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On top of all these mistakes...there is also the very American mistake of believing Ford invented the car.

When I've read it I knew I had to take all the rest with a big grain of salt :|

> there is also the very American mistake of believing Ford invented the car.

I don't quite see that since the author dates the quote to 20 years before Ford's popularisation of automobiles, he obviously couldn't have been the inventor of something being investigated by a congressional committee long before his age.

Then again, the "report" is an anachronistic piece of fiction: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

I am referring to "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced the world he was onto something".

No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars roughly 10 years after his peers in Europe.

The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker does one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it? IIRC Ford's project was to make the car affordable to those of more modest means, so "everyone" could have a car.

If you look at the quote then this interpretation makes more sense IMO - the quote clearly considers the position that cars were being made commercially 20 years before Ford.

TL;DR the Ford point is he democratised car use in the face of congress's earlier consideration that such widespread use would kill agriculture and people. (Mind you the congress memo quote seems pretty right on).

> The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker does one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it?

IIRC Olds already had a one-job production line, but the line was static and workers had to move around between assemblies. Ford's innovation was to make the workers "static" (with well laid out workspaces) and move the assembly between the jobs.

I think you're right: I toyed with adding "static" but then needed to emphasise it was the workers who were static, then it was getting too wordy.

It's a far-reaching interpretation in my opinion.

The author is talking about product innovation, all the examples are on people who invented famous products.

When he says : "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced..".

Well the congress's statement is from 1875, 20 years later the first cars appeared. Ford came 10 years later. The event he's referring to is clearly the car invention

It's quite obvious that he's presenting Ford as the inventor of the car.

> No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars 10 years after his peers in Europe.

Closer to 20 and he was neither pioneer of production-line manufacturing (that was Olds) nor of US car manufacturing (that's Duryea followed by Studebaker). The something he was on to was the moving assembly line (where the posts are fixed and the assembly moves around), inspired by slaughterhouse butchery lines.

When you have only so much history, you need to take whatever you can.

And note that the memo talks about horseless carriages propelled by gasoline. At the time, steam-powered cars were already on the roads and people expected steam to be how the car would be powered.

Ford's wife drove an electric car!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric

I am sure you are right about steam being the expected winner, but gosh the past is a complex place!

The history of early flight and car technologies reminds me very much of the early computer industry. In each case every other product was some crazy one-off custom job. With flight you had different approaches to control surfaces. With cars just for power you had steam (the assumed winner because people were so familiar with steam locomotives), gasoline, diesel, electric. On top of that there were flywheel powered and balanced cars, three wheelers and all sorts of crazy control systems. With computers there was also very little standardization with Apple, Tandy, Atari, Acorn, Sinclair and many others selling mutually incompatible devices. BASIC was pretty common but there were many variations and I remember one home micro coming with Forth.

I wonder if there are any other good examples of technologies that had explosions in different technical approaches to the problem before becoming more standardised?

Another (completely unrelated) tidbit from that time in history: There were two competing schools of thought regarding flight. One was the modern school of thought: that pilots should be given control. The other was inherent stability, the idea that planes could be made to balance themselves in the air with no input from a pilot.

I just think it's interesting how difficult it is to see good ideas when they haven't been invented yet. And how easy it is to relentlessly pursue bad ideas.

Planes do balance themselves. Stability was traditionally achieved with a carefully placed center of gravity.

Modern fighter planes are unstable, but are stabilized by computers, not the pilot.

> Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal

Absolutely untrue. The Wright Brothers brought their breakthrough into the market in a big way, becoming a (not the only) major manufacturer of commercially available, working, reliable aircraft.

True, they fought patent battles, and in the end their reliance on wing warping (covered well by their patents) held them back when it became clear that ailerons were the way foreward - but they certainly were more than just experimental researchers. They truly did usher in the age of practical, heavier-than-air flight.

If they didn't focus mainly on patents and secrecy, maybe they could have seen that ailerons were the future. If the US didn't enter WWI, the US aircraft industry could have stagnated under the Wrights. They just weren't building and innovating anymore. They were just suing everyone.

> Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent.

I believe that this was not true for Santos-Dumont[1] though. I wonder if he had more media coverage at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont

It's not true of most other aviation pioneers, because they were either independently wealthy or well-funded. The Wright brothers were self-funded but not really wealthy, their flyers were their path to wealth so the secrecy was understandable.

"most other aviation pioneers, because they were either independently wealthy or well-funded"

Wrong! One of them was Traian Vuia, struggling with financial difficulties which significantly delayed both the plane development and its final public demonstration in Paris! Other not so wealthy pioneers are Percy Pilcher, Lawrence Hargrave, Samuel Franklin Cody, Otto Lilienthal, Aurel Vlaicu, and many others.

This is fascinating. I can't believe I never knew this.