckons that the world’s companies between them spend about $19 trillion each year on sales, general and administrative expenses.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Update Did you know that an original, 1976 VW Golf GTi weighed 830 kg? Don’t care? You might, if you owned a 2009 VW Golf GTi: it weighs 1,330 kg. That’s about 60 percent heavier. 176 FUTURE FILES Or how about the fact that in 2007 Ford’s US automobile range averaged 18.7 mpg? Seems low. Especially if you consider that a 1908 Ford Model T could return 25 mpg. Things are changing in the automobile world — but clearly not very fast. GM and Chrysler still look like dinosaurs (they may be extinct by the time you read this). Indian company Tata has launched a very cheap car, and I’d expect a couple of Chinese car companies to make significant inroads into western markets very soon.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Brazil is the world leader in booze-fueled vehicles: every car on its roads runs on an ethanol blend, from 20 percent mixed with gasoline up to 100 percent ethanol-fueled. Even in the United States, many states require that all gasoline contain up to 10 percent alcohol, a blend that can be used without modification to the engine. Indeed, the very first mass-produced car, the Ford Model T, was designed to run on either fossil-fuel gasoline or alcohol, and several distilleries in the US converted crops into car fuel until Prohibition killed the practice. The problem with large-scale production of ethanol for fueling the transport system of a recovering civilization is sourcing enough refined sugar to feed the fermenting microbes.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia Chapter 6 Utopia Reconsidered The Growing Retreat from Space Exploration and Other Megaprojects Nothing is more indicative of the fading of scientific and technological utopian fantasies from the sensibilities of ordinary Americans (and most other people) than the relatively muted response on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first moon landing of 1969. In 1994 there was hardly the euphoria that had characterized similar major anniversary celebrations involving New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, the first coast-to-coast telephone hookup, or the first Ford Motor Model T automobile (though the 2007 Model T centennial was severely reduced from original plans because of the threat of bankruptcy facing Ford Motor Company and, for that matter, the possible collapse of the entire American auto industry). By 1994 it had become painfully clear to most people that, contrary to centuries of utopian dreams, the moon landing had not changed the world.

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The possibility of accidents and deaths became one of the automobile’s thrills.70 Speed rewarded citizens depending upon their geographical location, income, and, being a predominantly male province, gender. Speed also necessitated governmental controls in the form of highway construction, traffic regulations, and drivers’ licenses. Yet Duffy fails to appreciate the inability of many auto and other workers, including those in Detroit, to afford Henry Ford’s Model T, the cheapest American car through to the early 1920s. These workers presumably never experienced speed first-hand. Meanwhile, for many twentieth-century workers, speed remained associated primarily with Taylor’s stopwatches and other nonpleasurable methods of control. This qualification has parallels with those contemporary claims of the supposed universality of high-tech’s transforming effects—a very dubious stance.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

In the United States the story was largely the same as in Europe. In the 1890s, there were already about thirty companies building cars. By 1909, the low-volume, high-price model of automobile production was standard for the nearly three hundred American automobile companies. All except for one: Ford Motor Company. The introduction of the Model T in 1908 changed U.S. industry forever. But the Model T was not the first car Ford worked on. The company had started in 1903. What happened in those first five years? Models A, B, C, F, K, N, R, and S all came and went as Ford struggled to find the right car for the American market.

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He wrote in 1906 that “the greatest need today is a light low-priced car with an up-to-date engine of ample horsepower, and built of the very best material.”2 Ford sold the initial Model Ts for $850 but by 1924 dropped the price to only $290, which is amazing considering the rising inflation of the period. Quality was key, but so was price. How to reconcile the two? Working alongside a small group of other mechanics, Henry Ford built the first Model T simply. The engine could be cast in one piece, out of a relatively inexpensive but light vanadium-steel alloy. The process of production of the Model T, as well as the product itself, was novel. The young mechanics Ford arrayed about him drew on the organizational techniques of many different industries, from meatpacking to gun manufacturing, to invent a new way of building cars.

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Four models—the runabout, the touring car, the town car, and the delivery car—would all be based on the same interchangeable chassis. The car was brought to the worker, not the worker to the car. A complete Model T emerged from the factory every forty seconds. By merging production techniques from a variety of industries, as well as pushing the limits of machining, Ford dropped the production time of a Model T from twelve and half hours in 1908 to less than thirty minutes by 1914. The car stayed the same while the machines used to produce the cars constantly improved. In 1915, Ford Motor Company celebrated its millionth sale. Though Henry Ford loved building cars, he hated business, especially finance.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

ATD had placed its computers right beside Island’s baker’s racks of Dell computers in the basement of 50 Broad, giving it a huge advantage over Cummings’s firm, based more than a thousand miles away in North Kansas City. Those miles meant money. In the world of automated speed trading, it was like racing a Ford Model T against a Lamborghini Testarossa. Because Tradebot often popped in and out of stocks in seconds, a fleeting sliver of time could mean the difference between a profit and a loss. Just as floor traders had an advantage by being at the heart of the action, proximity to a trading network’s computer systems gave certain firms an edge over competitors in the race to grab a trade.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

