Myles Away From Dublin (10 page)

Some weeks ago I promised to write something about Henry Ford (1863–1947), if only because I have been reading about him recently. Isn’t it hard to believe that he was alive as late as 1947?

He was an extraordinary man. He knew more, at least in his earlier days, about litigation than he did about automobiles. He had also a formidable grasp of the law governing patent rights in his time, and made this known several times by firing lawyers who told him he was wrong.

A recital here of his monstrous litigations would be not only dull but probably incomprehensible. To put it briefly, Ford was an eccentric man who had nonetheless many sound ideas, not a few of them since adopted universally. He was, to use a cliché, ahead of his time and he naturally suffered from it. A life-span of 84 need dismay no man. He seemed as indestructible as his famous Model T.

The deep thinking on large-scale industrial problems which were to characterise Ford’s life had indeed simple beginnings. Though born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, his parents had emigrated from Cork in 1847. That was one of the famine years, and the trip must have been a painful and squalid passage in a
windjammer
, with no hint that it would conclude in the mass manufacture of the ‘flivver’. Yet that is what did happen. Tradition has it that the Ford factory in Cork, originally intended for the manufacture of agricultural tractors, was founded by Ford in memory of his parents. Very likely that is true. The iron structure of
Ford’s mind did not exclude sentiment.

Yet his parents do not seem to have been true Irish people at all, not that it matters when one considers his life-work. His mother’s name was Mary Litogot and, born in the US, had Dutch parents herself. William Ford, the father, was probably of English extraction. The mother died when Henry was 12, and William decided that his son should be a farmer. His main interest as a youngster was in mechanics, taking asunder at the age of 13 a watch and then correctly
reassembling
it. His main tool was a knitting needle, flattened at the point to a very keen blade. Although compelled to do farm work by day and no excuse taken, Ford spent many hours at night mending watches and thus sustaining his interest in machines, besides quietly making some money.

Just when and how did he go into the motor business? This is not certain, but his first vehicle was a farm tractor worked by a steam engine which was, in fact, far too heavy for the job. His father, to put a stop to this nonsense, offered Henry a 40 acre farm, much of it wooded. Henry built a saw mill worked by steam, cut the trees and sold lumber. About 1888, taking
advantage
of his comparative independence, he got a job with the Detroit Edison Company as an engineer and it was about this time that he began to experiment with the petrol engine, somewhat as we know it today. He formed the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with a capital of 100,000 dollars and the first cars he made and sold, designed solely for speed, won every race for which they were entered. That is one of the ironies of the story. The origin of motoring rests, not on universal
transportation
but on racing.

What is one to make of the whole story? It is not easy to say, at least by those who have a poor grasp of
staggering figures. Ford ignored trade unions but paid a far higher rate than the minimum they prescribed. He refused to enter into any agreements or conventions with other motor-makers. As his organisation developed, he did not see why he should pay merchants or middlemen for timber; so he bought, maintained and developed his own forests. He equally disdained shipping companies and soon had his own vessels for transportation of his cars overseas. Later he was to realise that this transportation was in itself wasteful and that his cars should be made or assembled at various spots
throughout
the world. In the United States alone he founded 34 assembly plants and now Ford factories exist in many parts of the world, manned almost wholly by natives.

Having written last week about Henry Ford and his famous Model T, I feel I should say something this week about the diesel engine. The theme is gruesomely topical, for the Eichmann trial has revealed that one of the ‘quick and easy’ methods of murdering Jews, locked in a road truck, was to divert the exhaust gas of its diesel engine into it. The irony of that sort of tragic killing lies in the fact that the inventor of the diesel engine was a German.

Some of the books say he wasn’t, for he was born in Paris in 1858. But both his parents were German, and nearly all his education took place in Munich. A technical paper he published, in English named
The
Theory
and
Construction
of
a
Rational
Heat
Motor
‚
led to the making of the first engine by Rudolf Diesel, and to the diffusion of the principle he discovered today throughout the world. The engine was first publicly shown in Munich in 1898, and in the same year an American (?) named Busch paid Diesel one million gold marks for the rights of US manufacture. The soundness of his idea was self-evident.

Rudolf Diesel’s life (1858–1913) was ended in a way not to be expected in the regime of a skilled and original engineer. On the night of September 29–30, he fell off the Antwerp-Harwich steamer and was drowned.

