Why Henry Ford Refused to Build the Engine That Won the War скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Henry Ford Refused to Build the Engine That Won the War

That sound. The one that still makes people near Dover feel what their grandparents felt. That twelve-cylinder scream tearing through the chalk-white sky at three thousand RPM. That sound almost never existed. Because the man who could have mass-produced the engine behind it, the man who owned the largest industrial operation on Earth, personally killed the deal. His name was Henry Ford. And his reasons for walking away from the Rolls-Royce Merlin tell you more about who actually built the weapon that dominated the air war than any documentary you have ever seen. Here is the number that rewrites the story. Packard Motor Car Company, operating out of a single plant on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Michigan, produced fifty-five thousand five hundred and twenty-three Merlin engines. Rolls-Royce, the company whose name is literally stamped on the thing, produced twenty-three thousand six hundred and seventy-five. That is not a rounding error. Packard built seventy percent of the confirmed seventy-nine thousand one hundred and ninety-eight Merlins. Seventy percent. The so-called British engine that powered the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and eventually the aircraft that broke the Luftwaffe's back over Berlin, the P-51 Mustang, was an American-made machine in seven out of every ten copies. And the reason Packard got the contract at all is that Henry Ford threw it away.Late May 1940. France is falling. The British Purchasing Commission and Rolls-Royce are scrambling across the Atlantic looking for any manufacturer with the capacity to build Merlins at scale. They approach Ford. Edsel Ford, Henry's son and the company's president, negotiates directly with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. The deal is nine thousand engines, six thousand for Britain, three thousand for America. Rolls-Royce ships blueprints and a sample engine to Dearborn. Ford's engineers produce prototype crankshafts within two weeks. The program is moving. And then, in the first days of July 1940, Henry Ford personally pulls the plug.