Reading 18

“There were few cars on the road in 1900 and they tended to belong to the rich, the obsessed and the tinkerers. The rest of the population were in the habit of crying ‘Get a horse!’ as the cars of the day rattled by.”

- Bryan Appleyard, The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World (2022)

“In 1919 Ford pursued a libel case against the Chicago Tribune, which had called him an ‘ignorant idealist’ and ‘an anarchistic enemy of the nation’ because of his opposition a few years earlier to President Wilson’s decision to send the National Guard to the Mexican border to prevent raids by Pancho Villa’s guerrillas. The Tribune’s defence was that Ford was an ignoramus.

“On the witness stand Ford did indeed display remarkable ignorance – he thought the American Revolution had occurred in 1812 and that chilli con carne was a large mobile army. He was widely mocked, but he didn’t care. In fact, he revelled in the scorn, as it put him in touch with the common man. ‘I rarely read anything except the headlines,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to read books; they muss up my mind.’”

- Bryan Appleyard, The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World (2022)