Posts Tagged ‘Ford’
“These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of”*…
Ryan McManus on geologic byproducts, American automotive lore, and the hidden beauty of the industrial age…
Let’s be real for a second: gems are basically very pretty garbage. A byproduct of a geologic or biological process we hang on our bodies for some weird reason. Diamonds are just charcoal that has been squeezed a little longer than usual. Geodes are dried lava that got a little wet. Pearls? Oyster mucus, secreted to smooth out the bivalve equivalent of a stone in one’s shoe. They are unintentional, accidental and, due to the peculiarities of our brains, unquestionably beautiful.
So, if nature can accidentally create works of art while going about its business, why not us?
In the 1940s and 50s, Detroit’s automotive factories had a beautifully messy problem: paint. Workers hand-sprayed enamel paint onto cars on assembly lines, with excess overspray gradually building up on the tracks, skids, and walls of painting bays. This oversprayed paint accumulated over years, layer by layer—creating thick, multicolored deposits that factory workers would periodically chip away and discard.
What they were throwing out, however, would eventually become one of the most sought-after materials in contemporary jewelry making: Fordite, also known as Detroit agate.
Fordite is a man-made gemstone (technically a non-faceted gemstone, called a cabochan), but not like the rubies and diamonds grown in labs. The material represents a fascinating intersection of industrial inefficiency and geological mimicry: As cars were spray painted by hand, the hardened enamel paint built up and baked, creating sedimentary-like layers that mirror how natural agates form over millennia, except compressed into decades of automotive production.
When cut and polished, the visual result is striking—especially in the most valuable samples from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period of bright “high impact” colors like Ford’s Grabber Blue or Mopar’s Plum Crazy purple. Fordite reveals psychedelic swirls and bands that chronicle automotive color trends year by year, strata by strata: It’s essentially a cross-section of American car culture, with each stratum representing a different model year’s palette. Like the proverbial Jurassic Age mosquito trapped in the stone of amber, the DNA of a bygone epoch is hidden inside.
But Fordite’s deeper appeal lies in its accidental scarcity and temporal specificity. By the 1980s, car manufacturers had moved away from hand-spray painting, adopting an electrostatic process that magnetizes enamels to car bodies, leaving little to no overspray. Efficient, yes—but this electrostatic process ended Fordite production in abundance by the late 1970s. The material can never be recreated—it’s a finite byproduct of a particular moment in industrial history.
This creates a curious value proposition: Fordite is valuable precisely because modern manufacturing has become more efficient. It is industrial waste transformed into luxury material through the simple passage of time and technological progress. With the old factories long gone and today’s automated systems eliminating waste, each piece of Fordite becomes increasingly rare (and expensive), turning Detroit’s former inefficiency into today’s artisanal treasure.
In an age of planned obsolescence and disposable manufacturing, Fordite stands as an accidental monument to the beauty that emerges from industrial imperfection—proof that sometimes the most interesting materials come from processes we’ve intentionally left behind.
A better poet might even see Fordite as metaphor for the City of Detroit itself—forever tied to the automobile, often written off as worthless; unrecognized as a thing of curious quality and glorious beauty waiting for its moment…
More beautiful examples at “Fordite,” from @ryantomorrow.bsky.social in the always-illuminating Why is This Interesting?
* George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
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As we rethink remnants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that America’s first fatal automobile accident occurred. At West 74th Street and Central Park West in New York City, Henry Hale Bliss, a 69-year-old local real estate dealer, stepped off of a south bound 8th Avenue trolley car and was struck by the driver of an electric-powered taxicab (Automobile No. 43). Bliss hit the pavement, crushing his head and chest. He was taken by ambulance to Roosevelt Hospital, but upon arrival the house surgeon, Dr. Marny, judged his injuries too severe to survive. Bliss died the next morning.
“The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so”*…
From Kai Brach, in his nifty newsletter Dense Discovery, an appreciation of an Isaac Asimov essay from 1988: “The Relativity of Wrong” (a lovely riff on a point also taken up by Karl Popper)…
… it’s a welcome dose of nuance in this era of absolutist thinking. When knowingness tricks our brains into certainty, Asimov’s wonderfully nerdy piece demonstrates that right and wrong are far less binary than we may think.
The piece begins with Asimov addressing a young English literature student who’d written to scold him for his scientific arrogance. The student argues that every generation thinks they’ve got it sorted, and every generation gets proven wrong. Therefore, our current knowledge is just as flawed as flat-earth theory. But Asimov won’t have it:
“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
He then makes his point clear through a series of delightful examples. Like spelling:
“How do you spell ‘sugar’? Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is wronger than Genevieve? For that matter, I think it is possible to argue that Genevieve’s spelling is superior to the ‘right’ one. Or suppose you spell ‘sugar’: s-u-c-r-o-s-e, or C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Strictly speaking, you are wrong each time, but you’re displaying a certain knowledge of the subject beyond conventional spelling.”