In the same way, armory practice in machining laid down a substrate of technologies—including gauging, pattern making, profiling, and milling—that were seized on later and taken in many different directions by private companies. The apotheosis of armory practice—machine production lines with special purpose machinery turning out fully interchangeable parts with little or no manual intervention—came only with the first Ford Model T assembly line in 1913. That production model dominated much of American manufacturing in the twentieth century. For most of the nineteenth century, however, highly organized production lines using precision special-purpose machines accounted for a very modest share of national output. The mass-production industries that drove American growth through the nineteenth century were those in which the United States had a massive comparative advantage, and they sprang primarily from the crops, husbandry, and natural resources of the West.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Since then, efficiency has improved by nearly a factor of five, and prices have dropped by a factor of four. They became bigger better and cheaper. The unregulated fridge market was only doing bigger. Source: Lawrence Berkeley Lab. The U.S. automobile industry provides a marked contrast to the remarkable and rapid improvements seen in refrigerators and other appliances. The 1908 Ford Model T traveled 25 miles on a gallon of gas. Fuel efficiency subsequently declined for decades until energy and environmental concerns prompted an interest in fuel conservation. The average EPA miles per gallon for all cars sold in the United States peaked at 22.1 mpg in 1998, but dropped backed to 20.8 mpg in 2004.5 This is a grim testimonial to the successful lobbying efforts of the auto industry and the influence of their friends in Congress, particularly John Dingell,6 to relax the types of regulations that proved so effective for other products, and to exempt small trucks and fuel-hog SUVs from the already weak standards.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

It was a method that even its biggest evangelist, the mall developer–turned–downtown savior Victor Gruen, would come to bitterly regret. You could draw a direct line from the crowded curbs of the start of the twentieth century to the volcanic wastelands that constituted many American downtowns by its end. The arrival of Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908, along with the subsequent improvements in durability and reliability that permitted year-round outdoor car storage, established parking as a major urban issue. Not only did merchants and country folk quickly abandon horsepower in the first few decades of the century; wealthy commuters could drive themselves, ditching the unwashed, the pickpockets, and the bustle pinchers on the trolleys.

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This switch would be accelerated by the arrival of indoor enjoyments like television and air-conditioning, as well as appliances like washers and dryers, which freed the backyard from its workaday purpose, but it began with the automobile. Prior to widespread car ownership, streets were multifunctional public places suitable for hawkers and markets, stickball games and snowball fights, the storage of construction materials, and waste disposal. The roaring car traffic associated with Henry Ford’s Model T cemented the street’s sole purpose as a thoroughfare. The children’s book series Frog and Toad offers an early glimpse of the way drivers navigated the terrain. Behind the wheel emerges “Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, Toad the traffic queller, the lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.”

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

Model airplanes are another. We also refer to the Model T, fashion models, artists’ models, a weather model, an economic model, the Black-Scholes Model, the Standard Model. What do we mean when we call something a model? The Model T The Model T is a type of Ford, one of a class of things belonging to the Ford category. The Model T is an instance, not everything a Ford can be. Fashion Models A fashion model displays clothing or cosmetics. What’s important about a fashion model is the exterior: looks, physique, aura. The rest is more or less irrelevant, except insofar as auras and exteriors reflect interior qualities.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In China, despite rapid demand growth, oil is only 20 percent of total energy use, and the largest part of that oil is used as fuel in industry or as diesel in trucks and farm equipment. But that is changing swiftly. As the Chinese automobile industry moves into the fast lane, the impact will be felt not only across the nation but globally. In 1924 Henry Ford, already known worldwide for his Model T, received an unexpected letter. “I have . . . read of your remarkable work in America,” wrote China’s president Sun Yat-sen. “And I think you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale.” He continued: “In China you have an opportunity to express your mind and ideals in the enduring form of a new industrial system.”

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One congressman (and a future Speaker of the House) predicted that alcohol “made from cornstalks” would soon be one of the “most pertinent factors in modern civilization.”2 With the tax eliminated, demand shot up, and ethanol was once again locked in a great race with gasoline as to which would be the “fuel of the future.” Making good on his social contract with America’s farmers, Ford ensured that the Model T, at least when he introduced it, could run on either ethanol or gasoline. It was the first flex-fuel vehicle. Later he introduced Fordson tractors that could run on alcohol as well as gasoline. With all that, however, gasoline was the dominant fuel because it cost only a third as much.

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One citizen wrote to the Los Angeles Times in shock: “We have created one of the finest networks of freeways in the country, and suddenly wake up to discover that we have also created a monster.”3 Haagen-Smit’s discovery in 1948 would eventually lead to what some believe could be the most important development in transportation since Henry Ford’s Model T—the massive effort in the twenty-first century to bring back something that had disappeared from the roads at the beginning of the twentieth century: An automobile with no tailpipe at all. The electric car. THE RACE RESUMES Oil had held its seemingly impregnable position as king of the realm of transportation for almost a century.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Raised on a farm outside Detroit, he had absorbed the farmer’s obsession for any tool or technique that let you get more bushels or other outputs from the same hour of labor, and he made that principle the centerpiece of his new company. Where rival carmakers were handcrafting luxury sedans for the scions of the Gilded Age, Ford created his Model T to be cheap enough “for the multitudes.” To do this, he not only designed a simple, durable vehicle, but he also created a new system, centered on the world’s first moving assembly line, that let him produce that car in enormous volumes and thus exploit the very powerful efficiencies of scale.

