We've now made our way to Detroit, with stops along the way visiting friends in Fargo (Fargo Phil) Rochester (Helen C) Onalaska (Sandy K) Madison (Margie, Judy and Al) Plymouth (Cliff F) and Detroit (Astrid and Elly). We appreciate all the hospitality and the opportunity to visit and catch up with so many old friends.

Yesterday Astrid took us to Greenfield Village, a Henry Ford enterprise. The village is an assortment of historical buildings moved from various locales from around the East Coast. It includes:

the Dayton Ohio home where Irvine and Wilbur Wright lived, and the bicycle shop where they built the famous airplane they flew at Kitty Hawk. (The plane itself is at the Smithsonian). The back of the bike shop was only large enough to hold about one third of the plane at a time, but all the peices were actually built in this very building and then re-assembled prior to flight.

Thomas Edison's Menlo Park NJ Laboratory. This is a recreation of the place where the light bulb and lots of other things were invented. It is a medium size two-story building with room for a dozen or so technicians all employed by Tom. Thomas Alva Edison was a great marketer as well as a prolific inventor. Next to the laboratory (and also in the Village) was the rooming house where many of the workers lived. Tom rigged up the rooming house with the very first light bulbs. He would go down to the train station and convince affluent looking passengers to come see (and invest in) the future. The light bulbs were about 7 watts and didn’t give off much more light than a night light. This building, like many of the others, had docents that provided background and other information. We saw the model for Edison's first invention. It was a polling machine for recording how members of Congressmen voted. This was an idea that was well before its time. Today we keep data on how each Congressman votes on every vote. Unfortunately for Tom, the Congressmen of the 1860's didn’t think it was a particularly good idea to have a record of how they voted, it might make a difference to their constituents. So, the polling machine never got off the ground, and Tom quickly learned that he needed to invent things that would be used.

And of course there are the Henry Ford sites. Henry’s birthplace and tribute to his mother; the place where he built his first car (and had to hatchet down the door to get it out f the building) and the first Ford factory, before the assembly line concept; here the workers came to the car instead of visa-versa.

I figure Henry Ford built Greenfield Village because he wanted to immortalize his own life and figured he could afford to do it. However, he probably thought it might be a little tacky to just immortalize Henry Ford. So he went and got these other structures. Nonetheless, like so many of Henry’s ideas, this was a good one. Well worth a visit if you’re in the Detroit area.