Henry Ford Quotes
Mark my word - A combination airplane and motor car is coming.
"Ford, at 77, Foresees a Plane-Car." The New York Times, 31 Jul. 1940, p. 17.
What Mises says in this quotation is true. What he does not say that by the time the automobile was developed and then the airplane, the Railroad monopoly had impeded and destroyed so many different entities that the governments had cracked down and curtailed much of the ability of the Railroads to exercise monopolist power. If the Railroads had as much power in 1920 as they did in 1870, there probably never would have been a thriving auto industry and the airlines would likely never have succeeded. Mises again exaggerates a basic point that large monopolistic companies and industries often have not been able to stave off new technology and approaches. While true in many cases, the cause is not necessarily fundamental to economics but has sometimes (as with the railroads) been caused by Government regulation and reform. A better example is that the large sail dominated shipping industry was not able to stop the coal fired steam engine ships. Indeed the shipping owners embraced the new technology. The best examples of Mises point occurred after Mises died. For example, Microsoft was not able to prevent Google from dominating many of Microsoft’s positions in the IT world.
It is perhaps ironic that Langley had the vision of air flight while Wilber Wright, the inventor of the first airplane a few years later, saw it’s role much more limited. See: {42182}.
Cayley developed the first gliders and envisioned air travel at the same time that Thomas Jefferson was President.
Ataturk quickly envisioned the importance of the airplane. He even sent is daughter to Russia to learn to fly a plane, and she became the first Turkish Military Officer to do so. This was typical of Ataturk—killing two or more reform “birds” with one stone. He not only brought the airplane into the Turkish consciousness by having his daughter fly which attracted great attention of the press and got people talking, but showed that women were capable of the most complex technological tasks. Before Ataturk, few women in Turkey ever did anything but parenting and homemaking. Ataturk gave Turkish women the vote before America adopted women’s suffrage.
Actually both of these predictions came true in half the time estimated. This is a good illustration of how technological innovation and utilization was accelerating throughout the 20th century.
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, business magnate, anti-Semite, and founder of the Ford Motor Company and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that middle-class Americans could afford, he converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into an accessible conveyance that profoundly impacted the landscape of the 20th century.
