Thinking Small (4 page)

Watching the black-and-white footage from the ceremony, I notice Hitler is sitting up front with the driver when his car enters the grounds. It was well known that Hitler’s preferred place in any car
⁶
was next to the driver. (On long trips, he liked to wear a leather driving cap and study the road atlas, planning the route.) But in the footage of him
leaving the celebration that day, the führer is sitting in the backseat of the open-roofed car and
looks much happier than he did while giving his speech. That old automotive joy flashes in his face again, perhaps because he is no longer alone: An older man in an oversized tweed coat, his belly a bit large, his face creased from age and perpetual squinting, has joined him. Hitler is obviously content to be in this man’s company. He is turned toward
him, conversing in a casual sort of way as the crowds lining either side of the road wave and cheer when the little Volkswagen chugs past. It’s a striking moment, I realize, for in that brief instant the car is carrying both its fathers, two men whose legacies will follow it forever, for better and for worse. Cushioned in its backseat is Adolf Hitler, and in that same backseat is the Bug’s engineer and designer, Ferdinand Porsche.

It’s no wonder
Adolf Hitler was so concerned with the idea of motorizing Germany, or that the high rollers on Madison Avenue have historically received some of their biggest accounts from automobile firms. Mobility, as both a word and an idea, cuts to the heart of the connection between creativity and change, and it is through that connection that humans have found a way of satisfying certain primary desires:
the desires for freedom and prosperity, and the desires to join together and commune. To put it another way, the history of our progress as humans, both socially and politically, is inextricably linked to the ways we’ve found to move. For better or worse, humans have always been curious about what lies beyond the horizon, about what else is out there to be experienced and seen, and in order to explore those new worlds, we’ve had to find new ways of getting there.
Whether it is by horseback, carriage, bicycle, motorcycle, ship, car, plane, spacecraft—or through more virtual means such as reading a book, listening to music, or going
online—we have put a great deal of time, energy, and money into finding ways to transcend ever greater distances at ever greater speeds. But just as no political or
economic revolution has come easily, so no revolution in transportation has come without resistance to change.

Take the introduction of passenger trains, for example. Today, the idea of
being transported
has a somewhat mystical connotation. But when passenger trains were first being introduced, the word
transport
roused disdain, if not outright anger, when it was applied to people.
Transport
was a word for the movement of animals, objects, and food. Mass transportation of people felt sacrilegious, as though humans were being turned into a commodity.
“Freedom has been sacrificed to speed,”
¹
wrote one German journalist in 1902. “The train ticket is purchased not only with money but also with forfeiture of one’s right of self-determination.…”

Like all technological advances, however, convenience and curiosity eventually won out and the train was accepted and embraced. First-class cabins and onboard dining made those with money feel as though they were something more than eggs or lumber or livestock. People developed a taste for travel, for seeing new parts of the world, and for the rush of movement. And, once motor cars appeared on the scene, those who could afford the new vehicles found them liberating;
they were able to achieve the effects of train travel, but individually, without restriction. It’s one underlying reason why motor cars in Europe—and in the United States, before Henry Ford—came into the world as items of luxury. Automobiles were symbols of prestige from their very inception; it is only the details signifying that prestige that have changed.

There have always been different needs and different levels of liberation involved in travel, and because of this wide spectrum, rarely do the old methods disappear with the introduction of the new. Today, for example, there are ways in which trains continue to be the most convenient means of travel. Stepping onto a train requires little stress; there are no long lines,
security checks, or traffic-clogged streets to endure. Yet the lure of driving
remains clear. The rush of having a physical connection to one’s speed and direction—pressing the pedal, turning the wheel—is surely more exciting than simply stepping aboard and taking a seat.

One thing Adolf Hitler understood well in his call for a People’s Car was the desire everyone experiences at some point for two things: power and control. Automobiles, like most technologies, are tools we use to extend our natural capabilities and increase what we can accomplish. They allow humans to go faster and farther; they give us more speed and a wider reach than we could ever have with our bodies alone. And the automobile is an easy metaphor for class
mobility; it’s less about where we’re coming from, and more about where we want to go.

But there has always been another side to automobiles as well, a less political or Darwinian one, a side closer to the heart. Automobiles conjure feelings of freedom and possibility, of fantasy and escape. To some extent, all new technologies are as much about this poetic side of life as they are about anything practical or productive. It’s the spirit of adventure that motivates inventors: Their innovations require a great deal of risk and courage to be brought
to life. Innovators test limits, dealing with tools that have the potential of bringing great good to the world, or great destruction. Think of the men who were out on the cliffs of North Carolina experimenting with the first human flight, or of those who worked on splitting the atom during the Second World War. And, more recently, there are those curious groups of people dreaming up new ways of connecting the world via a vast, virtual web.

