I do not find it hard to believe that American auto makers have been so stupid as to get themselves into their current financial fix. They’ve made mistakes before. You never hear about people collecting a model “S”, or a Model “P” Ford. And that is not just because old man Henry Ford sold fifteen million of Model “T”s. It was the Model “T” that made Time magazine’s list of the fifty worst cars of all times; “…a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.” And that wasn’t even the worst disaster that Ford ever made. That destinction had to go to the Edsel.
It wasn’t just a car. It was an entire new line of cars, the Saturn of their day. The Edsel was originally conceived in 1954, to compete with General Motor’s Cadillac division. The chief designer on the project was a young man from Canada named Roy Brown. Years later Brown told "The New Yorker" magazine, “Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique…and yet somehow familiar.”
The design team took ‘front on’ photos of the 19 other cars on the road at the time and realized that from a few hundred feet away they were indistinguishable from one another. But clay models of Brown’s original grillwork were so graceful and delicate the engineers questioned how much fresh air would reach the engine.
So Brown created what he called the “Horsecollar” (officially known as “the impact ring”), front and center. It reminded one critic of “a vagina with teeth”. In fact, while the design still existed only in clay, a prankster taped fur in-between the front grillwork which left it, according to Robin Jones, then a young Ford designer, looking like “…a hormonally disturbed cow after giving birth”. Kinder critics said it resembled “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”, or just “a toilet seat”.
Looking for the perfect name Ford hired one of the largest advertising companies in the world, Foote, Cone and Belding, (“Successful Advertising is Only a Foote Away”) who offered up 6,000 possible names (including the “Mongoose Civique” and the “Utopian Turtletop”). Growled one Ford executive, “We hired them to come up with a name. They came up with six thousand.” Finally, after months of searching in vain, they settled on “The Ford Edsel”. 
Edsel Ford was a civilized, cultured, talented and intelligent man who was also a skilled car maker and favorite son of old man Henry Ford. And suffice it to say that if Edsel hadn’t died of a heart attack from overwork in 1943 there would never have been a Ford carrying his name because Edsel Ford knew too much about marketing to have ever allowed it. When Ford’s Public Relations chief, C. Gayle Warnock, was presented with the name "Edsel" he claims to have said, “We have just lost 200,000 in sales”.
They financed the Edsel with the infusion of cash they got by going public in 1957, and from the success of the new Thunderbird. But at the last minute they decided to start pinching pennies. Rather than establish a brand new production line, management chose to assemble Edsels on the same production lines used to make Lincolns and Mercurys, and at the same time. The assembly line workers and plant management both saw the Edsel as an intrustion into their regular work scheduals and the results were perfectly perdictable. And the "mistakes" which slipped through the quality control were not helped by the advertising campaign.
Ford chose a mystery introduction for the Edsel. Cars were shipped wrapped in fabric, and the 1,160 brand new Edsel dealers were strictly instructed to keep the cars under wraps on their lots until “E” day, which was supposed to be September 4, 1957.
However, a used car dealer in Cleveland, Ohio had an unwrapped white Edsel on display two days early. So much for the surprise 
Meanwhile a $2 million advertising campaign ($14.5 million in 2007 dollars) began by showing only the hood ornament, and then blurry shots of speeding Edsels, and drawings of draped cars on transporters, always with the taunting tag line, “The new Edsel is coming!”
Finally, on Friday night, September 13, during the premier on CBS of the “Edsel Show” - staring Bing Crosby, with guest stars Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope and the Four Preps - an announcer, spoke in warm golden tones; “And now for the moment I'm sure you've all been looking forward to, a look at the newest member of the Ford family of fine cars ... the Edsel!" It may have been the greatest advertising buildup since Moses came down off the mountain. And like Moses, it was all downhill from there - one stumble downhill after another.
The dealers' showrooms were full of people, but few customers. Ford had expected to sell 2 million Edsel the first year. They only sold half a million. What went wrong?
