The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia by Thomas Hager

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia by Thomas Hager The extraordinary, unknown story of two giants of American history—Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—and their attempt to create an electric-powered city of tomorrow on the Tennessee River During the roaring twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be ten times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society, introducing mass commuting by car, use a new kind of currency called “energy dollars,” and have the added benefit (from Ford and Edison's view) of crippling the growth of socialism. The whole audacious scheme almost came off, with Southerners rallying to support what became known as the Ford Plan. But while some saw it as a way to conjure the future and reinvent the South, others saw it as one of the biggest land swindles of all time. They were all true. Electric City is a rich chronicle of the time and the social backdrop, and offers a fresh look at the lives of the two men who almost saw the project to fruition, the forces that came to oppose them, and what rose in its stead: a new kind of public corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal. This is a history for a wide audience, including readers interested in American history, technology, politics, and the future.

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There's just all over the Internet. Just search for Chris Voss or the Chris Voss Show. You can find us as well as goodreads.com. Fortunately, that's Chris Voss. You can see everything we're reading and reviewing over there today. On the podcast, we have a most excellent author. He's the author of about a dozen books. A dozen! I'm still trying to write my first one. Thomas Hager is on the show with us today. He has a new book out, May 18, 2021. This baby just came off the presses. Electric City, The Lost History of Ford and Edison's American Utopia.

So you can check that out, order it up where fine books are sold. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor,i-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and mqa files we're using in the studio right now i've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices

at ifi-audio.com. Thomas is on the show with us. Welcome, Thomas. How are you? Thank you. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. I have a website at thomashager.net that I update occasionally. And, but if you, you know, if you just put my name into the browser, Thomas Hager, you'll come up with links to other stuff, reviews and speeches and video and all kinds of stuff. There you go. There you go. So what genre do you usually write in on your books or let's or this one i'm a non-fiction writer so i write uh my my specialty is science writing and medical writing so i was trained as a uh scientist years and years and years ago um i went to graduate school in medical

microbiology i was i wanted to learn how to fight viruses. That was my specialty. And maybe I should have stuck with it. Yeah, we could have used you. But it just wasn't for me. Laboratory work wasn't my cup of tea. I was too interested in too many things. So I stopped short of getting my PhD and went back to journalism school to learn how to write and writing about science ever since. It turned out to be a good a good fit for me there you go there you go so what motivated you to write this book this book electric city is a little bit different for me it's a um it is a book that came about by accident we can go into that story a little later if you want to, but it's a little less

science and a little more American history than I usually do. And I stumbled across this story when I was working on another book. And I got fascinated with, I just got fascinated with the story. I got fascinated with the characters, these larger-than-life characters in the book. Henry Ford, the guy who started the Ford Motor Company, invented the Model T, was the richest man in the world. Well, he's certainly the richest man in America in the 1920s, Henry Ford, and then his buddy, his friend Thomas Edison, who was the greatest inventor in the world at the time. These two geniuses, people used to call them the twin wizards. They were probably the two of the most admired people in the United States in the 1920s. They got together and they decided that they were going to do their masterwork for their life. They were going to build this giant utopia in the middle of the Tennessee River Valley in northern Alabama. Basically, for most Americans, not the good folks of Alabama, but for most Americans, kind of the middle of nowhere, they were going to turn this area, which was one of the poorest parts of the country, into a shining modern city powered with renewable energy and funded with a new kind of currency. They were letting their imaginations run wild,

and they were going to create a new model for a new kind of American society. This project never happened. They never brought it to fruition. And I wondered about why and got fascinated with the characters, and I ended up with the book. That's interesting. They're kind of like the Elon Musk of the 1920s or something at that point. There's a lot of parallel.

