I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford and the Most Important Car Ever Made

Written by Richard Snow

Narrated by Sean Runnette

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jun 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452684468

Richard Snow

Richard Snow spent nearly four decades at American Heritage magazine, serving as editor in chief for seventeen years, and has been a consultant on 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. He is the author of multiple books, including, most recently, Disney’s Land.

Reviews for I Invented the Modern Age

[uberbutter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow
364 pages

★★★ ½

I think most everyone knows something about Henry Ford. Before reading this book I could tell you that he was the main person to come up with an assembly line in its modern sense, he raised the minimum wage and lowered the hours – one of the first to do so, and of course he came up with the Ford Model T – far from being the first car but definitely pushing a path where no car had gone at the time, and the whole anti-Semite thing. But there was much more to the man behind the car company and the author does a great job of shining light on Henry Ford.

This was a really interesting biography on a man I honestly didn’t know much about. I was amazed with how much paths this man paved in his time and I wonder where we would be even know without the genius of Ford and his team. The guy was far from perfect – he could be a jerk, he was an anti-Semite, he bullied his own son, and he had a habit of making all ideas from his team out to be his own. The author did his research and he was fair in his perception of Henry Ford. The book goes into detail on the early life of Ford and through his most successful car, the Model T, and then sort of rushes past the rest. This is a good one to read if you have any interest in the man or in cars (in this case I have little interest in cars but I am fascinated by the history of it all). It’s a smooth, attention-grabbing read in my opinion.

[michellebarton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

very interesting history of the start of the car industry and of Henry Ford, eccentricities and foibles included.

[minfo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Even if you've read a dozen or more biographies of Ford, this is one you'll definately want to add to your collection. Snow has brougnt large concepts and minute details together into a compelling and creative work. It's a book that simply pulls you in and holds you throughout, with visual descriptions which put you there as events unfold. An impressive narrative that's also an excellent start for anyone simply looking for a fantastic story of a man and the world which shaped him and which he shaped as well.