Stumble Number One was that between August 1957 and February 1958 American industrial output declined by 10%. During the same six months unemployement jumped by two million. Retail sales dropped 2% and so did take home pay. The recession was bad enough that it gave Democrats a majority in the House in 1958, and set up Kennedy’s win of the White House in 1960. In short, this was not the time to introduce a new line of expensive automobiles.
Stumble Number Two; there were a few small problems with the cars. The much ballyhooed "Vac-U Start" feature displayed a dangerous tendency to restart the car after you had turned the engine off and walked away. And the “Teletouch” push button transmission shifter, located in the center of the steering wheel, was so new and so secret that none of the dealers knew how to service it.
And then there was the famous hood ornament. When the big V8 engine was pulling the Edsel at over seventy miles an hour (which it easily could do) the hood ornament had a nasty tendency to come flying off and turn into shrapnel.
Stumble Number Three was that many Edsels left the factories with wrong or missing parts: wires had been incorrectly connected and an occasional transmission had been installed backwards. And many of those Edsels which did start prompted dissatisfied owners to claim that Edsel stood for “Every Day Something Else Leaks”. (Decades later, when Ford failed to respond well to the invasion of well made inexpensive Japanese cars, the name Ford was said to stand for “Found On Road, Dead”). 
Stumble Number Four was that Ford had introduced the 1958 Edsel in September of 1957 instead of October, the standard practice at the time, so the Edsells were competing with other Ford products being sold at 1957 inventory closeout prices.
And then there was the advertising blitz; Stumble Number Five. As one observer noted, although customers had been primed to expect a
“…plutonium-powered, pancake-making wonder car…” what they were being offered was a “…kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive…” car." The American public simply didn't want this car.
Overnight the Edsel went from wonder kid to village idiot. In 1958, when a crowd in Peru pelted Vice President Richard Nixon with eggs while he was riding in a brand new Edsel, he would quip, “They were not attacking me. They were attacking the car.” 
And in 1961 on the Andy Griffith Show when Deputy Barney Fife bought a used car, it simply had to be an Edsel convertible. The audience was laughing even before the steering wheel slowly projected itself into Barney’s face. The Edsel had become “…an aggalmoration (sic) of everything the public had grown tired of…vulgar ostentation and superferlous (sic) size…”.
By November of 1959, after building 110,847 Edsels and losing $350 million ($2 and 1/2 billion in 2007 dollars) Ford surrendered, and stopped production of the Edsel. A legend was born.
Three years later Ford would introduce the Mustang, a car designed to fit what the customer wanted, rather a car design looking for a customer, which the Edsel was.
Today just six thousand Edsels survive. And Roy Brown, the now elderly designer of the “vagina with teeth”, still insists with a straight face, “The car is a complete success as far as I'm concerned." And that kind of thinking is what is wrong with Detroit, today.
- 30 -
She was big; a 282 ton sailing brig built for the prosaic business of the North Atlantic shipping, and launched in Nova Scotia in 1861. But she was always a sad ship. Her first captain died of pneumonia on her maiden voyage. Her second captain struck a fishing boat and was dismissed. In 1867 a storm ran her ashore and her owners sold her for salvage. She was bought for $11,000. Repaired and refitted, she went back to work. And at anchor at Staten Island, New York City, on November 3rd, 1872, her new Captain, Benjamin Biggs, wrote a letter to his mother in Marion, Massachusetts.
“My Dear Mother:…It seems to me to have been a great while since I left home, but it is only over two weeks…For a few days it was tedious, perplexing, and very tiresome but… It seems real homelike since Sarah and Sophia (his wife and 2 yr. old daughter) got here, and we enjoy our little quarters…We seem to have a very good mate and steward and I hope I shall have a pleasant voyage…We finished loading last night and shall leave on Tuesday morning if we don't get off tomorrow night, the Lord willing. Our vessel is in beautiful trim and I hope we shall have a fine passage, but I have never been in her before and can’t say how she'll sail. (You) shall want to write us in about 20 days to Genoa, care of American. Consul… Hoping to be with you in the spring with much love, I am yours, affectionately, Benjamin.”
