Overview

Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technology: 170 years ago the railroad changed Americans' conception of space and time; in our era, the microprocessor revolutionized how humans communicate. But in the early twentieth century the agent of creative destruction was the gasoline engine, as put to work by an unknown and relentlessly industrious young man named Henry Ford. Born the same year as the battle of Gettysburg, Ford died two years after the atomic bombs fell, and his life personified the tremendous technological changes achieved in that span. Growing up as a Michigan farm boy with a bone-deep loathing of farming, Ford intuitively saw the advantages of internal combustion. Resourceful and fearless, he built his first gasoline engine out of scavenged industrial scraps. It was the size of a sewing machine. From there, scene by scene, Richard Snow vividly shows Ford using his innate mechanical abilities, hard work, and radical imagination as he transformed American industry. In many ways, of course, Ford's story is well-known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an infinity of household devices. A highly pleasurable listen, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive competition with other early car manufacturers, I Invented the Modern Age shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.

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Reviews

"Stylistically, Snow mimics the marvelously folksy, protean temperament of his subject, dwelling on Ford's early mechanical inventions rather than his latter problematic prickliness, and everywhere portraying a compelling character.-- ""Kirkus"" ""Highly readable."" -- ""Publishers Weekly"" ""Stylistically, Snow mimics the marvelously folksy, protean temperament of his subject, dwelling on Ford's early mechanical inventions rather than his latter problematic prickliness, and everywhere portraying a compelling character."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews"" ""The 'T' itself is a protagonist in Mr. Snow's often lyrical book."" -- ""Wall Street Journal"""

Author Information

Richard Snow is a historian and the author of several books, among them two novels and a volume of poetry. He worked at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was its editor-in-chief for seventeen years. Richard has served as a consultant for historical motion pictures-among them Glory-and has written for documentaries, including the Burns brothers' Civil War and Ric Burns's award-winning PBS film Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote. Most recently, he served as a consultant on Ken Burns's World War II series, The War. Sean Runnette, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, has also directed and produced more than two hundred audiobooks, including several Audie Award winners. He is a member of the American Repertory Theater company and has toured the United States and internationally with ART and Mabou Mines. His television and film appearances include Two If by Sea, Cop Land, Sex and the City, Law & Order, the award-winning film Easter, and numerous commercials.

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