#190 Henry Ford and Thomas Edison

**David Senra** (0:00)
Before Edison left, he had a suggestion. The best part of the California trip had been the drive from Los Angeles to San Diego, free from any demands but their own whims.
While Edison didn't enjoy public appearances, he did savor time spent with friends away from the crushing daily concerns at work.
Surely Ford and Firestone felt the same.
Why not embark on future car trips, picking a general area and route, and then going along as they pleased?
They could camp. Perhaps John Burroughs would come along and point out all sorts of interesting plant life and birds, as had been the plan in 1914 during the aborted visit to the Everglades.
Henry Ford was immediately in favor.
And besides recreation, the trips would suit business purposes too. The three men were pragmatic enough to realize that they couldn't go anywhere, particularly as a group without attracting constant notice. Their California adventures had just proven that newspapers couldn't get enough of Edison's and Ford's adventures. Everywhere else in the country, reporters would vie for an opportunity to write about local visits. And thanks to the recent development of wire services, their stories would appear in newspapers all over the US.
Edison and Ford and Firestone gave themselves a nickname. They would be The Vagabonds, annually joining much of the rest of America, exploring the country by car.
What better way for such rich, famous men to demonstrate their kinship with ordinary Americans?
We are really just like you.
Their main goal was to have a good time, but few business magnates in America had a shrewder understanding of marketing than Edison, Ford and Firestone.
If rank and file consumers like what they saw and read about, as they surely would, then sales of cars and light bulbs and phonographs and tires would directly benefit too. All right, so that excerpt is explaining the why behind the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Vagabonds, The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip, and it was written by Jeff Guinn. And real quick, just before I jump back into the book, sometimes I have like ideas about the podcast or new things I'm doing. And anytime that pops up, I'm just going to put them at the end of any particular episode. So at the end, at the very end of this podcast, there's just some new updates and ideas I have. So if you're interested, make sure you can listen to that at the very end. Let me go ahead and jump into the beginning of the book. Really a way to think about, I would say the author was just talking about how shrewd a marketer Ford, Edison and Firestone were. And I think Ford's probably the greatest of all marketers out of the three of them. And you can really think of Henry Ford as like the original influencer.
He would definitely do very well with social media. And so this is a little bit about that. It says Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity. He worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts.
Most summers for a decade, Henry Ford set out on auto trips, visiting remote towns and small communities.
And you can think of these trips, which is what the entire book is about, not only as vacation, they get to hang out with friends, they don't get to normally see because everybody's busy, but it is primarily, the reading of the book is, I think the primary reason, more so than all that, was the fact that it gave them publicity for their business, for their respective businesses. But particularly with Henry Ford, it shows what you can do with my product. Hey, look, here's another reason you want to buy it, in addition to the free publicity. So it says on every trip, Ford was accompanied by friends, sometimes other business magnets or else government officials, including I think two presidents, if I'm not mistaken, or one president and then they met another one, high-ranking Ford staff members, and high-ranking Ford staff members. His road companions always included the tire tycoon Harvey Firestone and the much-beloved inventor Thomas Edison. Edison was the only living American whose fame rivaled Ford's own.
So both Ford and Edison are obviously extremely famous and well-known independently. They get together, of course, the press and the general public, and we're curious of what they're up to. This book goes in sequential order from 1914 to 1924 when the trips end.
Now, throughout the book, they talk about obviously the trips they're taking, but then the author has a bunch of digressions and these little stories that give us insights into the personality and business, like what's going on in their businesses between Firestone, Ford and Edison. And that's most of what I'm going to focus on today. It's most of what I personally found interesting. And this is about Henry Ford's one idea. And when I got to this section, it made me think of a quote I'm going to read to you from this book I covered all the way back on Founders Number 118, written by Charles Sorensen, which is like Henry Ford's, almost like right-hand man for 40 years. The name of the book is My 40 Years of Ford, and I'll get there in one second. And it's about this idea that I love. It's like Henry Ford had basically one idea. And the reason I love that is because you only really need one idea in life to become wildly successful and build the life that you want. So it says, Henry Ford introduced a car that transformed American consumerism and travel. Previously, automobiles were exclusively for the rich, costing thousands of dollars for purchase and considerably more for upkeep. But Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model T's were mass produced on a previously unimaginable scale. In competitors' factories, it took workers several hours to assemble an individual car. At the Ford plant, a completed Model T rolled out the line every two and a half minutes.