The same logic applies to mathematics: “Suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an integer. You’d be right, wouldn’t you? Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an even integer. You’d be righter. Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = 3.999. Wouldn’t you be nearly right?”
The flat-earth idea is a great (and again timely?) case study for Asimov’s theory. The notion that the earth was flat wasn’t the product of ancient stupidity but reasonable observation given the tools available. The earth’s actual curvature is roughly 0.000126 per mile – practically indistinguishable from zero without sophisticated instruments.
“So although the flat-Earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favour of the spherical-Earth theory.”
What he’s really arguing for is intellectual humility. Scientific theories don’t flip-flop wildly from flat earth to cubic earth to doughnut-shaped earth. Instead:
“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
We seem to live in a world of zero-sum thinking, where nuance often gets steamrolled by the satisfying simplicity of being right. I want to remember Asimov’s framework the next time I’m certain someone else is wrong – that most disagreements aren’t between absolute truth and utter falsehood, but between different degrees of incompleteness…
On the dangers of “knowingness” and absolutism: Isaac Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong,” from @densediscovery.bsky.social.
Asimov’s essay is here.
See also: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement” and “The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances.”
(Image above: source)
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As we rethink, we might recall that this date in 1957 was “E Day,” the introduction of the Edsel automobile. Name for Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry Ford, Edsels were developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand (beyond Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln) to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. It was the first new brand introduction by an American automaker since the 1939 launch of Mercury and 1956 launch of Continental (which ended and merged into Lincoln after 1957).
Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, unattractive, distinguished by a vertical grille said to resemble a horse collar, and low quality.
No automobile has been so widely anticipated nor so quickly rejected as the Ford Edsel (with the possible recent exception of the Tesla Cybertruck). Within two months of its highly publicized launch, the Edsel became a rolling joke– and has stood as a metphor for disastrous product launch failures since.
Recognizing this (and following a loss of over $250 million [equivalent to $2.66 billion in 2024 dollars] on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line), Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand before 1960.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”*…
Your correspondent is headed into another period of turbulence– travel, talk, meetings– this one, a little longer than the last; so (Roughly) Daily is about to go into another hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around October 8.
If only it were so easy… There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? Tyler Re suggests that Kant has an answer…
Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle.’
…
The United States Department of Labor identifies a ‘good job’ as one with fair hiring practices, comprehensive benefits, formal equality of opportunity, job security and a culture in which workers are valued. In a similar UK report on the modern labour market called ‘Good Work’ (2017), Matthew Taylor and his colleagues emphasise workplace rights and fair treatment, opportunities for promotion, and ‘good reward schemes’. Finally, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has two sections on work. They cite the free choice of employment and organization, fair and equal pay, and sufficient leisure time as rights of workers.
What all three of these accounts have in common is that they focus on features of jobs – the agreement you make with your boss to perform labour – rather than on the labour itself. The fairness of your boss, the length of your contract, the growth of your career – these specify nothing about the quality of the labour you perform. And yet it is the labour itself that we spend all day doing. The most tedious and unpleasant work could still pay a high salary, but we might not want to call such work ‘good’. (Only a brief mention is made in the Taylor report – which totals more than 100 pages – of the idea that workers ought to have some autonomy in how they perform their job, or that work ought not be tedious or repetitive.) This is not to say that the extrinsic aspects of work like pay and benefits are unimportant; of course, a good job is one that pays enough. But what about work’s intrinsic goods? Is there anything about the process of working itself that we ought to include in our list of criteria, or should we all be content with a life of high-paying drudgery?
Philosophers try to answer this question by giving a definition of work. Since definitions tell us what is essential or intrinsic to a thing, a definition of work would tell us whether there is anything intrinsic to work that we want our good jobs to promote. The most common definition of work in Western thought, found in nearly every period with recorded writing on the subject, is that work is inherently disagreeable and instrumentally valuable. It is disagreeable because it is an expenditure of energy (contrast this with leisure), and it is instrumentally valuable because we care only about the products of our labour, not the process of labouring itself. On this view, work has little to recommend it, and we would do better to minimise our time spent doing it. A theory of work based on this definition would probably say that good jobs pay a lot (in exchange for work’s disagreeableness) and are performed for as little time as possible.
But this is not the only definition at our disposal. Tucked away in two inconspicuous paragraphs of his book about beauty, the Critique of Judgment (1790), is Immanuel Kant’s definition of work. In a section called ‘On Art in General’, Kant gives a definition of art (Kunst in German) as a subset of our more general capacity for ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ (note that Kant’s definition should not be limited to the fine arts like poetry or painting, which is schöne Künste in German, which he addresses in the following section of the book). In other words, Kant defines art as a particular kind of skilled labour. Kant’s definition of art as skilled labour will direct us to the intrinsic features of work that we ought to include in our conception of good jobs…
Read on: “Freedom at Work,” in @aeonmag.
