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Tag Archives: Bill Bryson

Why Are Driver’s Seats on the Left Side?

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Why Are Driver’s Seats on the Left Side?

Tags

Automobiles, Bill Bryson, Cars, Engineering, Henry Ford, Model T, Model T Ford, One Summer, One Summer: America 1927, Why Are Car Driver's Seats on the Left Side?

Model T Ford

“One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows. Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature. Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford’s seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.”

__________

Pulled from Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927.

To counterbalance this impressive account of Ford, read Bryson’s description of just how mindbogglingly stupid the genius was.

Or go on:

  • From Bryson’s A Short History: is it possible to step outside the universe?
  • The last gentleman on the titanic
  • The real wolf of wall street

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Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Humor

≈ Comments Off on Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron

Tags

American History, Automobiles, Bill Bryson, Cars, Henry Ford, history, humor, Ignorance, Industrial Age, irony, Model T, One Summer: America 1927, Prejudice, racism, stupidity, The Irony of American History

150th Anniversary of the Birth of Company Founder Henry Ford

“For a man who changed the world, Henry Ford traveled in very small circle. He resided his whole life within a dozen miles of birthplace, a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. He saw little of the wider world and cared even less for it.

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, ‘mildly unbalanced.’ He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.

His ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse. Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about sixty thousand tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weigh more like a hundred tons, so that skyscrapers actually reduced the burden on the earth beneath them, but Ford was unpersuaded. He seldom let facts or logic challenge the certainty of his instincts.

The limits of his knowledge were most memorable exposed in 1919 when he sued the Chicago Tribune for libel for calling him an ‘ignorant idealist’ and an ‘anarchist.’ For eight days, lawyers for the Tribune entertained the nation by punting through the shallow waters of Ford’s mind, as in this typical exchange regarding his familiarity with the history of his own country:

Lawyer: Did you ever hear of Benedict Arnold?
Ford: I have heard the name.
Lawyer: Who was he?
Ford: I have forgotten just who he is. He is a writer, I think.

Ford, it transpired, did not know much of anything. He could not say when the American Revolution was fought (‘In 1812, I think; I’m not quite sure’) or quite what the issues were that provoked it. Questioned about politics, he conceded that he didn’t follow matters closely and had voted only once in his life. That was just after his twenty-first birthday, when, he said, he had voted for James Garfield. An alert lawyer pointed out that Garfield was in fact assassinated three years before Ford reached voting age.”

__________

Pulled from Bill Bryson’s superbly readable romp of a history book One Summer: America, 1927.

In all fairness to both author and subject, Bryson’s next paragraph gives you the other side of Ford’s commendable personal story:

Yet against this must be set his extraordinary achievement. When Henry Ford built his first Model T, Americans had some 2,200 makes of cars to choose from. Every one of those cars was in some sense a toy, a plaything for the well-to-do. Ford changed the automobile into a universal appliance, an affordable device practical for all, and that difference in philosophy made him unimaginably successful and transformed the world. Within just over a decade Ford had more than fifty factories on six continents, employed two hundred thousand people, produced half the world’s cars, and was the most successful industrialist in history, worth perhaps as much as $2 billion, by one estimate. By perfecting mass production and making the automobile an object within financial reach of the average workingman, he wholly transformed the course and rhythm of modern life. We live in a world largely shaped by Henry Ford…

Henry Ford was born in July 1863, the same month as the Battle of Gettysburg, and lived into the atomic age, dying in 1947.

So there’s that.

Go onward:

  • Mark Twain’s hilarious, furious letter to an idiot
  • The greatest cover letter of all time
  • Meet Sydney Morgenbesser, the cleverest man you’ve never heard of

Henry Ford with Car

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Is It Possible to Step Outside the Universe?

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Astronomy, Bill Bryson, cosmology, Galaxies, J.B.S. Haldane, Map of the Universe, Space, Steven Weinberg, the universe, Theory of Relativity, Time

Bill Bryson

“Now the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen if you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains? Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond?

The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That’’s not because it would take too long to get there— — though of course it would — but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began (at which point, presumably, you would rather lose heart in the exercise and give up). The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’’s theory of relativity… [W]e are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “’solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.”’ Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “’The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.'”

__________

From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

The image below is a three-dimensional map of the perceptible universe. It stretches 380 million light years, includes 43,000 galaxies, and covers 95 percent of our sky. It took a team of world-class scientists over a decade to compile, and it represents only a tiny fraction of the entire universe. The colors signify the respective red-light-shifts of each galaxy (the “third dimension” of an otherwise 2D image).

If you can understand it, well, you’re cleverer than me.

Read on:

  • Einstein, Newton, Carl Sagan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson relate how science requires childlike wonder
  • Baruch Spinoza theorizes how the universe might have began ex nihilo
  • Gottfried Leibniz takes a different crack at the question

3D Map of the Universe

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