Most of us have a fair idea of how the petrol engine works. A mixture in the form of gas prepared in the carburettor in the air-fuel ratio of 14.5:1 is introduced to the cylinders and exploded by means of sparking
plugs, which are activated by an intricate electrical system.

Diesel knew from miscellaneous experience that compression itself meant the spectacular generation of heat and the principle of his engine is based on the theory that the sparking plug is not necessary to achieve combustion. In his cylinder, ordinary air is compressed to about 500 lb per square inch, which raises its temperature to 1000 F. This has been defined as red-hot air, and into it is injected a spray of atomised oil. There is an instant explosion. The event is spontaneous, and the machine begins to work.

Yet the diesel engine has certain inherent delicacies. In this country the steam engine, having served faithfully for a century, is steadily being ousted by diesel locomotives, and never have traction breakdowns been so frequent. The steam engine has always been a notoriously inefficient machine, a great amount of its energy being spent on moving itself; it has been a sort of diabolical creature, breathing fire, shaking the earth and causing enormous uproar. But its sheer brute-strength made it the pivot of a whole era, just as Henry Ford’s Model T was later to do.

Nowadays several makes of car are offered with, at the option of the purchaser, petrol or diesel engines. Some people think petrol is on the way out, for the cost of unearthing, transporting and refining it is vastly higher than the crude stuff a diesel engine uses. This is indeed a half-truth. The petrol engine is far more versatile than the diesel, universally understood and capable of being serviced anywhere. On the other hand, the diesel is more suitable and economic for really heavy work such as driving ships, moving earth, powering military tanks, or driving the machinery of great factories.

Man has not yet found the ideal method suitable for
all purposes‚ though he seems to have decided that steam will no longer do.

There are still in the far corners of Ireland the quiet man who thinks he found the true answer when he was a little boy, and still believes in that answer. It does not entail crankshaft, injectors or plugs. You just get a simple cart and yoke a donkey into it.

I am sure many readers share my horror of the quiz. It is a useless and infuriating abomination, and it is infernally ubiquitous. One can scarcely take up any magazine or newspaper (
The
Nationalist
and
Leinster
Times
honourably excepted) without encountering it in one form or another. Versions of it occur on the cinema screen. Turning on the radio is a matter of deadly risk. When I personally do so, I am almost certain to hear the voice of my friend, Joe Linnane.

‘Now, Number One. This is a six-mark question. How much are two and two? If you add two and two together, what do you get?’

(Pause).

‘Em … five.’

‘No. Hard luck, Number One. The correct answer is four.’

(This last, as an absolute statement, is in fact wrong. There are fluids, also gases, which when combined equally in two-part quantities, do not achieve a total of 4 but sometimes as low as 3½ because the combination brings about a change in the overall molecular
structure
.)

Crosswords, the yo-yo and whistling in the bus are all bad. But the quiz is worst of all.

The firm of Guinness is world-renowned, chiefly for the gift of making good stout and producing sundry kindred brews. Quite recently they have seemed to have gone wild and produced a massive book of 280 large pages. A treatise on brewing? Not at all, but the answers to quiz questions on every subject under the sun, a unique
compendium of useless knowlege. There is scarcely any mention of Guinness itself except an oblique one when, having disclosed that the largest brewery in the world is in the US, it adds that the largest in Europe is none other than Arthur Guinness, Son and Company Ltd.

Which is the largest airline in the world – TWA or Pan-American? Neither. It is the Russian airline ‘Aeroflot’, which operates 1,006 aircraft.

Which distinguished singer earned most in the course of his career? Caruso, of course. No, no, you are wrong. It was our own John MacCormack, who piled up a total of £1,400,000.

Still talking of music, this book can be funny, though the editors swear every word they print is true. It is useless asking the reader where and when was the vastest orchestra ever assembled, what sort were the instruments and how many of them were there. The respective answers are Trondheim, Norway, August, 1958; brass 12,600. Is this true? I cannot help doubting it, for I was in this country in 1958 and in my health and I did not hear the recital.

It is impossible to give the reader a true notion of this remarkable compendium but I will quote a few more facts entirely at random. The palm for prodigious literary output goes to an American, Eric Stanley Gardner, aged 70. He dictates up to 10,000 words a day and is usually engaged on seven novels
simultaneously
. What I personally admire here is not so much the output as the uncanny control which prevents a character in one book from accidentally straying into another and thus snarling up both books.