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As Ford churned out more cars every month, each car’s share of the “fixed” cost of Ford’s factories became proportionately smaller. As Ford’s costs fell, he was able to cut his selling price, thereby attracting more buyers and generating even more volume, leading to even lower prices, and so on. By 1923, Ford had lowered the price of a Model T from $850 (around $21,000 today) to just $290 ($4,000), or around a third of the average workingman’s annual salary and, as crucially, around half the price of a horse and buggy, then the standard in personal mobility. Put another way, a citizen of even modest means could now afford an unprecedented upgrade in personal power.

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

The ambitious Durant quickly acquired a third auto company, located in Pontiac; then, feeling he had to add a Detroit automaker to his portfolio, he paid $3.5 million for the Cadillac Motor Company. The classic GM five-brand lineup became complete in 1917, when Durant brought in a model founded by a mustachioed Swiss auto racer named Louis Chevrolet. The Chevrolet Royal Mail, a $750 four-cylinder roadster, was neither as cheap nor as popular as Ford’s Model T, but the masses bought it nonetheless, and it established Chevrolet’s future position as the bottom rung of GM’s “price for every purse” brand ladder. Flint, which had begun the first decade of the century with a single hand-assembled motorcar, was by that decade’s end the Second City of the auto industry, behind only Detroit.

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His rise to the chairmanship begins in 1920, when GM’s exuberant founder, Billy Durant, is fired after his final bout of overexpansion and financial adventurism nearly bankrupts the company. Under Sloan’s leadership, General Motors surpasses Ford as the world’s leading auto manufacturer. While Ford persistently produces his black Model T, the vehicle that dominated the twentieth century’s early agrarian decades, GM rolls out a variety of automobiles that appeal to the new urban middle classes: the “car for every purse” brand ladder that will come to define the company’s offerings, from the plebian Chevrolet to the aristocratic Cadillac.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Well, one key reason is obvious: The U.S. can import those commodities from lots of different countries. And the U.S. has been doing just that for nearly a century. The U.S. was a net crude oil importer way back in 1913. In fact, between 1913 and 2007, the U.S. was a net crude exporter in just nine of those years.10 In 1913—just five years after Henry Ford began selling his Model T—America was importing 36,000 barrels of crude oil per day.11 Nine decades later, in 2005, with George W. Bush in the White House, the U.S. was importing almost 300 times as much oil as it did when Woodrow Wilson was living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.12 But once again, those numbers must be put in perspective.

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Toyota officials say they may begin marketing a pickup truck in the U.S. in 2008 that will be capable The Impossibility of Independence 197 The Ethanol Timeline 1862—The Union Congress places a $2 excise tax on each gallon of ethanol to help pay for the Civil War. Before the war, ethanol was a major illumination oil. After the tax is imposed, its lighting use declines. 1896—Henry Ford’s first automobile, the quadricycle, is built to run on 100 percent ethanol. 1906—Congress removes taxes on ethanol. 1908—Ford produces the first Model T, which can run on ethanol or gasoline, or a mix of the two. 1978—The Energy Tax Act of 1978 defines gasohol for the first time: a blend of gasoline with at least 10 percent alcohol by volume. It excludes alcohol made from petroleum, natural gas, or coal and provides a subsidy of $0.40 for each gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline. 1980–1984—Congress enacts a series of tax benefits for ethanol producers and blenders.

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Note that the $2.75 is the nominal price, not inflation-adjusted. 9. EIA data. Available: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real _prices.html. 10. EIA data. Available: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrntus2a.htm. Note that no data are available for 1916 through 1919. 11. It’s worth noting that Ford’s Model T got 25 miles per gallon. That’s better than the current fleet of vehicles and higher than current Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. 12. EIA data. Available: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrntus2a.htm. 13. For 1913 GDP data see: http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/gdp_answer.php?CHK nominalGDP=on&year1=1913&year2=. 14.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

A college laid out on an axis defined by its railroad station, in a town that took its name from the depot, was reorienting itself to the automobile. A quarter century later, Turner had worked virtually every sort of engineering job the bureau had to offer. Days out of college, he'd reported for duty with the bureau's Division of Management, and an assignment as an observer and analyst. Issued a 1927 Ford Model T touring car, he'd studied road-building jobs all through the West. " We would sit on the side of the bank there with a clipboard and a pencil and a stopwatch," he recalled late in life, " and time the movement of [a] shovel, digging, swinging, loading it in the truck and then back. What did he do there?