There's a lot of parallel. Henry Ford is kind of a forgotten. Yeah, everybody knows the name Henry Ford, but most people don't know much about him. This guy was an American phenomenon. He was unbelievable. And in some ways, he makes Elon Musk look like a second string. He's, you know, Henry Ford was the real deal. Yeah. So what gets them interested in going out to this area of the country to do this? And

how does the story lay out? Well, the action of the story takes place in the years right after World War I in the United States. So, you know, the World War I ended in 1918. And at the time, the end of that war marked this turning point for the United States. We had never really been involved in a major European war like that before. We went in late in World War I, and our abilities, our men and our interest in machinery and our weaponry ended up helping win the war for the Allies at that time, the, you know, for France and England. And we defeated Germany and Austria-Hungary. That was a huge step forward for the United States. We were, that was like our entry into the world stage to a great extent. So we're in this special place. At the same time, when that war ended,

there was a huge pandemic. It was the Spanish flu at that time. And the Spanish flu ranked up there with what we're fighting now with the coronavirus in terms of having an impact on people's lives. It was a tremendous blow. Right after we put all this energy into the war. We got hit with this pandemic. And America was kind of back on its heels a little bit. In 1918, 1919, we were suffering. And the economy was taking a while to get going again. People were hungry. People were looking going again. People were hungry. People were looking for work. People were wondering what was going to happen next.

And that was the scene in which Henry Ford and Thomas Edison came out and devised this new vision for the United States, this new way of building a modern, technologically advanced society that was also all-American at its core. And it was a genius move. It was really good timing. What they did was they looked around. There were a lot of government projects that had been war-related. The government had put a lot of money into building factories to make, you know, guns and gunpowder and all this stuff they needed to fight World War I. And then the war was over pretty fast after we got into it. And America was stuck with all these half-finished projects. It had put this government money into all these factories, a lot of which were never finished.

But they'd been started, and a lot of money had gone into these projects. One of the biggest, in fact, probably money-wise, the biggest single project the government had during that war was to build two giant factories in northern Alabama. The factories were put in northern Alabama to keep them far away from the chance of any invading army getting to them. They wanted something inland, inland in the United States, but on good water. They decided to pick a spot on the Tennessee River, build these enormous factories. They were among the major engineering achievements of that era. And they were made to build, they were built to make armaments. They were munitions factories, basically. They made

the raw materials that went into gunpowder and explosives. So these two giant plants were started, and the government started building an enormous dam across the Tennessee River to power the factories. All of this stuff was unfinished when the war ended. The war stopped, and all the money dried up. There was no more government money to finish the plants. And they were sitting there, you know, they're rusting. They're in the middle of nowhere.

There's a dam that's about half finished. The factories that never produced anything. But millions of dollars had gone into them. Henry Ford took a look at that and said, hey, I could use that stuff. You know, what I could do is I'll make a deal with the government. I'll take all this stuff off the government's hands. Government doesn't want it anymore. And I'll use it for building a new kind of society. It's like there's all this power that's possible by damming the river. You

can make all this electricity with this giant dam government started, but didn't finish. If we can finish that dam and we can get these factories up and running again, we can use that as the start of a new kind of city. And then he dreamed up this new kind of city with Thomas Edison. That's amazing. I know back then there were, there was all these, you see all these pictures and schematics that people were doing of trying to create like a new utopia of a city like you'd see like people in new york running around in little cars and stuff for something little box things and and you know they were stacked and parking was you know they saw this and it seemed like that was kind of the thing back then to create new utopia sort of thing

it was i mean it's been an american thing forever. You know, Americans are always looking for utopia. The religious utopias or political utopias or whatever, ecological utopias. Americans are like that. We're always looking for that stuff. So in that way, I think Ford and Edison were right in line with the factors that drive Americans. You mentioned these drawings and, and, you know, kind of sci-fi type things that people were thinking about in the twenties. And it's true. It's important to remember that during that period, America was also changing from being an agricultural nation to being an

industrial nation, right at that hinge point there. When we were, everybody's moving off the farm and moving into cities and working in factories. One of the biggest industries, well, the biggest industry at that time for machinery was the automobile industry. Henry Ford built that industry. He created the modern automobile industry single-handed. Before Henry Ford, cars were like handmade toys for rich people. They were super expensive. You know, regular folks couldn't afford a car.

They couldn't even dream about having a car. And Henry Ford came in and said, okay, I'm going to figure out a way to make a car that's really cheap and really reliable and will be affordable by working people in the United States and by farmers in the United States. And it'll be tough enough to run on the crappy roads we have in the United States. The roads, you know, were like dirt and rutted and horrible. People could drive a Model T across.