The highest spire in the world is that of the Protestant cathedral at Ulm, Germany; 528 feet. St Paul’s in London was a mere 489 feet but was struck by lightning in 1561. (I did not know St Paul’s existed then.)
But when it comes to a question of ecclesiastical age, we need not bang our own heads. The Gallerus Oratorio near Kilmalkedar, Co. Kerry, reputedly dates from AD 550!

The heaviest beer-drinking country in the world is Belgium.

Between 1940 and 1955 a number of ‘
counter-revolutionaries
’ were executed in China. How many? At least 20 million.

The last public hanging in London was in 1868, the distinguished main actor being Michael Barrett, a Fenian.

The country with most psychiatrists (13,425) – it’s an easy guess – the United States.

Does stating something as a fact make it true? That is a more complicated question than it sounds, for what begins as lie can in time become truth. When Hitler told the German people, for purposes of his own, that Germany’s dearest friend was the Soviet Union, he was believed and Germans in general became very friendly with Russians. That both nations tried later on to exterminate each other is irrelevant. The mutual esteem, while it lasted, was genuine.

This week I return, as threatened, to the
Guinness
Book
of
Records.
This book is full of extraordinary allegations, for the veracity of which no source or proof is given. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that this majestic firm should go out of its way to circulate a parcel of lies. We must take the material on trust, as we do the contents of newspapers.

In the matter of printed books, the bestseller of this era was
Gone
With
the
Wind
by Margaret Mitchell. It deals with the American Civil War and has become so
well-known
that it is casually referred to in many
publications
merely as GWTW. Twenty years ago I felt I must be stupid and illiterate for not having bought and read it. I bought a copy all right but in the course of four heroic attempts to read it I broke down. Frankly, I found it unreadable, badly written, dull.

Hollywood nearly strangled itself in an effort to make it the greatest film ever. Even the film I found dull, ridiculously elaborate and far too long. I do not doubt that the fault is in myself.

Turning to the
Guinness
Book
, there is a statistic
concerning the longest run of a play. The play in question opened in Los Angeles on July 6, 1933, and, playing one show a night, lasted until September 6, 1953. The title of this play?
The
Drunkard.

The reader may well ask why it stopped at all after over twenty years. The answer is that it didn’t. The play was made the subject of a musical adaptation called
Wayward
Way
and this piece was played on alternate nights with the original until October 1959. When finally discontinued,
The
Drunkard
had been played 9,477 times.

I feel there must be a moral buried here. For some people drink itself is a fascination but for a far greater number, all total abstainers, the subject of drink and drunkenness fascinates. No doubt
The
Drunkard
is a burlesque and funny in its own right, like
Ten
Nights
in
a
Bar-room
as played in Dublin years ago by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company. All the same, I cannot think of any other theme that could stand up to the harrowing friction of a 26 years’ run. No doubt the players themselves had to be changed, for one who was a pretty young lady at the start would have become a middle-aged matron by the end.

The heaviest bell in the world is known as the Tsar Kolokol, cast in Moscow in 1733. It weighs 193 tons and is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the heaviest in Britain, the Great Paul in St Paul’s, London, a toy that weighs a mere 16 tons.

In the US, an outfit named Kraft Foods entered into a contract with the singer Perry Como (48) for a
one-hour
appearance daily on colour television. Including production expenses, the money involved was £8,928,000. This seems to prove we are all in the wrong country.

The largest store in the world is R.H. Macy of
Broadway. I will not trouble the reader with details of the staggering daily sales beyond saying that it has 11,000 employees. The floor space is 46.2 acres, and I do not find it feasible to work out how many times bigger this is than Croke Park.

Talking again of shops, what is the longest chain of chain-shops? In the US there is an enterprise known by the long-winded name of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company; they have 120,000 employees, 4,276 branches, and operate two laundries of their own for dealing with the workers’ uniforms. Outside the four county boroughs, no town in Ireland has anything like the population of the GA & PT’s staff. Maybe it is just as well.

The largest tractor in the world (naturally a product of the US) was exhibited in May last year. It weighs 50 tons.

This
Guinness
Book
is getting under my nails. Very likely I will be back to it again next week.