Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott Read Free Book Online Page A

his name well known. Versions of“the Porsche system” were being used all over the city: Even the Vienna fire brigade decided to become motorized by using hub-mounted electric motors he had designed.
    Ferdinand Porsche had just the kind of talent that the future would need. In these early years of the 1900s—a time when Germany and Austria were still empires, and when Europe and America had no concept of what it would be like to fight a world war—all the main car companies we know of today were taking their first steps. Thanks to new inventions such as the telephone, ideas were spreading more quickly, and that meant the race to advance technologically
     was speeding up too. Automakers were constantly observing one another, and a sense of competition had set in. Individual, motorized mobility was getting closer. But there was still so far to go.
    Around the same time Porsche was starting his new job and his new family, Henry Ford, with the help of two Hungarian immigrant designers, was beginning to design a car called the Model T. This vehicle would later be known as the world’s first car for the masses. But the gap of time between the invention of that car and the motorization of the United States was a matter of decades. Horses and carriages still felt inevitable, and most people still died in the very
     same towns where they’d been born, rarely traveling farther than a radius of twelve miles. The primary reason was an economic one: In the early 1900s, the average American made about five hundred dollars a year. That meant automobiles, which ranged in price from $650 to $6,000, were beyond most people’s budget. (Later, car companies would invent credit systems, and the sales of cars would soar.) While in retrospect we can talk about 1908 as the birth of Ford’s
     Model T, the time when “the people” got a car, in fact, all Ford had that year was “a wonderful car—one, single, wonderful car.” 8 As author and historian Douglas Brinkley points out: “At the time, Ford himself wondered aloud whether his company would ever build even a tenth Model T.” 9

    In 1909, the same year that the United States laid down its first mile of paved road, Porsche and his wife welcomed their second child into the world, a boy they named Ferdinand, after his father, but who would come to be known simply as Ferry. Now working for Austro-Daimler, a place that made cars for the elite as well as top-of-the-line racing cars, Porsche was at the Semmering hill climb racing one of his new designs on the nineteenth of September when word came
     that his son had been born. It is a potent image—to imagine Porsche at the racetrack at the very moment his son enters the world—and not only because Porsche’s main connection to his children would always be tied up with the automobile, but also because his son’s birth occurred on the verge of a dramatic new decade of technological progress.
    Between the years 1910 and 1920, the United States and Europe would experience a breathtaking degree of change. Change in transportation, economics, and political systems would go hand in hand. Technology was now, more than ever, beginning to be seen as a tool, indeed an engine, of political and economic influence, and Porsche himself was an example of how intimately these paths were being intertwined. Porsche was never interested in politics, and yet because he worked
     in the field of transportation, which was becoming an integral part of political and social development, politics would always be a part of his life. At times, this was because government subsidies were a means of getting money for his cars, but there was also a more simple reason: cars were for the elite, and who was more elite than royalty? Before 1914, Europe was still a place of empires, of kings and queens and archdukes—and they were among the first to buy cars. Jacob
     Lohner & Co., Porsche’s first employer, had built cars for royalty, and Porsche had eventually been