Well, what he invented was a car called the Model T. The Model T was Ford's genius invention. And he figured out a way to make it so that it would, it costs like $500. It was like something that people could reasonably expect to afford. The Model T was super tough and became the best-selling car in the world in the years just before World War One. Made Henry Ford fabulously wealthy. His factories went up in Detroit, Michigan. He turned Detroit, Michigan into Motor City and created the really created the whole mechanism for modern automobiles. He created the sales point. He created the whole mechanism for modern automobiles. He created the sales point.

He created the market for it. He devised the dealership things that happened. He was a genius. He was just a brilliant guy. Guy had a sixth grade education. He was basically a self-made man who was a genius at what he did. And so he made all this money and he was going to take the idea of the automobile, which he invented really. And he was going to take that the next step, this city

that I write about the electric city, um, was going to be his way of incorporating automobiles into American life and giving workers, sort of like devising a way of life built around automobiles and electricity. He was way ahead of his time. The city that he devised was different than other cities. He had his factories in Detroit and he employed so many people so fast

that the cities grew really fast. And what he saw was his workers living in slums and tenements. And he saw an increase in crime and vice. And he didn't want any of that. He didn't want that. What he wanted was a way for his workers at his factories to live kind of the way he was brought up. He was a farm boy. You know, he didn't want to work on the farm. He loved machinery, but he really loved the kind of the lifestyle of people who worked in rural America. He was very nostalgic for this vanished America. Green, you know, with a church at one end and a few businesses at the other and a lot of farms, everybody prosperous, but in a green place at a, you know, not a dirty big city. Create that on a massive scale.

And that was the idea he came up with. And instead of having a single concentrated city, he was going to have every worker in a car driving down a smooth modern highway to an electrically powered small factory where they would work. But every worker in this new city would also have five acres or 10 acres or 20 acres to live on and farm. The farmers part-time, they would bring in a crop. He was going to rent them farm machinery and provide them with people to teach them how to farm so that they could afford to put in a crop every year, farm it the most modern way possible. You didn't have to spend a lot of time. You just use tractors instead of doing it by hand. And the rest of the time they'd work in a factory. They'd get time off to do their farm work. They'd get time on again to work in their factory and they could make money. So they'd have a combination of this perfect life. It'd be part old-fashioned rural and part newfangled, all-electric, modern urban. But the urban side would be a string of small towns connected by roads. Everybody drove to where they wanted to go.

Everything was transported in this modern way. Everything was powered by renewable energy. And he thought that this combination, if he could pull it off, this would be a model for the world. Because at the time, everybody was worried, you know, that people still are worried, I guess, about communism and socialism. You know, at the time, labor unrest was a huge thing in cities in the 1920s. He wanted to give his workers a lifestyle where they wouldn't be tempted by socialism. They would have the best of what America could offer. It would be a new model for everybody. Wow. And we're going to refer to this as the Detroit of the South. Is that correct? Newspaper people called it that. Okay. But he didn't want Detroit. He wanted the opposite of Detroit.

He wanted this city to be something completely new. It was enormous in scope. He thought that he would have a string of these cities 75 miles long along the river, powered by a series of dams and employing a million workers that would work basically every aspect of anything that he needed, he could get out of that region. He could pull iron out of the hills or aluminum ore. He could smelt it in his factories. He could take the metal, send it to other factories to be fashioned into car parts, send it to other factories to be fashioned into car parts, send those to other factories to be fashioned into cars. He was going to create essentially a single factory 75 miles long. The guy was just like his imagination was unfettered.

That's just crazy. And so him and Edison were going to work together on the whole project, design it, build it, and all that good stuff? They were. Ford was the main force, but his good buddy was Thomas Edison. I tell their story of their relationship in the book. Thomas Edison was sort of a senior figure at the time. He was older than Ford. And he had already made his reputation by inventing the electric light and the phonograph and early movies.

All that stuff was Thomas Edison. He was changing America in his own way, but he was a big believer in electricity for power. And he chimed in with Ford on this powering it with renewable energy from the river and having everything be electric. Both Ford and Edison hated coal power. They thought coal power was dirty. Everything was powered by coal. All the industries were coal-driven at that time. They hated coal power because it was dirty.

