Danielle Young
EEE-2083
The New Machine
November 9, 2022
In this documentary, it focuses on the men that built America, such as Henry Ford, John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for example. This documentary started out by President McKinnely being shot who was the current president. Then Therodore Rosevelt immediately stepped up to fill the position and that is when everything started to change. The reason everything started to change was because shortly after Therodore Rosevelt stepped up he passed numerous new business laws. The documentary focuses on Henry Ford and how he invented the first car, the Model T. Henry Ford's main focus was the benefit the people of society. While John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie wanted to do the same thing but were put under different conditions. In part of this documentary they talked about John D Rockefeller owned an oil company but it was a monopoly in that business. Meaning that this company supplied all the oil that was needed and there were not any other major competitors in this field. The government soon noticed and realized how unfair it was to the smaller business. So the oil company as a whole that Rockefeller owned were split up into smaller ones, which then made Rockefeller a lot more money. Henry Ford had a new invention, it was a gas powered car. He got turned down numerous times for his Model T design, but he did not let that slow him down. He took a different approach one time and started racing his cars to gain popularity, which then did work. When he gained popularity in his cars he then created an assembly line of workers to put the cars together in a shorter amount of time. One of his main focuses was making sure that this car was affordable so the middle class at that time could afford it.
I thought his view on things were interesting for that time period he was in. He wanted to find the fastest and cheapest way possible to make things. But he did not cut corners, he wanted all of his cars to come out the same and in the best quality possible. I also thought it was interesting that behind these great ideas, that at the time they were in no one supported them. These ideas were not just adopted into the world. They had to work long and hard to get the world to realize how great and different these ideas work.
I think these inventions greatly impacted the entrepreneurial world today. We would be nowhere near where we are now if those ideas never existed. One thing I do not support that Henry Ford came up with was the 40 hour work week. He figured it out that the productivity was a little higher. It is crazy to try and imagine what the world would be like today if these people never existed or if they just never came up with the ideas that they did.