Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Henry Ford

Day 39: Dearborn, MI. I was really interested in visiting a car museum in the city appropriately dubbed Motor City USA. What I didn’t know was that The Henry Ford Museum would quickly become the most amazing museum I had ever visited! Instead of just an auto museum, it is a museum of all American industrialization(including current events and pop culture) from the 1700s to today.

There were plenty of cars to be seen, but there were pleny of other machines that you would find nowhere in the country. Some were small. Like this hand-feed machine that creates the grove on the end of a screw:


Some were larger(and look like they could have been in Mad Max) like this Avery Traction Engine from 1916:


And then some were enormous installations like these steam engines and this generator that powered a small city:



Here’s a prefabricated house, called the Dymaxion House, from the 1940s. Only 2 were ever built and fairly recently The Henry Ford was able to acquire both:



A really dug some of the neon signs they had here and there:


But I was most fascinated by the exhibit of popculture that started in the year 1900. I must say though that it made me feel a little old to see some of the stuff I played with in the late 1970s…like this Pong video game. And I’m pretty sure I even owned this Star Wars lunch box! J





After the museum I toured Ford’s Rouge Factory that produces the F-150 trucks. This is Ford’s newest assembly line factory. Unfortunately they wouldn’t allow me to take pictures inside. But I can assure you it was pretty cool…and a lot quieter and cleaner than you’d expect from an auto plant!

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