Napoleon, Brown, Ford, Fermi, McCarthy, Castro

There are some days when nothing happens, but December 2nd isn't one of them.

On this day in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France. He was 35. France hadn't had an emperor since Charlemagne a thousand years earlier.

On December 2nd, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his violent attack on the military arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He was 59. If you've seen the famous painting of him, he looked a lot like God. The federal troops that captured Brown and retook the arsenal were under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee.

On this day in 1927 Henry Ford replaced the famously reliable Model T with the Model A. Ford was 64 and still innovating. The Model T had been in production for the previous 19 years and came in a variety of colors, all of them black. That was the joke, anyway.

It was on this day in 1942 that Enrico Fermi initiated the first sustained nuclear reaction, the first step toward the production of an atomic weapon. It took place in a secret laboratory under the bleachers of a university football stadium. On the same day the State Department announced the deaths of 2 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Fermi was 41, and a recent immigrant from fascist Italy.

Fifty five years ago today the Senate voted to censure Joe McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." He was 46. He was still in office when he died two years later.

On December 2nd, 1956 Castro, Ché Guevara and 80 other members of his July 26th Movement landed in Cuba to begin their revolution. On December 2nd, 1961, his revolution completed, Castro announced in a nationwide radio address that he was a Marxist. He was 35.

All of these stories, and hundreds of others, appear in A Book of Ages. Monarchs, revolutionaries, soldiers, scientists, authors, painters, inventors, demagogues, tycoons; what they did, and how old they were when they did it.

Fathers & Sons

In 1955 Ford Motor Company hired Marianne Moore to help name their newest car-model. The 67 year-old poet had some interesting suggestions. Imagine driving a car named "Utopian Turtletop" or "Andante Con Tropo." What about "The Anticipator"? The "Thunder Crester"? The "Silver Sword"? The "Regna Racer"? What exactly is a "Magigravue"? Or a "Turcotingo"? Would you expect a "Pastelogram" to get better gas mileage and good acceleration? I like "The Varsity Stroke" but it might be a bit preppy. She also suggested "Mongoose Civique" and "The Intelligent Whale" (which the car was almost as big as.) "The Resilient Bullet" sounds almost cool.

Ford didn't use any of Moore's suggestions, deciding instead to name the new car after Henry Ford’s son and heir. The Edsel. The question isn't why Ford Motor Company named the car Edsel, but why Henry Ford would give such a name to his son. Maybe he should have let the poet name him.

Marianne Moore appears five times in A Book of Ages. Henry Ford, Edsel's grandfather, appears seven times.

Reliability

The last Model T automobile rolled off the assembly line on this day in 1927. Ford had produced 15,007,003 of them. Henry Ford was 64.

He'd formed the Ford Motor Company when he was 40. Ten years later he began building the Model T on an assembly line modeled after the disassembly line that Armour & Co. used to turn hogs into canned hams. In 1914 Ford began paying his workers the preposterous wage of $5 per eight-hour day. The auto worker was suddenly able to afford to buy what he made; as revolutionary an idea as the assembly line itself. The other nice thing about the Model T was it ran forever.

Henry Ford appears seven times in A Book of Ages. We first see him walking to Detroit to look for a job. His last appearance is at age 78 when he finally allows his employees to unionize. We see him on vacation with his friends Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. He is also a collector of antiques, and, in 1922, a large contributor to a new political party in Germany. A grateful and admiring Mr. Hitler hangs Ford's picture in his office.