Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?

Abstract

Abstract:In the summer of 1921, a business journalist named Samuel Crowther reached out to Ernest Liebold, the personal secretary of automobile magnate Henry Ford. Crowther had previously interviewed Ford for a magazine profile. After the piece, he'd talked with his publisher about how it seemed like there was an opportunity for something more. As he wrote to Liebold, "Ford has done more than build a new and better automobile." Crowther believed that the "theories and practices" Ford had developed marked "the largest step forward to civilization that the world has ever taken." (As Crowther put it later, "The Ford industries are built on ideas and the brick and mortar only help carry out the ideas.") He proposed to spend six hours interviewing Ford, and then to turn the results into an "economic classic" that would do greater good for the world than any book ever published other than the Bible.