Technology is about broadening our ideas of what is possible. And often the men and women who find or discover the scientific principles that change our world are men and women who are moved—in the same way any writer or artist is moved—by a deep curiosity about the unknown. They are not only intellectually but also emotionally stirred by the work they produce. People like Albert Einstein or the Wright brothers, Jane Goodall or
Mary
Walton, Michael Faraday or Steve Jobs, are often instinctively drawn to their occupations. The engineer Ferdinand Porsche was like that as well, so much so that his lifelong obsession hardly seems to have sprung from a conscious choice.

It started when he was just a boy. There were people in his village, people in his own family in fact, who whispered about him and wondered if he might be possessed. They found it hard to explain the boy’s knowledge and understanding of something as incomprehensible as electricity still was back then.
How does he even know it is there?
Born in a small Bohemian village called Maffersdorf in 1875, Porsche entered a world where familiarity with an electric
spark went about as far as rubbing amber against a cat’s fur, then standing back to watch the ensuing flash of light.

Things were changing rapidly, however, and by the time Porsche was thirteen years old, there was one building in a neighboring town that did indeed have electric light: the local carpet factory. One day, while running an errand for his father, who was the area’s best tinsmith, Porsche happened upon the factory and could not drag himself away. He was fascinated, awed, and fearlessly began inspecting the gadgets and burning bulbs. The owner of the factory noticed
the big-eyed boy and, rather than running him off, brought him in and explained the way the system worked. Porsche began taking mental notes about the batteries and chemicals and charges he saw. He wanted to build an electrical system for himself.

But Ferdinand’s father, Anton, had other plans for his son. Having already lost one of his boys in an accident (a loss that cast an unacknowledged shadow over their home), he now looked to Ferdinand to learn and inherit the business from him. Ferdinand could feel the importance and weight of his father’s wishes, but there was something about electricity that just simply would not leave him alone. Often, even after working all day for his father in the
tinsmith shop, he would stay up half the night to experiment with the batteries and other tools and chemicals he’d managed to acquire. His father found such preoccupations unhealthy
and distracting and eventually forbade Ferdinand from tinkering with what did not relate directly to the tinsmith trade, fearing that his son’s hobby was getting out of hand. Ferdinand’s adolescent struggles eventually grew into serious quarrels. He tried to explain
his passion to his father, but the unfamiliar words and terms he used only frustrated Anton further. He didn’t want to hear about it. He just wanted it to end.

Ferdinand appealed to his mother. He
couldn’t
stop; perhaps he could just set up a place in the attic, out of the way, which his father would never see. He’d only work up there when his father wasn’t at home, and he’d keep up with all his tinsmith work. Thus, his mother, sensitive to her son’s talent, turned a blind eye to the little laboratory Ferdinand established in the topmost room of the house. Because Anton was such a
gifted tinsmith, and also a politically involved man, he was often traveling or away overnight, and Ferdinand found ample time to continue his experiments. But there was one night when he misjudged his father’s time of return. Anton, in search of his son, discovered Ferdinand’s secret laboratory and flew into a rage. His orders had clearly been disobeyed. He was stunned and angered by the recalcitrance and oddity in what his son was doing, and not understanding the
acids that went into the batteries and chemicals Ferdinand had assembled, his father began stomping on them with his large, heavy work boots, pushing Ferdinand away when he tried to intervene. The acids ate through the soles of Anton’s shoes, burning his skin as it splashed up from the floor. It took Ferdinand’s mother’s interference to calm him down again. Ferdinand watched in a sad daze, but he didn’t apologize for what he had done.

Electricity was still
something to be wondered at in America, too. In 1939 at the New York World’s Fair held at Flushing Meadows in Queens, an advertisement for the Commonwealth and Southern utility company showed a long candle beside a squat but brilliant lightbulb, telling its readers: “It now costs the average American household only $1.71 to light its house or apartment by electricity for a month … If this home had to use candles, it would have to pay $346.65 a month for an equivalent amount of light …”
¹
The text goes on to say that it would require over half a ton of candles, some 5,778 of them in fact. In suggesting that it will be innovations in electric lighting that will, literally and metaphorically, “make
the future bright,” the ad implicitly asks Americans to trust the new market that is emerging. Private enterprise, the ad explains, “rewards individual initiative,” “encourages inventive genius,” and “induces investors to supply capital.”