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

He worked as a hospital technician administering anaesthetics in a surgical ward in Syria, fleeing when he was conscripted by the army to work in a military hospital. His ‘Rolls-Royce’ is a huge contraption made from the frames of multiple bicycles. It is the size and shape of a car; it looks a little like a Ford Model T, and is painted gold. The car is pedal powered, with an extended chain that powers the front wheels as the driver pedals. Look closely and you can see the skeletons of other bikes that make up the axles and frame. But stand back and focus on the red leather seating, adjustable wing mirrors and sun shade, and you can see why they call it a Rolls.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle. But two things killed that first generation of electric cars. One was Henry Ford’s Model T and the mass production of the assembly line. The other, though less well known, was the electric starter, invented by Charles Kettering in 1911 for Cadillac after a person died from cranking a car. Kettering’s invention eliminated the need for someone to stand in front and crank. Over the next several years, electric cars faded away.

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Burns worried about GM’s future—in particular, what could make the automobile obsolete. Once, GM’s then-CEO Rick Wagoner and Burns had got to talking about the fact that while many other industries had changed over a hundred years, the basic model of the auto industry was the same as it had been since Henry Ford’s Model T—“gas-fueled, run by an internal combustion engine, rolling on four wheels.” “What’s the car of the next hundred years going to look like?” Wagoner asked Burns. “If the automobile were being invented today, then what form would it take?” Burns reflected that “there haven’t really been any disruptive innovations in that time.”

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“The first time ever,” said Thrun, “that the machine made all the decisions.” Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick rode up the Eiffel Tower during a Paris snowstorm and hammered out the idea for a “better cab”—a ride-hailing company based on the smartphone. It would become Uber. Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, stands next to a Model T built by his great-grandfather at the one-hundredth anniversary of the company. “I’d like Ford to be around another one hundred years,” he says. “You’ll live in a world where you’ll have internal combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, and pure electrics. Over time, the shift will take place.”

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Contrast this with traditional industrial design, which has been informed by price and engineering concerns. A popular story that illustrates this approach is that Henry Ford mandated black paint for the Model T because it dried faster. While recent research by Professor Trent E. Boggess at Plymouth State College has called this anecdote into question, his alternative explanation also suggests that Ford took an object-based view of the Model T. Boggess says, “The Model T was a most practical car. No doubt Henry Ford was convinced that black was simply the most practical color for the job. Model Ts were not painted black because black dried faster.

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In Henry Ford’s industrial age, this might have been fatal, but modern digital and manufacturing technology has made it increasingly affordable to customize products and software for small numbers of users. One of the advantages of this approach is that it creates highly resilient systems, which can respond quickly when their users need change. Rather than completely retooling, as Ford needed to do when it replaced the Model T with the Model A, an engaged community can redesign its solutions in real time, or something close to it. Of course, codesign is not the only way of creating systems-oriented solutions, nor is the Media Lab the only organization working toward incorporating this principle into its work.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

The advertisers pitched the telephone as if it were a more convenient telegraph. None of them suggested having a conversation. The automobile today, embedded in its matrix of superhighways, drive-through restaurants, seat belts, navigation tools, and digital hypermiling dashboards, is a different technology from the Ford Model T of 100 years ago. And most of those differences are due to secondary inventions rather than the enduring internal combustion engine. In the same way, aspirin today is not the aspirin of yesteryear. Put into the context of other drugs in the body, changes in our longevity and pill-popping habits (one per day!)

After the Flood: What the Dambusters Did Next by John Nichol

British Empire, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, Ford Model T, friendly fire, IFF: identification friend or foe, the market place

His parents were originally struggling small shopkeepers, and so poor that Barney and his brother slept in a tent behind the shop, except in the coldest weather when they would take refuge in the attic. However, in the early 1930s they set up a mobile motion-picture business, touring small towns and villages in rural areas of the South Island with a film projector mounted on the back of a Ford Model-T truck. They persuaded the townsfolk and villagers to cut a hole in the rear wall of their community halls and then reversed the truck up to the wall, pushed the lens of the projector through the hole and projected their movies onto a portable screen inside. Gumbley’s brother painted posters of the movies on show, Gumbley himself manned the projector and his sister sold the tickets.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Automobiles might complete what railways, trams and omnibuses had only partially achieved, and extend the benefits of the separation of work and home even to manual workers: ‘Imagine a healthier race of workingmen, toiling in cheerful and sanitary factories… who, in the late afternoon, glide away in their own comfortable vehicles to their little farms or houses in the country or by the sea twenty or thirty miles distant! They will be healthier, happier, more intelligent and self-respecting citizens because of the chance to live among the meadows and the flowers of the country instead of in crowded city streets.’ The only problem was the expense. Enter Henry Ford and his Model T. Ford wanted to build a car that was technically advanced, reliable, and which could be sold at so low a price ‘that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one, and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces’. He pioneered production-line assembly and standardized parts, and the first Model T was completed in August 1908.

