Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [111]
SPOKESMAN: But the America of the pioneers is gone. Wiped out by Henry Ford's Detroit…
HENRY FORD: I come from that old America. My father had a farm, in Michigan. I began to experiment with my inventions on the farm, financed by my father; I wanted to build practical transport vehicles for agriculture. The car was born in the country. I kept my love for the America of my childhood and my parents. As soon as I realized it was disappearing, I started buying and collecting old farm tools, ploughs, millwheels, carriages, buggies, sleds, furniture from the old wooden houses that were going to ruin …
SPOKESMAN: So, just as ecology originates in the culture that produced pollution, so antique dealing originates from the same culture that imposed the new things that have replaced the old…
HENRY FORD: I bought a traditional old tavern in Sudbury, Massachusetts, together with its swing sign and veranda… I even had them rebuild the unsurfaced track the wagon trails used when they headed West…
SPOKESMAN: Is it true that in order to bring back the atmosphere of the time of horses and stagecoaches around that old tavern, you had the highway diverted, the very highway your Ford cars were roaring along at top speed?
HENRY FORD: There's room for everything in this America of ours, don't you think? The American countryside mustn't be allowed to disappear. I was always opposed to the exodus of farmers from the country. I designed a hydroelectric station on the Tennessee to supply low cost energy to farmers. I would have given them electrical appliances, fertilizers, and they would have stayed away from the city. But neither government nor farmers would hear of it. They never understand simple ideas: there are three elementary functions in human life: farming, manufacturing and transportation. Every problem hangs on the way we grow things, the way we produce things, the way we transport things, and I always proposed the simplest solutions. The farmers' work was pointlessly complicated. Only five per cent of their energy was being spent to good use.
SPOKESMAN: So you don't feel nostalgic for that life?
HENRY FORD: If you think I miss things from the past, then you haven't understood me at all. I don't care one bit about the past! I don't believe in the experience of history! Really, filling people's heads with culture from the past is the most pointless thing you can do.
SPOKESMAN: But the past means experience… In the life of peoples and individuals …
HENRY FORD: Even individual experience serves no other purpose than to perpetuate memories of failures. The ‘experts' in the factory only know how to tell you that you can't do this, that that has already been tried but doesn't work… If I had listened to the experts, I would never have achieved any of what I did achieve, I would have been daunted from day one, I would never have managed to put together an internal combustion engine. At the time the experts thought electricity was the solution to everything, that engines should be electric too. They were all fascinated by Edison, rightly so, and so was I. And I went to ask him if he thought I was crazy, as people were saying, because I'd set my stubborn mind to getting an engine rolling that went ‘brum brum. Then, the man himself, Edison, the great Edison, said to me: ‘Young man, I'll tell you what I think. I've worked with electricity all my life. Well, electrical cars will never be able to range very far from their supply stations. No good imagining they can carry batteries of accumulators around with them: they're too heavy. And steam cars aren't ideal either: they'll always need a boiler and fire and what it takes to fuel it. But the automobile