Preview · Page 1 of 3
Meet the Book
Watch her — the Model T drives out of the book, across the page, and parks back home. Tap her to step inside the book.
This is the book's own stage: Henry Ford stands and reads his book aloud — the first 72 seconds of his Introduction, What Is the Idea?, over the book's 36-second stage loop, played twice, with period photographs behind him: the moving line at Highland Park, the Model T, and his first car, the 1896 Quadricycle. The narrator is Ford himself, from his real 1915 photograph. The barcode rides every frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
“We have only started on our development of our country--we have not as yet, with all our talk of wonderful progress, done more than scratch the surface..”
That is how Ford opens his book — and under the stage, the little Model T drives out of the book itself, across the page, and parks back in. Press Next to step into the middle of the book, where the assembly line is being born.
Preview · Page 2 of 3
From the Middle — Chapter V — Getting into Production
HENRY FORD
Highland Park, in the spring of 1913 — the experiment that changed how everything is made: “Along about April 1, 1913, we first tried the experiment of an assembly line. We tried it on assembling the flywheel magneto.” Ford tells it himself, in his own words, exactly as his 1922 book gives them — how the line began with one small part, and what it did to the price of a car.
Press Next to see everything that is inside the whole book.
Preview · Page 3 of 3
What’s Inside
- The Introduction and Chapters I–XI, complete: 55,647 words, Ford's own text exactly as he published it in 1922 — the idea, the beginning of business, what he learned about business, starting the real business and founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903, the secret of manufacturing and serving, getting into production, machines and men, the terror of the machine, wages and the five-dollar day, why business need not always be bad, how cheaply things can be made, and money and goods.
- 5 hours 28 minutes of narration — Henry Ford himself stands on the stage and reads his own book aloud, chapter by chapter, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes.
- 49 period pictures — the factory and the moving line at Highland Park, his first cars from the 1896 Quadricycle onward, the experiments, and the Model T in everyday life: families on the road, the ten-millionth Ford standing beside the very first one, the Fordson at work. Every picture is public domain, each captioned with its source.
- Kept honest, as Ford kept his accounts: the Model T was not the first car ever built — it was the first automobile ordinary people could afford, the car that put the world on wheels. This is Ford's own account of how that happened.
- The barcode rides every stage frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
This is the public-domain text of Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther's My Life and Work (1922; Project Gutenberg transcription #7213), presented as a talking hologram book, with all modern editorial matter removed and Ford's spelling untouched. The narration is a performed reading of that public-domain text, made for this edition. The narrator on the stage is Henry Ford himself, from a photograph taken in 1915 by the Ford Motor Company Photographic Department — a photograph of the man, not a painting or a rendering — and the book says so plainly in its disclaimer, which stands first, before the book begins. Editor: Franklin Langston.
franklinlangston.gumroad.com/l/uudglo
Point a camera at this barcode to come straight back to this bookstore — and pass it on.