Where it all began: the spiritual center of Motown

By: Lawrence P. Lonero

Date: Monday, 21. August 2006

Larry Lonero is an expert on crash causes and a principal of Northport Associates, a consulting company based in Ontario, Canada.

As the millennium turns, it's a good time to think about the technical innovations responsible for our industries and everyday lifestyles. It would be great fun to speculate about possible futures but all too easy to forget where these technologies have come from, and especially how fast they evolved and become "transparent." For an enthusiast driver and chronic motor crazy, a trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, is a necessary millennial pilgrimage.

From the Northport campus in the Northumberland Hills of eastern Ontario, the road trip to Motown is itself an epic adventure. To simulate late 20th century family life, I loaded Eddie, the big brown Aerostar, with the astonishing amount of stuff supposedly needed by the modern North American family. As a packing genius, I was able to leave room for the nuclear family members themselves: the two boys Adam and Jesse, and Attila the Mum. To add realism to the simulated family adventure, I also loaded our other domestic livestock: the cat named Blue (confused), dog (Taz, Australian shepherd, totally berserk), and Jesse's pet mouse (Duncan, very quiet). We got under way only two hours later than planned, westbound on the Queen's Highway 401. The late start was good though, because we avoided the Toronto's impenetrable morning rush hour, which would have meant spending two hours inching (centimetering?) along a piece of freeway ironically called the Toronto Bypass by the guys who built it.

Almost without incident we punched through a few short, sharp thunderstorms and proceeded non-stop to southwestern Ontario. Just once Eddie was pushed out of his lane by a sloppy aggregate hauler who managed only half a pass at 35 kliks over the posted limit.

Past London we went on full alert. Dan, Drivers.com editor in chief, had assigned us to find out if there really is something wrong with the 401 Highway west of London. The news media say casualties are suddenly so numerous that there must be something wrong with the road. It is a poor, sad old freeway, with a narrow, grass median, designed before anybody really knew how to do it right. Except for a rough, broken surface, it's not much worse than it ever was. Maybe, however, crashes are "migrating" down there as other parts of Ontario's freeway system have been upgraded and gotten harder to crash on. Drivers often do seem to pick bad bits of road for their crashes. We got through to Windsor without even seeing a single cross-median crash, or any other type, but maybe we were just lucky.

The biggest danger on 401 may be starvation, or at least hypoglycemia. Food along the roads in Ontario is very scarce, and has generally been dreadful where available at all. The standard of Ontario road food went up a notch some years ago when McDonalds were put into the freeway service areas. The boys always perk up as we approach the US border, since it means they might not starve after all.

Surviving the various 401 hazards, we crossed the Detroit River from Windsor at the Ambassador Bridge. In Detroit, of course, the media would have us believe that not just the roads and other drivers are trying to kill us, but even pedestrians are packing guns and dangerous. Since the area around the Bridge still looks like a war zone, largely unrestored from the 1960s riots, the shooting hype is semi-believable. The most immediate danger in Detroit seemed to be disappearing down a pothole, since the roads are in such a state of disrepair and threat of small arms fire seems to be exaggerated. With the roads so full of huge potholes, it must be a real challenge for instructors to teach drivers to look far ahead. Still, we successfully dodged around the broken, maybe shell-pocked surface, took no incoming fire (to the great disappointment of the boys), and punched through to the suburbs and Dearborn.

In Dearborn, finding Greenfield Village is quick and easy. Good directions and a local map are available on their web site (URL link at end of article). Parking, as is usual around Motown, is plentiful and free. Some of the parking is even shaded, helping to prevent prematurely cooking our onboard livestock in the August heat. The Museum, situated on the 80 acre Greenfield Village site, is just one room. One room sounds kind of wimpy, until you find out that that room covers 8 acres, and the floor is all teak. It was built in 1929 for its current purpose, which was to preserve American technical history and innovation.

The collections contain an amazing amount of stuff connected with major technical innovation, such as Thomas Edison's laboratories, the Wright brothers' workshop, and the first Ford car, of course. Even more amazing to me are the collections of the hardware of everyday life preceding and resulting from these innovations: domestic equipment like lighting, stoves, clothes washers, and vacuum cleaners. Did you know there were hand-pumped vacuum cleaners and washers before electricity? Industrial, agricultural and transportation equipment of all times and types abound, horse drawn to steam to diesel and beyond, including the truly awesome biggest steam locomotive. Historic aircraft include the Antarctic expedition Ford TriMotor and the Ford Flivver, a still-born everyman's airplane. They don't mention that the Flivver never made production status because, when one of the prototypes crashed and killed the test pilot, Henry killed the airplane.

Communications and information technologies are covered in incredible scope and detail. Same for manufacturing and power generation technologies, including a complete, functioning steam powered machine shop, and even recent history including numerical controlled machining and robotics.

You can also see how the 15,000,000 Model T Ford's were built, and compare the assembly process to a modern robotic assembly plant. Aside from motorizing America and much of the rest of the world, those 15,000,000 Model Ts are, of course, what financed the Museum. While cars and automotive technology do not unduly dominate the Museum, there is plenty to fill the spiritual needs of the millennial driving nut.

Unlike the usual museum collection of cars, this museum also shows in-depth background on the history, economics, politics, and cultural impact of cars, as well as the industrial and automotive engineering technologies. In political history, along side a Corvair, the museum shows a copy of Ralph Nader's book about it and material on the subsequent controversy leading to the U.S. Motor Vehicle Safety Act. This "technology-forcing" legislation drove much of the subsequent automotive innovation that led to the very safe, but highly complex, modern car.

Many extraordinary and historical cars are fascinating in their own right; race cars like the legendary Mercedes 300SLR, solar cars, and landmark designs like the Chrysler Airflow. The presidential Lincolns include the one in which John Kennedy was shot in Dallas. For good measure, they also have the theater seat in which Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was shot. It is important to keep in mind that neither of these shootings occurred in Detroit.

An enormous double line of more ordinary, representative cars stretches from the 1896 Duryea up to the first Honda Accord built in America in 1982. Car culture displays include an early McDonald's, a beautiful rail-car type diner from the 1940s, and a 1930s Texaco station, complete with a fabulous streamliner type gas delivery truck.

Henry Ford' reputation is not untarnished if you think back to the allegations of union-busting goon squads, anti-Semitism, and excessive paternalism. He may have had a megalomaniac side, trying to own everything related to the car business, including ships for hauling Lake Superior iron-ore and even a rubber plantation in Brazil. Implausibly, Henry's even accused in local legend of stifling Detroit entertainment and culture as a means of keeping workers focused on their jobs. Even he was not powerful enough to take responsibility for Detroit's largely undeserved reputation as a dull, lunch-bucket town.

Nevertheless, in addition to his leadership in advancing world motorization, Henry was a strong advocate of education. My father and two uncles attended the Henry Ford Trade School in the 1930s, developing a technical grounding and work ethic that set them off on extraordinarily productive careers in the machine tools industry. Even now, the Henry Ford Academy of Manufacturing Arts and Sciences operates as a charter high school within the Museum.

This overview barely scratches the surface of the world's premier technology museum, and it fails even to touch the historical and cultural wealth of the other 70 acres in Greenfield Village. There's plenty of interpretive and interactive stuff to grab kids and others not yet fully enlightened as to the spiritual significance of this place. The fast food inside is Oscar Meyer hot dogs, complete with the original 1952 Weinermobile. My kids, serious experts on museum gift shops, thought the shops here were really cool. We can thank Henry's extraordinary historical and educational vision for the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, millennial motorhead Mecca.

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