ABSTRACT
Two unrelated events of 1909 marked twilight of one era for Americans and the dawn of another. In the same year that saw the passing of Harriman, the great railroader, Henry Ford launched his Model T automobile. The professional advertising men may have gagged, as well they might, but in the next nineteen years Ford made and sold fifteen million copies of his Model T and stamped his name indelibly on an era. Ford had nothing to do with inventing the internal combustion engine, or even with assembly-line method of manufacture, which was already old when Ford was born. What he did was to take both the invention and the method and tinker them into near perfection. Still other Americans were applying electric power to buggies. And the traditionalists were using steam power for the same purpose. In the summer of 1893, Charles Duryea braved ridicule by running his little gasoline machine up and down the streets of Chicopee Falls.
