Connecticut Yankee
They don’t call Detroit the Motor City for nothing. Nestled among the Great Lakes and rich in iron ore, Michigan and the Midwest didn’t take long to become the epicenter of a booming automobile industry that came to define so much of business and life in the 20th century. But the Industrial Revolution, indeed production of automobiles in this country, first took root in New England, where rivers first provided the energy that powered mills, machines, and factories.
Interchangeable parts manufacturing began long before Henry Leland’s Cadillac, and it started with New England gun-makers and horologists, the same industries that gave birth to the precision machine tools that fueled American advances in engineering in the 19th and 20th centuries, the sort of machines that made the mass production of durable and reliable engines and transmissions possible.
