Henry Ford: Cruising into Tomorrow

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Before the roaring factories of the River Rouge or the millions of identical black Model Ts that forever redrew the American landscape, there was only a restless farm boy with a pocket watch. Henry Ford was a man driven by a singular, obsessive conviction: that human beings were meant for a life beyond exhausting manual labor, and that the key to their liberation lay in the precise, elegant logic of the machine.

Henry Ford: Cruising into Tomorrow is the sweeping, intimate biography of an American titan who quite literally manufactured the twentieth century. This immersive, 6-hour-and-17-minute audio production traces the relentless trial, massive public failures, and uncompromising will of a legendary innovator. From his early, secret night-shift experiments with internal combustion to a high-stakes showdown on a dusty racetrack against the nation's reigning speed champion, this book captures the frantic, brilliant era that birthed the automotive age.

But Ford’s legacy is as complex as the engines he built. Beneath the brilliant industrial synthesis that created the moving assembly line lay a deeply contradictory figure—a pacifist who built the great Arsenal of Democracy at Willow Run, a self-styled benefactor of the working class who built a private corporate security state, and a stubborn patriarch whose obsession with complete control exacted a tragic toll on his only son, Edsel.

This is the definitive story of a genius who remade the modern world, only to spend his final years desperately trying to preserve the agrarian past his own machines had swept away.