* Mark Twain
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As we center satisfaction, we might recall that on this date in 1908, at the at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, “Model T 001”– the first production Model T– rolled off the line. Generally regarded as the first mass-produced/mass-affordable automobile, it made car travel available to middle-class Americans– and became the avatar of assembly-line production and the type of jobs that it produces.
(On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan.)
“Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week”*…
The ever-amusing Benjamin Errett on hospitality…
… The original word ghosti meant both guest and host specifically because of the deep connection between the two, “a mutual exchange relationship highly important to ancient Indo-European society.”…
That, as Beerbohm argues in his essay “Hosts and Guests,” is how we’ve evolved along with our words. There are natural hosts who keep a stocked drinks cart and jars of olives on hand. Obviously, it helps to have a generous olive budget. These people who arrange things just so are often bad guests.
A bad guest, Beerbohm writes, is either a parasite or a churl, the latter being someone like the freeloading poet Dante, who “received during his exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid them by writing how bitter was the bread in their houses, and how steep the stairs were.” Poets!
To be perfectly positioned between parasitism and churlishness is to reciprocate the food and drink with good company, “radiating gratitude, but not too much of it; never intrusive, ever within call; full of dignity, yet all amenable; quiet, yet lively; never echoing, ever amplifying; never contradicting, but often lighting the way to truth; an ornament, an inspiration, anywhere.” If you’re particularly winning at this, you can save on room and board and no one will ever call you a mooch.
…
let’s reflect on how the who-would-you-invite-to-an-imaginary-dinner-party game is always less fun than it sounds. And yet the New York Times keeps asking authors in By the Book, despite the fact that Charlie Kaufman absolutely demolished the premise with this answer:
I see Oscar Wilde there, of course, Voltaire, Carol Saroyan Saroyan Matthau (wife of William Saroyan, William Saroyan, and Walter Matthau, and a writer in her own right), Hitler (not witty but quite a “get”), Edie Sitwell, Molière, Oscar Wilde (so witty I thought why not double him and place him on each end of the table so everyone could enjoy his witticisms?), Aristophanes, and Sir Kenneth Dover (to translate Aristophanes’ jokes for the other guests). That’s more than three, but one must assume there will be cancellations. Oh, and Jesus...
Be neither a parasite nor a churl- @benjaminerrett on hospitality: “The Wit’s Guide to Guests.”
* W. D. Howells
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As we contemplate conviviality, we might consider the history of the visitor’s vehicle of choice, the automobile: it was on this date in 1903 that Ernest Pfennig, a Chicago dentist, became the first owner of a Ford automobile, a Model A. The two-(bench) seater weighed 1,240 lbs. and could reach a top speed of 28 mph. The Model A was the first car produced using pairs or trios of men working on each car; between 1903 and 1904, 1,750 cars were made.
Between 1903 and 1908, Ford produced the Models A, B, C, F, K, N, R, and S. Hundreds or a few thousand of most of these were sold per year. Then in 1908, Ford introduced the mass-produced Model T, which totaled millions sold over 18 years. While the Model T was famously available “in any color the customer wants, so long as it’s black,” the Model A was only sold in the color red.
(In 1927, Ford resurrected the “Model A” designation for the successor to its Model T; the revived Model A came in a variety of styles and colors…)
“The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved.”*…
What’s true of threats is also true of opportunities. Could Ford’s new truck be the pivot to a new, greener personal transportation future?
As the top-selling model line in the U.S. for 40 years, Ford Motor Co.’s F-Series pickups hold special weight in the auto ecosystem. The lineup, led by the F-150, generates more than $40 billion in annual revenue. Only one other U.S. product—Apple Inc.’s iPhone—tops F-Series sales.
Given this, Ford’s decision to electrify the F-150 stands as one of the boldest strategic decisions in 21st century business. An electric F-150, more than any other vehicle, will persuade rural America to go green, leading the way for almost every automaker that finds itself challenged by the electric transition.
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Costs for Lightning owners will be considerably lower than for those owning the F-150. The $39,974 base price (factoring in federal subsidies) is 17% less than that of an entry-level F-150, according to Atlas Public Policy.
Operating costs are lower too…
The most highly anticipated EV is about to hit the U.S. market — and raise the stakes for automakers’ efforts to cut emissions: “How Ford’s Electric F-150 Pickup Truck Will Cut Carbon Pollution,” from @business.
* George Washington
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As we plug in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that map and travel publisher Rand McNally published the first edition of Auto Chum, which went on to become the best-selling Rand McNally Road Atlas.
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