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The Inventor’s Secret: What Thomas Edison Told Henry Ford Written by Suzanne Slade Illustrated by Jennifer Black Reinhardt Charlesbridge Publishing    9/08/2015 978-01-58089-667-2 32 pages   Ages 7—12 “Thomas was curious about electricity—invisible energy that flowed and stopped, sizzled and popped. “Henry was curious about engines—machines that chugged and purred, hiccupped and whirred. “When Thomas …

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Last week I wrote about the kind of research I do when I get an idea. I have to answer two key questions: Is it kid-friendly, and is it a new idea or new slant on an old subject?  Henry Ford's plastic soybean car fits the bill, so I move to question number three: Will there be enough information about the subject to make the project viable?

I have run into dead ends before. Getting my hopes up about some arcane topic only to discover that the little tidbit that tantalized me initially was all there was. No historical records existed.  I suppose I could have made it my life's work to scrape together the few remnants that remained and built on it so that I became the expert, but my heart, and my attention span, was just not that into it. I'll leave that to some grad student looking for a dissertation topic.

But my gut feeling is that there is more to my plastic car story than what I have uncovered so far. After all, Henry Ford is one of the most famous innovators of the 20th century. So, my first task is to read as many biographies as I can about the man. Doing research for a nonfiction book is like creating backstories for fictional characters. You need to find out what makes them tick. Where did they come from? What and who influenced them?  There are a lot of biographies about Ford, so I select the ones written by reputable researchers; ones with lots of end notes and a big bibliographies that will direct me to other sources.  I start to build my own working bibliography.

Your real characters need to be grounded in a time and place. You need to know about the world they lived in. For this project that means reading about the Roarin' Twenties, the Great Depression, and about life in Michigan.

I also read up on ancillary topics, too, like soybeans (Did you know there are more than 300 kinds?), and about the Ford company (FYI: The ill-fated Edsel was named after Ford's son, who was named after Ford's best friend, who was a food chemist at the plant.)

My working bibliography grows exponentially, and I know that there is more than enough information out there to make my Henry Ford story a go. And that's a good thing, because my editor already approved it. :)

Next Week: Step 3 -  Looking for those Primary Documents

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Back in June while signing books at a conference, two educators suggested that I write about Henry Ford. My initial thought was, "Why? Aren't there a million books about Henry Ford?" Besides, this was an Agriculture in the Classroom conference. Ford wasn't a farmer.

But I was wrong. They told me that Ford owned so much farm land in Michigan that he could probably walk to Chicago without stepping off his property.  Huh! So, as I sat there trying to look busy and welcoming at my little table, I took the first step in researching what would turn out to be my next book project. I googled Henry Ford and farming.

Twenty years ago when I first started writing nonfiction, my first step was to scour my bookshelves for any information that could enlighten me about an idea I had, and to hurry to the library to check out a stack of books on the subject. Today, I don't have to get up out of my seat. I use my smart phone. (And I wonder why I'm heavier now??)

Ford's soybean plastic car - 1941

My phone told me that Henry did indeed own lots of farm land, he built the Fordson tractor, he was big into soybeans, and even created a soybean plastic car!!!  Hold the phone! That was it. That nugget of information became the center of my research snowball. I could even imagine the illustrations. That one phrase - soybean plastic car - told me that I had a kid-friendly topic. What kid, especially a boy, wouldn't be fascinated by that?

A cursory search through Amazon told me that there were no children's books on this subject. Now I knew that I had a kid-friendly, new slant on an old subject. With these two boxes checked off my mental list of must-haves, I knew I could move forward with more research. If someone else had written about Ford's car, I would have found a copy and figured out if  and how I could make my story different enough to warrant an editor giving me a contract for it. Now, all I have to do is see if there is enough information available to make it a viable story. It is possible that nobody wrote about the car because the story just isn't there. To determine that will require me to dig deeper.

Next week: How to Research NF: Step Two

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Now my son had tinkered on gadgets for years in our basement, which slowly aquired an assortment of tools, wires, and electronics equipment (including a 3D printer that he used to make his own inline skates), so I understood the enormous potential of a school makerspace.

3D printed model of Lincoln life mask

Actual Lincoln life mask

Find Out More Genius Hour Livebinder  Suzanne’s List of Genius Hour Resources  Designing a School Makerspace  Manufacturing Makerspaces  Instructables - website with great DIY projects  Make: - website with more great DIY projects

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Thomas Edison, 1921.

Title adapted from Laurie J. Edwards’ discussion on inspiration. Thank you! And don’t forget to enter to win a copy of Stefanie Lyon’s YA novel in verse, DATING DOWN. You can enter here between now and midnight, May 15, 2015.

