QI The Book of the Dead

that system involved sleeping outdoors ‘watching the squirrels gambolling’ and relying on fruit, nuts and berries for sustenance, a simple life that Kellogg said would allow people ‘to listen to the music of the spheres’. He applied his theories to hisown life, getting by on four hours’ sleep a night, and staying fit and healthy until he succumbed to pneumonia at ninety-one.

     
    The founder of another, even more successful, American business dynasty also paid close attention to diet and exercise. At the age of seventy-five Henry Ford (1863–1947) could still do handstands. In his late fifties he impressed friends by leaping into the air and kicking a cigar off the mantelpiece. He attributed his physical fitness to avoiding anything that might poison his body. Like Kellogg, he saw white bread as a major enemy and sternly warned his friends and associates against it. He always drank his water warm, believing that the body wasted energy heating it up if it were drunk cold. He never took sugar because he thought the sharp edges on the crystals were like pieces of glass that could damage internal organs, until it was pointed out to him that the crystals dissolve when wet.
    For a time in the 1920s Ford tried eating only wheat – which he held to be a miracle food. His doctor told him he was starving to death and this was demonstrated by experimenting with pigs fed only on wheat. When they almost died, Henry was persuaded to vary his diet. In 1926 he decided that carrots were a magical cure-all and devised a meal made up of fourteen different carrot recipes. In 1927 he announced that pigs, cows and chickens would soon be ‘redundant’ as he was working on a biscuit made of wheat germ, oatmeal, pecan and olive oil that would be sufficient for all human dietary needs. The ‘wonderfood’ biscuit never went into mass production but that didn’t stop Ford’s relentless dietary experimentation. No one was spared. Businessmen and friends invited to lunch at Ford’s mansion near Detroitwere faced with what Ford called ‘roadside greens’, including stewed burdock and soybean-bread sandwiches with a filling of milkweed.
    This attitude to food reveals much about Ford’s attitude to life in general. For him, control was of paramount importance. In Brave New World (1932) the state religion is called ‘Fordism’: Aldous Huxley saw that Ford’s working methods were as much to do with social manipulation as economic freedom. Ford’s mission in life was to make the process of making things more efficient. He thought that the key to human happiness was productivity, and that anything that interfered with it – war, organised religion, financiers, trade unions, bad diet – was to be resisted.
    It was an insight that changed the world. What we now call the consumer society was practically invented by Henry Ford: the idea that we ‘consume’ goods in the same way we consume food was entirely new. The first recorded use of the word ‘consumer’ in this way was in a Sears Roebuck catalogue of 1896. Ford found his metier aged fifteen, when he discovered that he had a gift for taking watches apart and putting them back together again. By the age of thirty he was chief engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. Ford idolised Edison and worked hard in the temple of electricity but, with typical single-mindedness and self-belief, in his spare time he was developing an entirely different source of power: the petrol engine. In 1896 he unveiled his crude first ‘horseless carriage’. It was called the Quadricycle because it used four bicycle wheels and was driven by a chain. In an uncharacteristic example of poor planning, the finished version was too large to get out of the workshop and Ford had to improvise a larger doorway using an axe. But Edison was impressed and urged him on:

    We do not know what electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything. Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a great future .
     
    Two years later Ford left to set up his own business. In 1903 he personally broke the world land-speed record in a car called the ‘999’, reaching 91 miles per hour on the frozen surface of Lake St Clair near Detroit. Impressive though this was, the ‘motor car’ was easily dismissed as a plaything for the well off, expensive to make and to buy. But Ford had other ideas. His invention of the assembly line simplified the manufacturing