Enthusiasts and Innovators: “Possible Dreams” and the “Innovation Station” at the Henry Ford Museum

Abstract

ENTHUSIASTS AND INNOVATORS: “POSSIBLE DREAMS” AND THE “INNOVATION STATION”AT THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM PAUL B . ISRAEL Henry Ford became famous and wealthy as a technological innovator whose assembly-line production methods made possible the first massproduced automobiles. He was also a technological enthusiast, albeit one who nostalgically looked to the past as he collected the relics of the machine age that are housed in the Henry Ford Museum. Two recent exhibits express these aspects of Henry Ford’s legacy. Technological enthusiasm was the theme of the exhibit “Possible Dreams: Popular Mechanics and America’s Enthusiasm for Technology,” which ran for two years, until early 1994. Curator Mary Seelhorst and her associates put together an exhibit that examined the ninety-year history of Popular Mechanics and its role in promoting technology. Visitors were drawn to the exhibit by a series of four figures and by graphics that asked, “Are You a Technological Enthusiast?” One depicted a weekend enthusiast and her motorcycle, another a consumer enthusiast with a microwave, a third a budding enthusiast playing a video game, and the fourth a professional enthusiast working on a robot prototype. These figures also suggested the range of the magazine’s readers. The exhibit was divided into several stations. Six examined some of the main themes found during particular eras in the magazine’s history. At the entrance, “Flying Fever, 1902-1919” showed the enthusiasm that greeted the new technology' of aeronautics at the turn of the century (fig. 1). Here, and throughout the exhibit, were artifacts featured at one time in the magazine, as well as quotations and illustrations from its pages. Also at each station was an advertisement from Popular Mechanics. In “Flying Fever,” a 1910 Curtiss company ad offered airplane engines and other equipment to the do-it-yourselfers who have been a principal audience for the magazine. Also included were items from the muse­ um’s collections such as a Blériot monoplane, an aerial camera, and Dr. Israel is associate editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He is the author of From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920 (Baltimore, 1992) and is currently writing a biography of Edison.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3502-0008$01.00 396 Enthusiasts and Innovators at the Henry Ford Museum 397 Fig. 1.—The “Flying Fever, 1902-1919” section of the “Possible Dreams” exhibit displayed aeronautical artifacts featured in Popular Mechanics. (All photos courtesy of Henry Ford Museum.) various mementos of Earle Ovington, the first airmail pilot, including his crash helmet and good-luck doll. The other thematic stations, in order, were as follows: “Electricity Wins, 1917-1935”; “The World Is Radio Made, 1919-1930”; “Planning the World of Tomorrow, 1930-1950”; “Building the Good Life, 19461975 ”; and “Recycling the Classics, 1975-1992.” Meant to represent major themes in the magazine, they clearly do not encompass the full range of technologies featured, although as one who read Popular Mechanics in the mid-1960s, I found that “Building the Good Life” resonated with my own memories of the magazine. Here the museum staffbuilt a structure based on plans found in Popular Mechanics, and the 398 Paul B. Israel furnishings were artifacts also built from such plans. Next to this “house” was a workshop with tools advertised in the magazine and a boat made from plans published in Popular Mechanics. The museum artifacts and excerpts from the magazine found in these stations appeared to have been selected quite judiciously, although “Recycling the Classics” was determined by budget as much as by the pages of Popular Mechanics. While computers and electronic technology have been featured heavily in the journal’s pages during the last two decades, this has not been a strength of the Henry Ford Museum collections, and the exhibit budget did not provide funding to acquire appropriate artifacts. The result, however, draws on another theme that tells us something important about Americans and their ambivalent relationship to the promise of technology. “Recycling the Classics” covered the period in which technological questioning has become as common as enthusiasm, yet it depicted...