The Fundamentals of Interior Design by Dodsworth, Simon, Anderson, Stephen

carbon footprint, country house hotel, folksonomy, Ford Model T, the built environment

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Later, GM’s Alfred Sloan expounded on that principle: “By the time we have a product to show them [consumers], we are necessarily committed to selling that product because of the tremendous investment involved in bringing it to market.”4 The music industry’s business model was built on telling its consumers what they would buy, just like Ford and Sloan. Executives invested in the production and distribution of CDs, and it was the CD that customers would have to purchase. Henry Ford was among the first to strike gold by tapping into the new mass consumption with the Model T. As in the case of the iPod, Ford’s Model T factory was pressed to meet the immediate explosion of demand. Mass production could be applied to anything, and it was. It changed the framework of production as it diffused throughout the economy and around the world, and it established the dominance of a new mass-production capitalism as the basis for wealth creation in the twentieth century.

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Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.”8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place. When we look through this lens, we can see that those eager customers for Ford’s incredible Model T and the new consumers of iPods and iPhones are expressions of the conditions of existence that characterized their era. In fact, each is the fruit of distinct phases of a centuries-long process known as “individualization” that is the human signature of the modern era. Ford’s mass consumers were members of what has been called the “first modernity,”9 but the new conditions of the “second modernity” produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential.

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It is the systematic result of a “pathological” division of learning in society in which surveillance capitalism knows, decides, and decides who decides. Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or asking a giraffe to shorten its neck. Such demands are existential threats. They violate the basic mechanisms and laws of motion that produce this market leviathan’s concentrations of knowledge, power, and wealth. So here is what is at stake: surveillance capitalism is profoundly antidemocratic, but its remarkable power does not originate in the state, as has historically been the case.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Morgan and Andrew Carnegie created U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. In 1903 the Wright Brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk. That same year Edwin S. Porter filmed The Great Train Robbery, thereby creating a U.S. industry in narrative motion pictures. In 1908 Henry Ford produced the first Model T. In 1909 Leo Baekeland introduced Bakelite, thereby inventing an industry in synthetic plastics. Around 1915 David Sarnoff dreamed up the “radio music box.” Allen might also have mentioned that in 1915 Alexander Graham Bell (who of course had invented the telephone four decades earlier) participated in a public demonstration of the first transcontinental telephone line—telecommunications’ equivalent of the golden spike.

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Later Victor recalled it was the only time he ever saw his father weep. Walter dropped out of high school at sixteen and apprenticed as a tool and die worker. He lost his big right toe at seventeen when a four-hundred-pound die that he and two co-workers were trying to move slipped and crashed down on his foot. At nineteen, Walter heard that Henry Ford—then phasing out the Model T and preparing to introduce the Model A—was paying tool and die workers a princely $1.25 an hour. He made a beeline for Detroit. Victor joined him three years later. Thriving at Ford, Walter was able, at night, to acquire his high school diploma and to enroll in college. He even considered law school.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Gradually, it emerged that the hiss came from a particular region of the sky and that it peaked every 24 hours. Actually, when Jansky looked at his data more carefully, he found that the peak came every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Almost a full day between peaks, but not quite. Figure 92 Karl Jansky makes adjustments to the antenna that was designed to detect natural sources of radio waves. The Ford Model T wheels are part of the turntable that allowed the antenna to rotate. Jansky mentioned the curious time interval to his colleague Melvin Skellet, who had a Ph.D. in astronomy and who was able to point out the significance of the missing four minutes. Each year the Earth spins on its axis 3651/4 times, and each day lasts 24 hours, so one year consists of 3651/4 × 24 = 8,766 hours.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Artisans and designers of the nineteenth century had struggled to make enough stuff to meet the growing demand of consumers. But modern factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of identical cheap goods by the 1920s. It was an era of mass production, yielding an abundance of selfsame products. Henry Ford’s Model T was a symbol of its age, and from 1914 to 1925 it was available only in black. Companies did not yet worship at the altars of style, choice, and design. The era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their one true god. But in the 1920s, art made a comeback, albeit for commercial reasons.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

See: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101765/. Put it this way, in “The Law of Accelerating Returns,”: ibid. More Transportation Options Model T: History.com editors, “Ford Motor Company Unveils the Model T,” History, August 27, 2009. See: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-motor-company-unveils-the-model-t. Just four years later: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Hosed,” New Yorker, November 8, 2009. radio-controlled “American wonder”: Fabian Kroger, “Automated Driving in Its Social, Historical and Cultural Contexts,” Autonomous Driving, May 22, 2016, pp. 41–68.

