Good, I am getting nothing about your hometown..I should go for wikipedia...:)

"1. I'm pretty sure the battle of Gettysburg was fought here."
I do hope this is a joke... last time I checked, Gettysburg was in Pennsylvania...
anyways, by "another one" I meant another freshman...

Oh, yeah, too many freshmen here...
TOO MANY FRESHMEN EVERYWHERE...
FRESHMEN ARE FREAKING EVERYWHERE...

They've got little else to do!

indeed, you probably should know the history of your state and area you live in
so its trivia time

Who here knows who Stovepipe Johnson is and what he is famous for?

From Belgium : the country with the best beer of the world !!

.... and teaching maths to 12-13 year old children

@Captain Cool.....So no children and no job? And living at home until you hit 30?

@butterhead.....do you know the significance of my hometown (Houston) and why Henry Ford is just an accident of history? How Houston and Indianapolis made Detroit.

@Scordatura.....It confuses me that Northfield is in the South. I mean no one would put Little Canada South of Little Chicago or something wacky like that. BTW, is there anything in Northfield besides Carleton and the people at St. Olaf who wish they were at Carleton?

@gopher- sadly no, I do not know the history of Houston. I haven't brushed up on my Texas History as much as I would like to(VA seems to have a very lacking selection of Texas History books), but I surely hope you will tell me!

Really, they don't teach Texas History in the 4th and 7th grades in Virginia the way that they are supposed to?

In 1908, one of my VERY distant relatives patented a drilling technology in Houston, and the same year, a guy named Burton in Indianapolis patented a process called thermal cracking that basically doubled the gasoline yield of a barrel of oil. The drop in gasoline prices that resulted is what made cars affordable. Henry Ford's third car company was not really any better than the two previous ones that had failed. Gasoline made it a success. The assembly line and economies of scale aspects that he gained from had largely been developed in the meat packing industry 30-40 years earlier. The drilling technology created Sharp-Hughes, which is what made Howard Hughes the richest man on Earth after his dad and my cousin died and is the reason the operational units of the major oil companies are all in Houston as they had to do business with Sharp-Hughes. Thermal cracking raised the gasoline yield from 25% to 45%. It is about 53% today at the most efficient refineries in the world, so in a few days the yield rose twice as much as it has in the last 100 years. Just one of the many amazing accomplishments of the AMerican Oil COmpany before it was subsumed into British/Beyond/Barely Petroleum.

Interesting story I must say. but no, we only briefly go over a little bit of Texas history in VA.

@Gopher, It was named after John North. And to your latter question. I'd say that both schools have redeeming factors, and are chosen by those who have different interests. For example, Olaf has a better music department, and generally better sports. (Excluding ultimate Frisbee). And Carleton has generally better academics. And for the other things... we have a nationally ranked highschool weightlifting team, if that helps anything.

"Henry Ford's third car company was not really any better than the two previous ones that had failed."

Uh, at least one of those two still exists, better than can be said for most car companies of that era (it's called Cadillac now).

so I take it no one knows about good ole Stovepipe?

@gopher Who is Captain Cool?

My apologies...dangers of page breaks.

@SacredDigits......my point was that the Model T was not more affordable than his previous failed attempts at creating a mass market automobile.

Don't know stovepipe, and KA, how can you not trumpet the Battle of Fredericksburg! This December there should be a huge reenaction for the 150th anniversary of the Turkey Shoot.

Will it be celebrated with impressive facial hair?

goldfinger, if my hometown's history mattered to me at all, you think I wouldn't be so jovial about it, would I?

haha very true.

My hometown is where the British fleet coming up from NYC gave up on Burgoyne, burned my town, and sailed back down the river lol.

Also, the first Capital of New York, but no one would ever know that.

just for the heck of it:
Stovepipe Johnson was a famed Confederate Partisan in the Civil War. He is mainly known for two things, he was part of the force that escape Fort Donelson alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest, and he led a small force of Kentucky Confederate into the town of Newburgh, Indiana. Ambushing a bunch of wounded Union soldiers in a makeshift hospital in a Hotel. The immediate effect of this was that Governor Morton ordered a large force of Indiana militia into Kentucky to hunt the guy down, they didn't get him and he was later blinded in battle and went on to found a town in Texas. They called him Stovepipe because he tricked the Union boys in Newburgh but fashioning a fake cannon from an old stovepipe and positioning it on the Kentucky bank of the Ohio River opposite Newburgh

Just a side note... Johnson was originally from Henderson, KY - home of my paternal grandparents' graves and several of my aunts and one uncle still live there.