Fred White blogged in 2010 that “Being inspired smacks of amateurish, daydreamy passivity, the notion that some supernatural presence must appear before us before the words can flow. And we’re reminded to death of Thomas Edison’s overquoted words about invention demanding 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, perhaps not realizing that without that primal 1 percent jolt from the gods, Edison might not have been driven to sweat out the hard work or to cope with a zillion things going wrong.”

Inspiration is important for any creative activity. In fact, some argue that art made the world (See Nigel Spivey’s How Art Made the World, 2005). When early humans produced art over 77,000 years ago, they crafted tools and embellished it with color, but the defining element that made it stand above their Homo habilis ancestors using tools is found the singular capacity of using the imagination. From these humble beginnings, civilizations were born.

And inspiration fires the imagination. I’ve asked some of my favorite people about their favorite inspirations, and include them below. All photographs are from the Library of Congress, used with permission.


 From Laurie J. Edwards, YA author extraordinaire:



Henry Ford, 1924. His first car and his ten millionth car.

 “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eye off the goal.” ~ Henry Ford

Bamboo Gardens, China, 1900.

From Rebecca Colby, author of It’s Raining Bats and Frogs and other picturebooks:

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." ~ Chinese Proverb




 

Martha Graham, Age 67, 1961.

  From Marcia Strykowski, author of Call Me Amy:

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of
you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."  ~ Martha Graham



 




Eleanor Roosevelt, 1946.

 From Yvonne Ventresca, author of Pandemic:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. . . .You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  ~ Eleanor Roosevelt





And because it's Mark Twain:

Mark Twain, 1903.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” ~ Mark Twain

Historic mural depicting the Harper Lee novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird" located in Monroeville, Alabama. 1961.

 “Inspiration matters because it prods us to traverse the full spectrum of human experience. An important part of what it means to be a writer is to become so turned on to the business of being alive, to be so completely inspired by life, that you will harvest ideas for writing everywhere—from books, from people, from music and other art forms, from the natural world, and most of all from your own inner resources.” ~ Fred White, 2010


What inspires you?


Bobbi Miller

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• Henry Ford established the Ford car company.
• He was born on June 30, 1863 in Michigan.
• His mother died in child birth when he was 12.
• He got a watch for his 13th birthday, and took it apart to put it back together.
• He liked bird-watching and dancing.
• He got a job where he could work with boat motors in Detroit.
• He got married to Clara Wright.
• Ford built what he called a quadricycle, which was meant to look like two bicycles put together.
• He started racing cars, then began the Ford company.
• The first car sold from Ford was a Model A, sold to a dentist.
• He wanted to make a car that could drive on dirt, and he succeeded with the Model T.  It was a very popular car, and he couldn’t build enough on time for everyone.
• Men at Ford had to work all night.
• Ford paid $5 a day so that other people would want to work there.
• He eventually started making airplanes.
• He also set up schools, because he loved kids.
• The Model T became outdated, so Ford made a newer Model A.
• The new Model A was successful.
• Ford shut down the company so he could think of new cars, and a riot broke out and 5 men died.
• People were drawn back to work again when Ford had an inspiration.
• The working conditions in Ford were miserable.
• A strike soon formed, and even his wife Clara was involved.
• When Henry Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 83 on April 30, 1947
• His oldest son, Ezel Ford, died of cancer in the stomach, liver, and other diseases, so his other son, Henry Ford II took over the Ford company.

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From the Cadillac to the Apple Mac, the skyscraper to the Tiffany lampshade, the world we live in has been profoundly influenced by the work of American designers. Below is an extract from Design in the USA by Jeffrey L. Meikle, part of the Oxford History of Art series, which discusses automobile design and the marketing strategies by Ford and General Motors in the 1920s.

The automobile was the most significant technology of the twentieth century, transforming the way almost all people lived, worked, and identified themselves. More than any other manufactured artefact, it engaged the attention of designers, of critics predicting design trends, and of anyone interested in the appearance of things. In 1916 the automotive engineer William B. Stout (1880-1956) observed that the motor car was no longer ‘merely a mechanism for traveling’ but ‘a part of the home equipment . . . standing at the door . . . reflect[ing] the personality and the taste of the home within’. Announcing that ‘style has come to the automobile’, he maintained that car manufacturers would soon ‘take every advantage of art knowledge’ to create ‘an appeal consistent with its mechanical performance’. The automobile was a luxury in 1916, with 3.4 million passenger cars registered, one for every 25 inhabitants. However, the success of the Model T Ford soon transformed popular fantasy into universal reality. Even then, one of every two new cars was a utilitarian Model T, first introduced in 1908, cheaply mass-produced on a moving assembly line since 1913, and sold for about $500. By 1928, there were more than 20 million automobiles registered, one for every six people. In the meantime style had become central to selling cars. For many Americans the focus of materialized identity had shifted outward from the relatively fixed traditional domesticity of the home to a perpetually changing public realm of technology. Eventually this outward machine-age gaze turned back inward to appliances and home furnishings, but the American love affair with the automobile was the start of it.