The 3 man crew sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, where an Admiralty’s court was convened and a commission was appointed to investigate the mystery.
That question undoubtedly influenced what the Admiralty’s court did next. The crew of the Dei Gratia was awarded $46,000 in salvage rights for the Mary Celeste (the equivalent of $770,000 in 2007). But this was barelyone-sixth of what the ship and cargo was insured for. Over the next year the owners and American authorities offered a reward and conducted a search in ports large and small around the Atlantic rim, for anyone matching the description of Captain Briggs, his wife and child, or any of the crew members from the Mary Celeste. Not a trace was found. It was as if they had simply vanished from the face if the earth.
So this leaves me to relate the fate of the human cargo of the Mary Celeste; a woman and child and eight men, ten souls in a twenty foot single mast-ed yawl. Whatever their reason for abandoning the Mary Celeste, they were now fully exposed to fate.
The Azores current travels eastward at 2 knots an hour from the islands. Suppose, for some reason, perhaps because of a leak of explosive alcohol fumes, the crew had abandoned the Mary Celest in good weather. And supposed that a gale had suddenly blown up, seperated the life boat from the ship and had driven the desperate little yawl northeastward for three or four days while breaking the boat to bits, and suppose the survivors had gathered the flotsam into a pair of rafts without food or water, and suppose those rafts, tied together, had drifted for five months into Biscayne Bay and suppose the rope joining them had finally seperated just before they were driven in toward The Beach of Silence, on the northern coast of Spain...suppose all of that. That may have been what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste.
I think it was. And I think little Sophia would have been a very lovely young lady.
And because, in 1840, a mob of French "Luddiet" tailors broke into Thimonnier’s factory, smashed his machines, burned the factory down and almost lynched Barthelmy. He died flat broke and forgotten in 1857. But first he invented the sewing machine. The vacuum he left behind was filled by the American Walter Hunt, who was a mechanical genius and a business boob from upstate New York. Walter invented the safety pin, U.S, patient #6281, and a repeating rifle, and a bicycle and a road sweeper. And then, in 1834, he improved on Thimonnier’s sewing machine.
What Walter Hunt actually invented was a sewing needle with the hole - aka, the eye - at the pointy end. As the needle pushed through the cloth the eye carried the thread with it. When the needle stopped it formed a loop in the thread behind it, and a second thread (from the bobbin) was pushed through the loop. The needle was then withdrawn, pulling the loop tight or “locking” it, around the bobbin thread. This “Lockstitch” was sheer genius, a brilliant insight, but Hunt never did anything with it because he didn’t want to be lynched by American tailors and he was safely making plenty of money from his safety pin. And that opened the door for Elias Howe.
Elias Howe told at least two versions of how he invented the sewing machine. In the sympathetic version he spent hours watching his poor wife (since dead, and unavilable to testify) earn extra money doing piecemeal sewing work to support his family. In the Freudian version, Howe dreamed about Indians shooting arrows through a blanket.
Then in 1850 Howe saw a demonstration of a machine which did work, built by a mechanic and an actor and one of the most foul-tempered bigamists in antebellum America, Mr. Isaac Singer. Singer’s sewing machine put the needle vertical and fed the cloth in horizontally, which made the whole thing functional. But Howe noticed that Singer had 'borrowed' his lockstitch. When Howe demanded $25,000 in “royalties” (i.e. blackmail), one of Singer’s long suffering business partners observed that, “Howe is a perfect humbug. He knows quite well he never invented anything of value.” Singer was typically more direct, offering to “kick (Howe) down the steps of the machine shop.” What eventually made Howe a wealthy humbug was the patent for his lockstitch. As a magazine at the time noted, Howe had “litigated himself into fortune and fame.” But then this story is not about the sewing machine.