You know, the cities were grimy and the air was foul. And they wanted to have everything be clean and this you know this vision of a green clean america yeah and they were pushing for renewable energy and a place free of air pollution how did that tie into like his model t's because they were you know combustible engines well people at the time you know this is 1920s and people at the time didn't know that gas engines caused pollution. Yeah, it's coal. You know, the focus was on coal, so obviously dirty. And they used so much more.

The gas engine was a rarity at that time. Even with his Model Ts starting to catch on, gasoline-powered automobiles were not the thing they became yet they were they were still you know an unusual item nobody worried about pollution from the cars yeah and was the renewal energy the dam then yeah the day it was uh it turned out to be a series of dams there was a dam that the government was building. It was a giant. It was a mile long. It's there today. You can walk across it. It's called Wilson Dam. Northern Alabama. Wilson Dam was a way to tap the power of the river to make enormous amounts of electricity, like so much electricity that nobody could figure out how to use it. They were going to flood the area with electricity. Thomas Edison could see how that could be used, but most

people couldn't. At the time, electricity was also a rarity. 90% of the farms in the area around this proposed city had no electricity, and people weren't used to using electricity. They were a little suspicious of electricity. But Edison saw a new age coming that was going to be electrical in nature. And he saw this giant dam as the starting point for a new era. He was going to, but he and Ford dreamed up a series of several dams. It was going to be the government dam first, and then two, three more, four, five, up the river, more dams. Eventually, their plan went south. I tell that story. It got stopped by the government. And in its place, the government took their best, a lot of their ideas, took Ford's best ideas and Edison's best ideas,

and ended up putting enormous amounts of money into a huge project to build more dams up the Tennessee River. It ended up being called the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was the biggest project of the New Deal in the 1930s that pulled america out of the depression the new deal uh finished the project that ford and edison dreamed up and it it now has a couple dozen dams up up and down the tennessee river producing electricity and it's changed that area yeah most definitely so do you want to give us any insight or teasers to, to kind of how things went awry or what it ended up being in the end? One of my favorite people was involved in stopping Henry Ford. Not everybody loved Henry. Henry Ford

was a beloved guy at the time. He, he was a genius at publicity along with everything else. And he put out this folksy, you know, he was, like I said, he had sixth grade education, came out of the farm. And that's a good starting point for being, you know, well thought of in America at that time. He had this very direct folksy way of speaking common language that Americans can understand. And he hated Wall Street and bankers, which is another thing Americans identify with. And so he had this persona in the media. Media loved him. They could go to him for quotes and he'd tell them something funny or salty or whatever. He was in the newspaper a lot. And everybody in America sort of developed this affectionate attitude. They called him Uncle Henry.

Uncle Henry gave them the Model T. Uncle Henry spoke truth to power. Uncle Henry was going to develop this new way of living and save the South. You know, he's going to take this backward, economically undeveloped area, and he was going to turn it into a shining city. Uncle Henry was beloved, but not by everybody uh he gave you know he came up with this plan he was going to basically cheap out on the government give him next to nothing for the dam and have the government finish the dam for him and then he would lease it from the government

and give him the factories for basically nothing and then he would do it from the government and give him the factories for basically nothing. And then he would do the rest. Right. And, and it was to everybody's benefit because what was the government going to do? They weren't, they weren't going to finish them. Well, the guy in the government, there was one guy, my hero, the guy's name is George Norris. He was an aging Senator from a nowhere state. He was the senior senator from Nebraska. George Norris decided he didn't like Henry Ford. George Norris was an old-style populist. He came out of prairie populism, it was called. He was a guy who believed that farmers should be protected against banks and railroads. That was his background. Well, he saw Henry Ford as a plutocrat, as a guy who was an industrialist who wanted to get a cheap deal and build his personal empire in the middle of America that basically was paid for by the government.