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The triple threat convergence of the internal combustion engine, the moving assembly line and the emerging petroleum industry was together driving—pardon the pun—the horse-and-buggy business out of business. The first bespoke cars hit the roads around the tail end of the nineteenth century, but Ford’s 1908 introduction of the mass-produced Model T marked the real tipping point. Just four years later, New York traffic surveys counted more cars than horses on the road. And while the speed of this shift was breathtaking, in retrospect it wasn’t unexpected. Whenever a new technology offers a tenfold increase in value—cheaper, faster and better—there’s little that can slow it down.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Certainly we are not implying that a car plant requires a number of personbytes that is equal to the number of people employed in a car factory or to the number of tasks that are executed by all workers. Rather, we can say that the number of people employed in a car factory is a generous upper limit of the number of personbytes needed to make a car. Henry Ford divided the production of the Model T into increasingly smaller tasks—7,882, to be precise.1 The number of tasks needed to make a Model T is larger than the number of tasks required to produce a pin, but that does not mean that making a Model T requires 7,882 personbytes of knowhow. A simple interpretation is that 7,882 personbytes of knowhow is a very generous upper bound for the amount of knowhow needed to produce a car from its basic ingredients: iron, soybeans, rubber, and imagination.2 The number of tasks involved in creating a car in the Rouge is an upper bound for the number of personbytes needed to make a car because many of these tasks are simple enough that the same individual can be an expert in a number of them.

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The personbyte theory implies that larger networks are needed to accumulate larger volumes of knowledge and knowhow, but it does not explicitly tell us why our world is not filled with megafactories that are ten to twenty times larger than River Rouge. After all, hasn’t the complexity of products increased vastly since Ford introduced the Model T? The limited proliferation of megafactories like the Rouge implies that there must be mechanisms that limit the size of the networks we call firms and make it preferable to disaggregate production into networks of firms. This also suggests the existence of a second quantization limit, which we will call the firmbyte.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Spurred by technological innovation, this new vision invoked a radical process to restructure streets, cities, and society. Governments, consumers, and auto-makers sighted prospects of a peak in the distance. Atop it supposedly contained wealth, freedom, happiness, and everything in between. Henry Ford started rolling a Model T off the assembly line in 1908 in the US at an unprecedented rate: 1911 saw one every fifteen-minutes, 1923 saw one every 15 seconds (off of multiple assembly lines). Mass automobility spawned new strategies to reach that peak. The commoner could now acquire a car with four months of work.

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Observers believed each would find niches, a "sphere of action" they would dominate: electrics for the wealthy wives of businessmen and professionals who wanted to travel in town, gasoline for the longer distance trips, and so on. Yet by 1905 electrics comprised fewer than 10 percent of all vehicle sales. By 1918 Henry Ford’s gasoline-powered Model T was dominating automobile sales.117 The rest, was, as they say, history. EV sales, even when growing slightly, comprised a smaller and smaller share of the market. Interest in electric vehicles waned for decades. It wasn't until 1969 that General Motors restarted experiments with hybrids, following on a technological path abandoned soon after Ferdinand Porsche built a hybrid in 1901.

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau

British Empire, Ford Model T, Lewis Mumford, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War

Among other means of persuasion the group undertook, it tried to get the backing of prominent local citizens, including those related to two of the passions of Detroiters, automobiles and baseball. Detroit was the “Motor City,” the automobile manufacturing capital of the country. The number of automobiles in use was surging, as the popularity of Henry Ford’s Model T made them more available to the average person, who was coming to see the ability to take a drive in a car as part of the American way of life. Auto enthusiasts appreciated that an extra hour of daylight allowed more time for sunlit evening drives in the country, and Detroit car manufacturers valued the savings on lighting for their plants.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

“And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, ‘No, no, we’re definitely going to use it.’

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We had the Roadster, but there was no good word for a sedan. You can’t call it the Tesla Sedan. That’s boring as hell. In the U.K., they say ‘saloon,’ but then it’s sort of like, ‘What are you? A cowboy or something?’ We went through a bunch of iterations, and the Model S sounded the best. And it was like a vague nod to Ford being the Model T in that electric cars preceded the Model T, and in a way we’re coming full circle and the thing that proceeded the Model T is now going into production in the twenty-first century, hence the Model S. But that’s sort of more like reversing the logic.” *A handful of lawsuits have been filed against Tesla with auto dealers arguing that the company should not be able to sell its cars directly.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

"It is said" that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. His inspectors came hack with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons-all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification. You may, like me, be a little vague about what kingpins are, but it doesn't matter. They are something that a motor car needs, and Ford's alleged ruthlessness was, indeed, entirely logical.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

His time-saving approach was based on optimizing human behavior to suit the capabilities of the machines before them and to minimize human error. 1915: FORD ASSEMBLY LINE, Henry Ford The Ford assembly line was the definitive application of Taylor’s principles of scientific management. Ford optimized his assembly line to make the Model T as cheaply and uniformly as possible, with no room for customization or consumer taste, thereby reducing the cost of an automobile from $825 to $260 by 1924. 1920s: HOME ECONOMICS, Christine Frederick Home economics attempted to free up leisure time for women so that they might pursue their own betterment.