This story is about another patent Elias Howe trolled for, this one granted him in 1851. And just like his sewing machine, Howe’s patent for an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” did not work. He just filed it away and waited to see if anybody else ever fixed it. But, since nobody else made his ugly and clumsy device work during his lifetime, Howe had nobody to sue and the device remained an obscure little footnote. And people continued to live with the original “Clothing Closure” device, the button.
Originally Whitcomb Judson was not interested in replacing the button. This rather odd man liked to eat bananas and mushrooms because he thought the mushrooms gave him psychic powers. Judson’s “mushroom visions” told him was going to rich designing pneumatic street cars, (he was granted 14 patents for them), a mode of transport described rather unhelpfully in his advertising as “…a screw, but without a thread; and this screw though always revolving in one direction, will send the (trolley) cars in either direction, and do this by a pure and simple rolling and not a sliding friction..” It sounded mysterious and magical, and was actually used briefly in England in 1864 to transport tourists 600 yards between Waterloo and Whitehall stations. But Judson’s railway went nowhere in America. So, in 1893, as a back up invention, he marketed his patent #’s 504038 & 504037 as a “claps lock” for ladies high button shoes, and “…wherever it is desired to detachable connect a pair adjacent flexible parts.”
Mr. Judson explained that “...each link of each chain (4 links per inch) is provided both with a male and a female coupling part…”. But sadly this coupling had a tendency to pop open, leaving the lady in question barefoot on the public way. So, in 1896, Judson added “….a cam-action slider…” to his invention, now calling it his “C-curity Fastener”. The company he formed to exploit the C-curity (The Universal Fastener Company) did well, and the gilled fungi lover was making money, but he never got as rich as he had expected. It was a shame the mushrooms never warned Judson about the dangers of eating too many mushrooms becaue Judson died of liver disease in 1909. 
And that brings us to the dull Mr. Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback, a Swiss emigrant to Canada, working as an electrical engineer for Universal Fastener and married to the plant manager’s daughter, Elvira. In 1911 Elvira died, and to distract himself from his grief Gideon started fiddling with Judson's “C-curity Fastener”. He added more teeth (the male coupler), ten to an inch, and widened the slider, and then he realized he could do away with the couplers entirely. All he needed was the teeth. Gideon called his invention the “'Separable Fastener”, Patent # 1219881, granted in 1917. Gideon even designed a machine to mass produce his fastener.
In 1923, when Mr. B.F. Goodrich saw the new fasteners used on a pair of rubber galoshes his company was trying to sell the U.S. Army, he was delighted, telling an employee to “Zip ‘er up.” And thus was born the onomatopoeia of the new invention, the name that sounds like the sound the Separable Fastener makes when it is used; the zipper. And the world has been a better place ever since.
It was the sixth year of Britain’s war, and by now the intricate process of bombing had become almost automatic. The staff at Bomber Command estimated Dresden in terms of concrete and wood and plaster and steel. An average of 28 military trains passed through Dresden’s rail yards ever day. There were 127 factories scattered throughout Dresden making everything from guns to time fuses.
At 5:20 P.M. Tuesday, February 13th, 1945 the first Lancaster took off for Dresden. This huge four engine bomber, 69 feet long, with a 102 foot wingspan, required a crew of seven to deliver seven tons of bombs in the dark. It was an expensive operation. 