Evidence of design’s significance came in May 1927, when Henry Ford (1863–1947) shut down the vast River Rouge plant, an international symbol of industrial modernity, and quit making the Model T. He was reacting to competition from General Motors, whose low-end Chevrolet, only slightly more expensive than a Model T, sported a lower, more rounded, better integrated silhouette. The automotive market was approaching saturation. Most people who wanted cars already had them, and new car sales were mostly replacements for unstylish Model Ts. Despite Ford’s key role in industrialization, he was ambivalent about progress and had long considered the Model T as a tool for improving the lives of farmers. But Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1875–1966), president of General Motors, recognized the automobile’s radical cultural novelty. He realized the public would reward a manufacturer who enabled them to drive inexpensive cars resembling the sleek, hand-crafted Auburns and Marmons of the upper class.

Sloan’s strategy at General Motors transformed the marketing of automobiles and the design of most other mass-produced consumer products. The first part of the strategy involved rationalizing the various brands GM had acquired through corporate takeovers. From the inexpensive Chevrolet up through Buick and La Salle to the most expensive Cadillac, there was a model for every price bracket and always something higher to aspire to. GM also perfected a system of ‘flexible mass production’, basing the different product lines on a limited number of chassis sizes and body types and differentiating them with minor cosmetic variations in fenders, bumpers, radiator grilles, chrome accents, and interior details, very much as the furniture makers of Grand Rapids had built up stylistically distinctive cabinets or bedsteads by adding layers of differing ornament to otherwise identical forms.

The second part of GM’s marketing strategy put this hierarchy of models into dynamic motion through time. The so-called annual model change, firmly established by 1927, was intended to stimulate demand by introducing minor styling changes into each model each year to create an impression of novelty even if a car’s mechanical functions remained essentially unchanged. Dramatic, newsworthy design changes occurred initially only in the most expensive models, thereby raising expectations among consumers who could afford only lower-priced models. In subsequent years such innovative details would migrate down the line, enabling even purchasers of the lowly Chevy to enjoy features recently limited to society’s economic elite—but subtly reinterpreted to reflect the presumed vulgarity of lower income groups.

Under Sloan’s guidance, General Motors developed an overarching design policy. In 1927 he established an Art and Color Section with a staff of 50. As director he appointed Harley Earl (1893–1969), a designer with experience creating custom auto bodies for Hollywood actors. Earl had just achieved a resounding success for GM with the 1927 La Salle, which boasted long front fenders, a roof gently rounded at the back, elongated side windows, and such elegant detailing as a chrome band between cowl and hood. As the Art and Color Section set to work on other GM models, the concept of the motor car as a thing of beauty, not merely of utility, became democratized. Using modelling clay over full-sized wooden forms, Earl’s stylists sculpted low-slung bodies notable for integrating the formerly disparate parts —engine and passenger compartments—of a closed automobile. These stylistic innovations exploited a shift in manufacturing from labour-intensive composite bodies of sheet metal on wooden frames to ‘all-steel’ bodies stamped in huge presses with dies whose wide-radiused curves encouraged a sculptural flair. Earl brought style to the masses.

Although developments at GM echoed for decades, immediate attention in 1927 focused on the Ford Motor Co. With journalists wondering whether Henry Ford would ever make another car, his associates were busy designing and tooling up for the Model A, introduced to great fanfare five months after the demise of the Model T. Although the new model was easier to shift and drive, endearing it to the increasing ranks of female drivers, stylistic improvements were modest. The Model A appeared somewhat sleeker, with lower road clearance, a longer wheelbase, bumpers of two flat parallel strips of chromed steel, a radiator with an elegantly curved frame, and a gently rakish backward slant. Even so, compared with GM’s bottom-of-the-line Chevrolet, there was nothing particularly innovative about the Model A. Its significance lay in the fact that America’s most famous industrialist, the inventor of the mass-production assembly line, had to spend $18 million on retooling just to keep pace with more artful competition.

Ford’s experience made an impression on other business executives who faced market saturation, consumer resistance, falling sales, and intense competition. Two out of three businessmen surveyed about the significance of ‘art and business’ spontaneously mentioned the Model A conversion as a cautionary tale. One executive referred to it as ‘the most expensive art lesson in history’, a phrase that carried special significance for those who heard his prepared remarks at a dinner meeting on 29 October 1929, the day the bottom fell out of the stock market. With the economy sliding from recession into depression, many manufacturers turned to product design, both as a means of overcoming competition in their own industries and later as a panacea for restoring the entire nation’s economic health.

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