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The pursuit of efficiency in the home laid the groundwork for a wave of appliances, such as washing machines, that became a sustaining source of work for Behrens, Dreyfuss, Loewy, and many other early industrial designers. 1921: MODERN ETHNOGRAPHY, Franz Boas In the 1920s, during his studies of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the anthropologist Franz Boas developed detailed methods for observing daily life and practices that provided the foundation for modern ethnography as practiced by Alphonse Chapanis, Henry Dreyfuss, Jane Fulton Suri, Donald Norman, Jan Chipchase, and others. 1925: “L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU,” Le Corbusier Le Corbusier introduced a modernist lifestyle aesthetic that stripped away decorative and ornamental touches in favor of simplified, mass-produced products to create a “machine to inhabit.” His groundbreaking exhibition embodied the Bauhaus belief that beauty can be found at the intersection of aesthetics and engineering. 1927: MODEL A, Henry Ford Henry Ford, who for years resisted offering variations on the Model T, was finally forced by rising competition from General Motors and others to introduce the Model A, which offered a range of options and colors in a Ford automobile for the first time. 1927: MASCHINENMENSCH ROBOT FROM METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang and Walter Schulze-Mittendorff Fritz Lang’s dystopian vision for the societal impact of technology took iconic form in the character of a female robot who served as the ambassador for a more advanced world—brought to life by the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff. 1930: RKO THEATER, SIOUX CITY, IOWA, Henry Dreyfuss Henry Dreyfuss spent three days observing the behavior of patrons of RKO’s new but unpopular movie house in Sioux City.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

In the case of the third revolution, for example, it was by no means clear in the 1870s that England would fall behind and that it would be the USA and Germany that would fully exploit the new wealth-generating potential to catch up and forge ahead. In fact, it could be argued that two big-bang events, one for each of the countries involved in propelling that surge, should perhaps be identified. Other choices are less controversial. Ford’s Model-T is an obvious choice for the Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass-Production. Nevertheless, the precise dating could be an issue. The truly mass-produced Model-T, from a full moving assembly line, only came out in 1913. However, even without a complete line, the first Model-T in 1908 was already the clear prototype of the standardized, identical products that were to characterize future production patterns.

An Island to Oneself: The Story of Six Years on a Desert Island by Tom Neale, Noel Barber

Ford Model T, trade route

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Combined with the rise of the chemical industries, petroleum refining, and the internal combustion engine and electrification, this next phase of manufacturing transformation is called by many historians the “Second Industrial Revolution.” They place it from 1850 to around the end of World War I, which includes Henry Ford’s Model-T assembly line, with its innovations of stockpiles of interchangeable parts and the use of conveyer belts, where products being produced moved to stationary workers (who each did a single task), rather than the other way around. Today, in a fully industrialized economy, we forget just how much the First and Second Industrial Revolutions changed society.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Smart Grid Standards by Takuro Sato

business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, data acquisition, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, exponential backoff, factory automation, Ford Model T, green new deal, green transition, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Iridium satellite, iterative process, knowledge economy, life extension, linear programming, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, Thomas Davenport

The advantages of EVs over other types of vehicles are that the electric car was quicker to start up, cleaner, and doing better in the snow. However, by the late 1920s, EVs had nearly gone from the market and were mostly used for specialist roles, for example, platform trucks, forklift trucks, tow tractors, and urban delivery vehicles. Compared to ICE, the EV was very expensive for consumers. Henry Ford sold the popular Model T in 1908 for $850, while the price of EVs at the same time was around $2000. The Model T was later sold for as little as $260, due to the production savings of assembly lines. Another primary reason for the downfall of personal EVs was the limited range. Electric cars in the early 1900s would last about 35 miles per charge, while Model T could get 13–21 miles per gallon of gasoline and could hold 9–10 gallons of gasoline [24].

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Energy Information Administration (2012) US Emissions of Greenhouse Cases Report, www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html#transportation. (accessed 15 December 2012). Ipakchi, A. and Albuyeh, F. (2009) Grid of the future. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 7 (2), 52–62. Vojdani, A.F. (2008) Smart integration. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 6 (6), 72–79. Ford (2012) Model T Facts, http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=858 (accessed 15 December 2012). Accenture (2011) Plug-in Electric Vehicles: Charging Perceptions, Hedging Bets. Deloitte Global Services Ltd (2011) Gaining Traction: Will Consumers Ride the Electric Vehicle Wave? Produced for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (2010) 10-K: Annual Report Pursuant to Section 13 and 15 (d), Enerl, Inc., New York.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

He became the leading automobile manufacturer in the early twentieth century by pioneering mass production methods in his factories, revolutionizing not only his own company but businesses throughout the economy, which followed the mass production principles that he introduced. The time required to produce a Ford Model T chassis shrank from 12 man-hours to an hour and a half.{202} With a mass market for automobiles, it paid to invest in expensive but labor-saving mass production machinery, whose cost per car would turn out to be modest when spread out over a huge number of automobiles. But, if there were only half as many cars sold as expected, then the cost of that machinery per car would be twice as much.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

By 1901, Peugeot (originally a bicycle company) had taken over. Louis Renault took another step forward with the invention of the drive shaft, and the Michelin brothers developed pneumatic tires. The most famous innovation in manufacturing occurred in December 1913 in Detroit, Michigan: Henry Ford’s assembly line for the Model T. Ford was already producing the Model T before the assembly line, but the line’s efficiency allowed him to cut the car’s price from $825 to $345 (only $8,000 in today’s dollars). The global auto market would be dominated by Americans for quite a while. The United States produced 73 percent of the world’s cars in 1933, while the former market leaders of Germany and France produced 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Frommer's Cuba by Claire Boobbyer

