Henry ford

Thursday

Tomoé Hill

Crucible’s complex picture

The beginning of Crucible, the writer and Oscar-nominated director John Sayles’s eighth novel, opens with a feint. A couple of journalists are taken for a mock-perilous test drive at the presentation of Henry Ford’s latest automobile. On their return, what starts as a humorous Q&A becomes increasingly restrictive as it becomes clear there is to be one narrative only: the company’s, or rather, the founder’s. This familiar combination of showmanship and control may feel ubiquitous now, but the audacity of Ford and the outrage he provoked was to change the face of American industry.

crucible

Friday

John Steele Gordon

How Elon Musk changed the world

Technological revolutions can only change the world when the new technology becomes cheap enough for it to be widely applied. Just ask Elon Musk. The rocket age began with Germany’s V-2 in 1944, but the single-use technology was so expensive that it required state resources to utilize. Then, last Sunday, SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster, the most powerful ever launched, returned from space and was secured by its gantry for reuse. Thus it became, in the words of the New York Times, “more like a jetliner than a rocket.” It is estimated that reusable rockets will reduce the cost per pound of launching things into space by at least an order of magnitude and a new space age can now begin.

elon musk

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

The dark history of dance marathons

From our UK edition

On 31 March 1923, Alma Cummings put her feet into a bowl of cold water. Then, tired-eyed but smiling obligingly for the photographer, she held up her dancing shoes. There were holes in both soles. Cummings had just finished a 27-hour stint of waltzing at a Manhattan ballroom, wearing out not just her shoes, but six male partners in the process. The dance instructor was one of the Americans responsible for a strange cultural phenomenon that swept the United States over the next two decades — dance marathons. Cummings’s record was soon beaten and within a few years promoters were organising public competitions across the States in which couples danced for hours, days, months even, to win prize money. Some collapsed and even died in the process.