He also refused to listen to the Mr. Dickins when he urged Harris to make the emergency escape hatches of the Lancaster a few inches bigger. It seemed a trivial issue at the time, and Dickins did not push for it. But a post war survey found that 50% of the crews bailing out of American bombers survived. The percentage for Lancaster crew members was 15%
The air raid warning sirens sounded in Dresden at 9 minutes before 10:00 P.M. Announcers interrupted the local radio. “Achtung! Achtung! Achtung! The lead aircraft of the major enemy bomber forces have changed course and are now approaching the city area.” Lothar Metzger was a child at the time. “We…dressed quickly, to hurry downstairs into our cellar…My older sister and I carried my baby twin sisters, my mother carried a little suitcase and the bottles with milk for our babies.” There were very few public shelters in the city, and no anti-aircraft guns. Ten night fighters were scrambled from a nearby airbase, but it would take them thirty minutes to get to altitude.
At 10:15 P.M. the first bombs began to fall from the stream of 244 Lancaster bombers, one after the other, approaching from slightly different angles. All courses crossed above the sports stadium. First to be dropped were the parachute flares and 1,000 pound Target Indicators, called by the Germans “Christmas Trees”. 
Below the bombers, Lothar Metzger crouched in his basement. “There were nonstop explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke…In great fear we struggled to leave this cellar. My mother and my older sister carried the big basket in which the twins were lain. With one hand I grasped my younger sister and with the other I grasped the coat of my mother…We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our fourth floor (apartment) did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames.”
Three hours later, as another 539 Lancaster bombers approached Dresden, they could see the fires from 500 miles away. The objective of this delayed second wave of bombers was, as the RAF stated at the time, to “…catch rescue workers, firefighters and fleeing inhabitants at their fullest exposure.” This time there were no warning alarms. The electricity was out. Between 1:21 A.M. and 1:45 A.M the RAF dropped another 1,800 tons of bombs. The center of Dresden was now consumed by a firestorm, with hundred miles an hour winds and temperatures reaching 2,700 degrees F.
A young soldier recovering from wounds, Rudolf Eichner, remembered, “…it was becoming increasingly impossible to breath in the cellar (of his hospital) because the air was being pulled out by the increasing strength of the blaze.” Rudolf ran outside but, “We could not stand up, we were on all fours, crawling. The wind was full of sparks and carrying bits of blazing furniture, debris and burning bits of bodies. There were charred bodies everywhere. The experience of the bombing was far worse than being on the Russian front, where I was a front-line machine gunner.”
Lothar Metzger and his family hid in another cellar, but found no shelter. “Explosion after explosion; It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare…. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children…whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro…and fire everywhere, everywhere fire…I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.”
Less than 12 hours later, about noon the next day, Wednesday, February 14, 1945 – Ash Wednesday – Valentines Day - 316 B-17 bombers from the US 8th Air Force dropped another 771 tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Dresden. 
The Dresden police reported that the three raids destroyed 12, 000 homes and apartments, 24 banks, 700 shops, 64 warehouses, 31 hotels, 11 churches, 19 hospitals, 39 schools and the zoo. More than 200 factories were damaged, but most were quickly put back in to operation.
It was a war. All wars are crimes. As General Curtis LeMay expressed it, “Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”
Timothy Dexter never attended school. He had been sent to farm work at the age of eight and at 16 he became an apprentice. In 1769, at the age of 29, Timothy Dexter opened his own glove making shop in Newburyport, Massachusetts. A year later Timothy married the widow Elizabeth Frothingham; “…an industrious and frugal woman” who was nine years his senior. Besides having given birth to four children, Elizabeth ran a “Hucksters shop”, where she sold second hand items and local produce. After the wedding Timothy moved into her house at the corner of Merrimack and Green streets and opened his own shop in the basement; “…at the sign of the Glove, opposite Somerby's Landing.” There were some in Newburyport who disapproved of the uneducated Timothy Dexter, who were offended by his ambition and ignorance. They noted he drank too much, and spoke clumsily. They scoffed at his luck and were impatient for his fall.