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Ford Model T, haute couture, Maui Hawaii

F énix ( & 7/866-6666) is the most expensive cab ser vice in Havana and is the only one (in addition to the G ran Car service, see below) that continues to operate under its o wn name. Other options include horse-drawn carriages; the so-called Coco Taxis (& 7/8731411), round open-air two seaters powered by a motorcycle; and antique cars that range from a Ford Model T to a 1957 Chevy. Both the horse-drawn carriages and Coco Taxis cost from CUC$5 to CUC$10 (US$5.40–US$11/£2.70–£5.40) per hour , with a minimum of ar ound CUC$3 (US$3.25/£1.60). Gran C ar (& 7/881-0992) is the most reputable agent for antique-car r entals. G ran Car rates, with a driv er, r un CUC$25 (US$27/£14) per hour or CUC$125 (US$135/£68) per day, or CUC$30 (US$32/£16) per hour and CUC$150 (US$162/£81) per day for conv ertibles.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

This is the story of search keyword advertising, Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fail.3 When you see a startup that has found a fit with a large market, it’s exhilarating. It leaves no room for doubt. It is Ford’s Model T flying out of the factory as fast as it could be made, Facebook sweeping college campuses practically overnight, or Lotus taking the business world by storm, selling $54 million worth of Lotus 1-2-3 in its first year of operation. Startups occasionally ask me to help them evaluate whether they have achieved product/market fit.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Think of the value that automation creates by increasing the productivity in Amazon’s warehouses, or by making it easier to keep Google’s server farms running 24/7. UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE #3: ADAPTATION, NOT OPTIMIZATION At a higher level of abstraction, successful scale-ups place more emphasis on adaptation than optimization. Rather than the giant assembly lines of Detroit automakers, which trace their origins to Henry Ford’s Model T, the current generation of Silicon Valley companies practice continuous improvement, whether through an emphasis on speed or the constant experiments and A/B testing of growth hacking. This emphasis makes sense in an environment where companies need to seek product/market fit for new and rapidly changing products and markets.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The prospect of more toll roads is probably unsettling to those concerned about the consequences for low- and middle-income citizens. Such worries could ease if oil prices continue to march higher. If we stand back and let the market find its own equilibrium, then rising pump prices will ration demand for roadways. Something of a return to the days of Henry Ford’s Model T could unfold. Back then, only the rich could afford to drive and everyone else found another mode of transportation. Does it make sense for everyone to pay for roads and bridges they won’t be using? As the number of people on the roads shrinks, public officials will feel less pressure to spend scarce tax dollars maintaining highways.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

His motor company pioneered the form of manufacture termed “Fordism.” Mass production with repeatable parts made by machines was taken to its most efficient conclusion with Ford’s moving assembly lines, in which the product moves, and the workers stay still. It had taken a long time to get to the stage of Ford’s Model T, the car that motorized the masses in the first decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1760s, the Scottish historian and philosopher Adam Ferguson had written, “Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”25 The automotive historian Andrew Nahum has commented that this could be a “perfect description” of Ford’s factory.26 Yet it took the convulsive developments in manufacturing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, heavily influenced by clock- and watchmaking culture and championed by the likes of John Bennett, before the dream of the perfect assembly line could be realized.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

The internal combustion engine was integral to revolutionary forms of transport, touching every corner of life from tanks and armoured cars to lorries and tractors. The world of out-of-town shopping centres, abundant food and dispersed families exists thanks to this engine. From an extortionately expensive curiosity, cars quickly became a mass-produced necessity, manufactured (thanks to Henry Ford's 1907 Model T) by the million. Even as it became normal for American and then European families to own a car, so plane travel went mainstream. By the mid-1930s flying was a viable if expensive mode of public transportation. Aircraft like the Douglas DC-3 could carry twenty-one passengers and cover a thousand miles on a single fuel load, crossing the continental US in three stops and fifteen hours.37 Improvements in existing systems like roads and shipping, coupled with the dramatic effect of new technologies like railways, motor vehicles and airplanes, gave us a new sensation: acceleration!

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Such barriers are not insuperable, but they are exacting and omnipresent compared with the early days of the car or the plane: Stephenson, Benz and the Wrights didn't worry (so much) about insurance, or licensing, or safety regulations, or litigation, or infrastructure, or impatient venture capitalists, although they might have had to grapple with a sceptical public, protectionist governments or a hostile media. As J. Storrs Hall points out, if Henry Ford had been sued every time someone crashed their Model T, we likely wouldn't have cars and highways at all.101 New forms of transport or medicine bump up against tight economic and policy limits. Concorde ceased flying not just over safety fears, but because it made a loss. It's possible to build hyperloop trains, hypersonic aircraft or lunar-orbiting bases, or send a mission to Mars, but the delicate balance of risk, regulation and return on investment may make them infeasible.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration