Bryan Appleyard
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Bryan Appleyard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There was something about the man. He was perfectly placed. He came from a farming family. He hated horses, which was quite crucial actually. And he took great pride in ridding the world of the need for horses.
Well, yeah, they say about things like the steer up on the horse and things like that quite commonly. But what they miss out from what the car did was the absolute physical change it brought to the world. It created roads. It created motels. It created interstates. The physical world has been changed by the car.
Well, there's some dispute about this, but an official story has emerged that the first one was built in 1885 by Carl Benz. who was an engineering genius, but he wasn't a public relations genius. And what made him a public relations genius was his wife, Bertha Ringer, or Bertha Benz. And she borrowed his car and drove 66 miles south in Germany with her children, which was astonishing.
No other vehicle. had done more than a mile or two at the time. Now that made it sort of the official narrative, but there are lots of close to actual cars at that time.
Absolutely they do, but not at the beginning they didn't. The car was developed in Germany and France mainly in the late 19th century. It wasn't really American at all. The Americans probably needed it more than anybody because it's a very big country and it had the most appalling roads in the world at the time. There was a lot of...
about what was the best propulsion method for the car in America. Was it steam, electric, or gas, as you would call it? And it really took hold. First of all, it was the Oldsmobile, which is a nice little car. It didn't really take off as well as it should have done. But it did catch people's eye. It was called the curved dash Oldsmobile.
This is because a dashboard in those days did not mean what we mean now. It meant the wood, piece of wood in front of a carriage to stop the muck kicked up by the horses in front hitting the passengers. So he made a car with a...
dashboard that was curved rather than flat that's all so it's its least interesting feature really but that it became known as the curve dash old boltonville and so a song with a famous song was written about it my merry oldsmobile But the real change came in 1908 when Henry Ford launched his Model T. After that point, America took over the world car business.
Well, it's an interesting question. And it may be just because it had to be somewhere. But what happened was the engineers and people at Ford went to that city. It was a kind of a city ready for industrialization. And the key thing was that Ford started building his Model T in a tiny warehouse in Detroit and then built two huge industrial complexes, the biggest the world had ever seen.
And that meant it was going to be Detroit. And General Motors came out later and so on. And it was all in Detroit. It's just a kind of crucial place.
He hated horses, which was quite crucial, actually. And he took great pride in ridding the world of the need for horses. So he took to engineering on his own, off his own bat. He didn't really have an education in engineering. He just suddenly saw this little machine that was used to drive farming machinery. And he became obsessed with it, how it worked, what it did.
And he started building it himself. And then gradually, he became aware that people were actually making cars out of this machine. He did it. But then there was something about the man that was unbelievably concentrated. So for example, when he actually started work, he built several cars that were quite successful. He became known as a big car maker.
But at some point, he realized that something was missing from the car. What he realized was that the car had to be for everybody. He wanted to make a cheap, reliable, easily serviceable car. And he concentrated all his mind on this. He did it in a special room in Detroit.
The most important thing was possibly his use of vanadium steel, which is a special kind of steel that had been discovered in Britain, I think, first. But then he found it. You can make very light cars out of this stuff. And he believed in lightness, like some people believe in God. You know, it's just lightness in an automobile to him was the most important thing. And it cracked it.
It coped with the bad American roads by making this wonderfully ingenious suspension system that meant, you know, probably a good condition Model T. would be better at going over bad roads now than a modern SUV. It had a special system for holding the engine in place so that the twisting of the suspension didn't damage the engine. It was a beautiful little thing.
And it started out quite cheap, and then it got cheaper still. He kept pushing down the price. And amazingly, he made ever more money out of it.
Yes and no. It came out of thought processes from others about how you best made people work more efficiently and quicker. And other people had had these ideas. But what he did was simplify the process so that every workman on the line would do one job. And he did do that all day. It made it very, very efficient.
The problems were later to emerge from this, which is later story was that the Japanese made it better. But nobody had ever seen anything like this. Could produce millions of cars very easily. And they flooded out of the factory. They were such an extraordinary, they changed politics. Both Stalin and Hitler admired Henry Ford for what he did.
in other words both ends of the political spectrum and they admired him because to them this seemed like a new world a new way of organizing humanity it was a new politics in a way
There was a sort of monstrous simplicity of the man. He was easily influenced. Towards the end of his life, he was thinking of handing over the company to not to his son, whom he didn't regard as that competent, but to somebody called Harry Bennett, who's a low-life thug. He beat up people who protested against working conditions and things. He was a low-life thug.
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