During the Revolutionary war Timothy was a patriot. But wartime inflation threatened all he had built. In July of 1777 a bushel of wheat cost eight Continental dollars. Just a year later it cost almost thirteen. Over the same year a pound of coffee rose from 48 Continentals to 120. It was no wonder then that many holding the shrinking Continentals sold them to speculators at a fraction of their face value, for quick gold or British pounds. But urged on by his savvy wife, Timothy gambled on the Continentals. He bought thousands of dollars worth, for hundreds. And to the surprise of many, in the “dinner table compromise” of 1790, Congress decided to buy all the outstanding Continentals at face value. Overnight Timothy was made a wealthy man. In fact, at the age of 49, Timothy Dexter was rich enough to retire.
It was a harmless speech, made, he supposed, amongst friends, and he sent a copy of it (translated into English) to the local newspaper. He explained the readers should not be surprised he could speak French because “…Frenchmen express themselves very much by gestures…”. But there were those present who were not Timothy’s friends, who insisted he had made a drunken, rambling and barley coherent speech (in English), and that more educated supporters had improved the English before committing it to ink. Wrote one critic; “He has been regarded as the most marked example of a man of feeble intellect gaining wealth purely by luck.” Then in 1795, when Timothy offered to construct at his own expense a public market house for Newburyport, these envious men and others who trusted them, voted to reject his offer, with thanks, of course. Stung by the insult Timothy decided to leave town.
He sold his new house on State Street (now part of the public library) and moved to Chester, New Hampshire (that home now "The Dalton Club"). But he lived there for only two years. And when he returned to Newburyport in 1798 he was a changed man. Any hesitation for what others thought of him had evaporated. In fact he seemed determined to remind those who despised him, just why they hated him.
He built himself a most unusual house on High Street. “He put minarets on the roof…(and)in front placed rows of columns fifteen feet high…each having on its top a statue of some distinguished man….and occupying the most prominent position were the statues of Washington, Adams and Jefferson, and to the other statues he gave the names of Bonaparte, Nelson, Franklin…often changing them according to his fancy. In a conspicuous place was a statue of him self, with the inscription, "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western world." They were gaudily painted, and…attracted crowds, whose curiosity deeply gratified the owner, and he freely opened his grounds to them.”
According to John James Currier in his “History of Newburyport”, Timothy “…would transact no business when intoxicated, and made his appointments for the forenoon, saying he was always drunk in the afternoon.” Timothy took to calling himself “Lord Timothy Dexter”, and had a coat of arms painted on the door of his carriage as if he were nobility. But those who missed the joke were unaware that his wife Elizabeth’s maiden name had been “Lord”. He claimed to have given Elizabeth $2,000 to leave him, and “hired” her back at the same sum two weeks later. He told other visitors that Elizabeth had died and that the "drunken, nagging woman" wandering about the property was her ghost. And then Timothy decided to write a book. He called it “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress”.
In the book Timothy claimed to have sold coals to Newcastle (at a profit), warming pans and mittens to the West Indies (at a profit), bibles to the East Indies and stray cats to Caribbean (both also at a profit). None of it was true of course, but anyone with a sense of humor got the joke. Many of his neighbors did not. That year, when a visitor finished a prayer for a meal, Timothy turned to his son and exclaimed, “That was a d----d good prayer, wasn’t it, Sam.”
In 1805 Mr, James Akin did an engraving of Timothy as he was often seen about Newburyport, with hat and cane, and followed by his little dog. It is the only image we have of the man. Timothy Dexter died on October 26, 1806 at the age if sixty. He left an estate valued at about $36,000. (worth about half a million in 2007.) Elizabeth followed him in 1809, aged 72. Said Timothy’s biographer, Samuel Knapp, " Many who attempted to take advantage of him got sadly deceived. He had no small share of cunning, when all else seemed to have departed from him…In buying he gave the most foolish reasons to blind the seller, who thought that he was deceived, when deceiving.”
The website devoted to honoring Timothy points to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice on living; “Be silly. Be honest. Be kind: for indeed, these were three simple dictates which guided Lord Timothy Dexter.” 