Ford made not one but two car companies that survived the huge pruning down process of the car industry. I'm pretty sure that qualifies him to be more than an accident of history.

But Cadillac didn't really survive. It is just the name that Sloan picked from among the name plates for his high end brand. Fisher and Chevy are GM. The rest were just accumulated pieces. Pierce-Arrow, Peerless and Packard survived longer than Cadillac did. My point was that many people, including Ford, had tried for years to make cars mass products and all failed. So many had failed that Ford was about the only guy left who was still trying, and he would have failed as well without two revolutions in the oil industry. Without Henry Ford a slightly less efficient producer would have grown to about the same market share using the same methods. No Walter Sharp and the oil industry might have been set back a decade or more easily. The same is true of Dr. Burton. Burton was largely alone in pursuing what he did. Sharp wasn't alone, but he was always recognized at the time as being the sharpest guy and he did a bunch of other stuff.

They continued operations in Cadillac Main up until the 1980's, which was where they had been built all along. That's a little more than picking a name plate.

And there were tons of people who were still trying. Every year in the nearby city of Ypsilanti, they have an "orphan car" show which has two requirements: the car you show may not be of a brand still in use, and the car you show may not be of a brand that any person who was registered before you is exhibiting. It regularly gets 200 or so exhibiters, of every era of manufacture, and is a great history lesson. Because you don't restore and show, say, a Minerva without knowing a bit about what the hell it is.

Ford's the one history remembers. But he was far from the only one continually making efforts to put something out there. Not taking anything away from Sharp and Burton, but Ford's much more than an accident of history.

It was truly a symbiotic relationship. Ford needed cheap gas to make his autos viable to the masses, and the budding gas and oil industry (aka Sharp) needed a readily mass-producible automobile to take advantage of the abundant fuel they could provide or they would have no marktet for sales. It's not like trains at that time were diesel powered and there was no other mass transit form that would use the oil. You had the automobile and motorized bicycle and that was pretty much it.

Cadillac fell into Durant's hands. Pierce-Arrow did not. Peerless did not. Packard did not. Duesenberg did not. That was my point. Durant did not take them over because they were doing great.

I was not claiming that he was alone in trying to make cars, merely trying to make a super-cheap car. Few people today are trying to make a $50,000 airplane. When gasoline was expensive the automobile was incapable of being a truly mass market product, so people were making luxury products. A luxury market is generally going to be dominated by many smaller scale producers. A mass market product is going to be dominated by massive ruthlessly efficient producers. It is a difference between wine and beer. People showing "orphan cars" are no different than collecting random wine bottles. Gasoline changed the economics of the market and someone would have emerged naturally who did all of the things that Ford did.

The British Navy and most shipping switched to "Fuel Oil" before 1908. Spindletop largely ended the kerosene era of the oil industry and inaugurated the "Fuel Oil" era which then ended less than 10 years later with improvements in refining and the rise of the automobile. On this issue, I fall on the side of Say's Law. Supply created the Demand. Even before the innovations of 1908, the abundance of "fuel oil" caused shipping to convert from coal and in Texas it gave birth to the semi-modern sulfur industry. Sulfur had been mined like a rock only in Sicily. There was a thing called the Frasch Process to mine it in a manner like oil drilling, but it was energy intensive. "Fuel Oil" was cheap enough to make the Frasch Process economical and bankrupted the Italian miners. As refining got better, it became cheaper to extract sulfur from natural gas and the Frasch Process producers went broke. Cheap gasoline would have created a mass level auto industry who ever became Henry Ford. The auto industry had failed to create cheap gasoline. At least in this case, Demand did not create the Supply.

My real point, or the source of my attitude, is that wholesale level innovators are never remembered even as they are the ones generally driving what people see at the retail level. Coming from a wholesale city, it annoys me. Walter Sharp is more important than Henry Ford and no one even in Texas remembers him at all. Hugh Roy Cullen is more important than Henry Ford and no one outside of Houston knows who he is, and most of them have no idea how he got super rich. There aren't probably but a handful of people alive today who will have the impact on the future that George Mitchell will have, and I'd be surprised if anyone here knows who he is. These men basically each roughly doubled the usable energy resources of planet Earth. They lifted billions of people either out of poverty or to significantly higher living standards by providing the world with huge amounts of relatively cheap energy.

Actually, Cadillac was doing great, they were winning international awards for innovation. Durant went bankrupt because he was pursuing valuable commodities and not just bottom-feeders.