Any time I see Henry Ford in the papers, I stop. As I’ve described him before, he is probably the most famous person that seemingly nobody knows anything about.

Well we learn more together again today. On his sixty-third birthday, Henry Ford skipped the cake and gave himself a factory tour instead. He walked a group of newspapermen through his Detroit plant and showed them something he'd been keeping quiet: a tiny plane he called the "flivver," borrowing the name straight off his cheap car.

The Washington Times ran a photo of him standing next to it, beaming, under a headline calling it a birthday gift to himself. The plane, the paper said, would give American aviation "incalculable impetus." It was, by the paper's own admission, still experimental. That qualifier wouldn't last long in the coverage that followed.

Within days the tone shifted from experiment to inevitability. A few weeks later at Ford Airport, Ford drove up in his coupe, spotted a rival pilot readying his own small plane for a cross-country tour, and challenged him to a race on the spot. The flivver won by several hundred yards. Ford's private verdict on the whole spectacle was almost bureaucratic in its satisfaction: it showed people were interested.

By September, the National Aeronautic Association was fielding fifty formal requests to buy one, with hundreds more letters from hopeful "prospects." One Oakland paper ran the plane's design specs next to a straight-faced argument that municipal airports were now a civic necessity, on the logic that cheap cars had once forced cities to pave roads. The air age, the paper insisted, wasn't coming. It was already here.

The pilot behind nearly every one of those headlines was a young man named Harry Brooks, Ford's chief test pilot, the one who flew low over crowds close enough to hold a conversation while doing it. Less than two years after that birthday tour, Brooks was attempting a distance record down the Atlantic coast in the same little plane.

On February 25, 1928, his engine failed over the water near Melbourne, Florida. Wreckage from the crash washed ashore. Brooks never did. According to the Henry Ford museum's own archives, an investigation later traced the failure to toothpicks Brooks himself had wedged into the fuel cap overnight to keep out moisture; they'd plugged the vents. Ford ended the flivver program in the aftermath. He never brought it back, and rarely spoke of it again.

A hundred years on, the pattern's familiar. Somebody promises a plane in every driveway. The headlines get ahead of the hardware. The whole thing rides on one person willing to fly it before anyone's sure it's ready. It's hard to read that Washington Times photo of Ford grinning next to his invention and not think about how confidently people build their futures around things that haven't been tested nearly long enough yet.

For video of the plane in action, see our video today below.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
Washington Times, August 3, 1926
Detroit Free Press, August 6, 1926
The Oakland Post-Enquirer, August 14, 1926
Baraboo News-Republic, September 17, 1926
The Oakland Post-Enquirer, September 18, 1926
Buffalo Courier-Express, February 26, 1928
thehenryford.org