One Summer: America, 1927

a school, better housing and a clean water supply were all provided. He and his estate managers even managed to get 700,000 rubber trees growing, but only at the cost of keeping them constantly fumigated against insects and diseases. Even so, workers had to be sent out to pick caterpillars off the trees by hand. The costs were out of all proportion to any possible profits. At the same time, the onset of the Great Depression meant that demand and prices both slumped; then in the Second World War artificial rubber was developed. In 1945, after nearly twenty years of failed efforts, Ford gave up on its Amazonian dream and essentially gave back its jungle estates to the Brazilian government. Many estate employees didn’t know the Americans were pulling out until the day they departed. In an ultimate irony, the land was eventually taken over by the American company Cargill and today produces great quantities of soybeans, the agricultural product that Henry Ford esteemed above all others.
     
    If things were going badly for Ford in Amazonia, in Detroit they were doing even worse. For years, Ford’s son and heir, Edsel, had argued that the Model T should be retired and replaced with something more stylish, but his father more or less reflexively dismissed almost everything Edsel ever said. Indeed, Henry devoted much of his life to humiliating his son. Although he had appointed Edsel president of the company in 1919, when Edsel was just twenty-five years old, Henry routinely belittled his son in front of others or countermanded his orders. Once when Edsel had a new set of coke ovens built at the River Rouge factory, Henry waited until the work was finished and then ordered them taken down.
    But now with sales plummeting Henry had to acknowledge, if not exactly admit, that the Model T had had its day. On 26 May, while the world was in the grip of Lindbergh mania, the Ford Motor Company produced what it claimed was its fifteen-millionth Model T (in fact, it was at least number 15,348,781, if not more – no one really knew), and immediately stopped production in order to build an entirely new car. For an indefinite period, the world’s largest car manufacturer would have no new products to sell. Sixty thousand Ford employees in Detroit were immediately thrown out of work. Tens of thousands more at assembly plants across America and throughout the world were similarly idled. Most would be out of work for at least six months, many considerably longer. The shutdown was hard on Ford’s long-suffering dealers as well, particularly those with city showrooms with high rents. Many never fully recovered.
    Work on the new car was done in the utmost secrecy. Not even the name was revealed. Many guessed that it would be called the Edison after Henry Ford’s close friend and hero. Only a few within the company knew that it was to be called the Model A. Rumours abounded as to what was going on within the plant. Henry Ford was said to be living in the factory, sleeping on a camp bed in his office or in one of the workshops. (He wasn’t.) The amount of work involved in producing a new car from scratch was daunting, to saythe least. It was almost certainly the biggest industrial retooling ever undertaken anywhere, before or since. The new car would contain 5,580 separate components, nearly all of them brand new, so all had to be designed afresh – and not just the parts themselves, but also several thousand new machines to make the parts. Some of these were enormous. Two power presses stood almost three storeys high and weighed 240 tons each.
    Remarkably, the company did almost all of the design and retooling without expert guidance, for Henry Ford hated experts and refused to employ them. As he put it in his 1924 book My Life and Work : ‘I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.’ Later he added: ‘We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert – because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.’
    In consequence, Ford had no one on the payroll with advanced engineering or design engineering skills. The company didn’t even have a proving ground, but tested its cars on public highways, to the dismay of the police. Ford’s chief tester, Ray Dahlinger, was a man of very few words. He offered only two terse verdicts on any car: it was either ‘damn good’