One Summer: America, 1927

or ‘no damn good’. ‘You could never get any details from him as to what was wrong or what needed improvement,’ sighed one engineer. The company did have a stylish research lab, designed by Kahn, but Henry Ford refused to invest in precision instruments or other useful tools. Much of the space was given over to his experiments with soybeans and other foods.
    Ford’s refusal to employ experts was what doomed Fordlandia and now it threatened to doom the Model A. For years, the Model T had been criticized for having unreliable brakes. Many states were beginning to require annual safety inspections, and there were fears within Ford that Model Ts wouldn’t pass the examinations. Germany was reportedly considering banning the Model T outright because of concerns over the brakes’ safety. For that reason,Lawrence Sheldrick, Ford’s top engineer, made sure new, safer brakes were designed for the new Model A. Henry Ford bitterly resented the idea of outsiders telling him how to make his products, and for some time through the summer refused on principle to let the safer brakes be incorporated into the new car, slowing progress further.
    As Charles E. Sorensen, a long-suffering Ford executive, later noted, no rational business person would have stopped production of the Model T without having a replacement model designed and ready to go into production. Putting the new car together on the fly, Sorensen calculated, added between $100 million and $200 million to the cost of the changeover. The additional costs of Henry Ford’s intransigence were beyond computation.
    On 26 July, four days before Henry Ford’s sixty-fourth birthday, General Motors declared first half earnings of $129 million. No manufacturer had ever made that much money in six months before – and that was on sales made before the Ford shutdown. Now with Ford making no cars at all, his competitors had the marketplace all to themselves. How well, or even whether, Ford could recover from such an extended shutdown was a question many within the industry were beginning to ask.
    The rest of the world was beside itself with curiosity to know what Henry Ford would come up with as a replacement for the Model T. What the world didn’t know was that many within Ford were just as curious to have that question answered themselves.
     
    fn1 Wickham returned to England around 1910 to find himself a national hero. He was given a life annuity by the British Rubber Growers’ Association and knighted by the king.

C HAPTER 19
     

     
    BEFORE THE 1920S , Florida was known for citrus fruits and turpentine and not much else. A few rich people went there for the winter, but hardly anyone else considered the state a destination. But then the wider mass of Americans discovered the attractiveness of Florida’s climate and the pleasantness of its beaches, and it suddenly became desirable. In 1925, Florida repealed income and inheritance taxes, which made it even more attractive. People swarmed into the state in huge numbers and began an intense and increasingly irrational property boom.
    A plot of land in Miami that had been worth $800 before the boom now sold for $150,000. Property deeds sometimes changed hands two or even three times in a day as frantic buyers tried to trade their way to ever greater wealth. Some eager buyers bought plots of land under water on the hopeful understanding that they would soon become prized beachfront through the miracle of landfill. (And in some cases, it must be said, that actually happened.) The Miami Herald carried so many property ads that one Sunday edition ran to 504 pages.
    One of those drawn to Florida was Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert. Ruppert bought ten thousand acres on Tampa Bay with plans to build a resort community, modestly called Ruppert Beach,on a scale to rival Coral Gables or Palm Beach. As part of the process, he moved spring training to nearby St Petersburg in 1925. Conditions were a little rough at first. At one practice, Babe Ruth was unable to take his place in the field until a groundsman chased an alligator back into the swamp beyond the (unfenced) right field boundary. Ruppert gave the development a catchy slogan – ‘Where Every Breath Brings Added Health and Every Moment Pleasure’ – and the promise that this would be the finest investment opportunity on the Gulf Coast. In the spring of 1926, Ruppert Beach was advertising building plots as being available from $5,000 – ‘at the moment’.
    Then disaster