He wasn't going to give the government much back. What he was going to do, what Henry Ford was going to do in Norris's view was take credit for everything. And Norris saw him as dangerous. So Norris set out to stop him, this one guy, and he gathered supporters around him and he found collaborators who were wary about Henry Ford, especially bankers and people on Wall Street who didn't like Henry Ford any more than Henry Ford liked them. And they developed an effective opposition to the Henry Ford idea. The Henry Ford idea came very close to happening. It was like, you know, it was within a whisker of getting passed by Congress. And he had a sympathetic president who would have signed off on it.

If Norris hadn't gotten his friends in the Senate to band together to stop Henry Ford, we would have had a 75 mile city. Wow. There would have been a Detroit of the South and it would be very interesting if that happened. It would, I speculate. That would be interesting. I know there was a point in Henry Ford's a career where they tried to take the company away from, I don't know if it was a shareholder thing or was it these

guys? They, they said, you know, you only have a sixth grade education. You shouldn't be running a public company. And they tried to seize the company from him and took him to court. That wasn't the same sort of attack? Yeah, that happened a little later. His son, there was a question about the succession of his company. He built this enormous company. It was a family company.

It was a private company, basically. And he ran it like a despot. It was a private company, basically. And he ran it like a despot. He was a one-man band. He was the guy in charge. And there was a real question about what would happen in the next generation, what would happen to the company, what would happen to all the workers in the factories once Henry Ford started to get older. He was starting to get older in the 1920s. You know, he was in his 60s when all this was taking place. And his interests, obviously, were moving from cars to wider fields. And the people around him were getting a little nervous.

But they didn't try and do anything about it until later. Henry Ford, later in life, sort of lost his mind a little bit. I mean, he didn't go crazy. I mean, that's a bad term, but he didn't, you know, he didn't lose touch with reality entirely, but he lost interest in the sort of the nuts and bolts day-to-day stuff to a certain extent. And there was a succession thing that happened.

Yeah, that's interesting. The important thing that happened with the, uh, this project was that it almost put Henry Ford into the white house. He, uh, he was going to run for president in the 1920s based on his success. Well, what he thought was going to be his success in this project on the Tennessee river, you know, and building this enormous city. He was getting a lot of support from people all across the middle of America, all through the Midwest, and especially in the South, which stood to be economically advantaged by his plans. He had enormous political support. And there were Henry Ford for president clubs that started springing up across the United States, more than 100 of them in different cities, spontaneously trying to trying to encourage him to run for president. He came closer than most people realized to becoming president.

It would have been interesting, too, because Henry Ford had not spent a day in public service in his life. He was an industrialist who was accustomed to being in charge. And as president, you know, you spend your time making deals and getting different compromises put together, making stuff forward. There's a lot of talking and a lot of waiting when you're president. Henry Ford would have been a terrible president. It would have been awful, but he came very close to being president. Wow.

And so this was a springboard for that then. He figured that once he built this thing, it would be like right in there. For a variety of reasons. It would have given him enormous political clout if he'd have gotten this through. And that may have been another factor in why the government decided to stop him. The very controversial section of the book deals with why Henry Ford dropped out. He eventually dropped his bid for developing this

area. He did it under very mysterious circumstances. He dropped his bid in what appears to be, and I think it was, he made a deal with the president of the United States. And the president of the United States didn't want Henry Ford running for president. And Henry Ford didn't really want to be president that much. You know, he liked his company and stuff, but he also wanted to build his city. There was a secret deal that was reported on at the time as kind of a scandal in which Henry Ford visited the president. At that time, it was Calvin Coolidge in the White House, and the two of them struck a deal. And the deal was, if Henry Ford dropped out of his run for president, the president would put his power

behind getting Henry Ford a deal in Congress to get his city built. That was the deal. The deal fell through for various reasons, but the reason that Henry Ford didn't get to be president in relation to this city, Ford didn't get to be president, my relation to this city. Wow.

That's crazy, man. I never heard of this project in all the history lessons. So it's great that you've shined a light on this and brought it to the forefront. I had not heard about it either, which is part of the reason I was fascinated with it. Yeah. So do you have diagrams and different pictures or anything in the book that people can take a look at there are uh there are illustrations in the book that show the people the area and the players in the book one interesting thing to me was you know i was

thinking well you know henry ford did all this work right on on designing the city thinking about a lot of detail work about how the cities would be laid out and so forth. And so I kept looking for blueprints, you know, where's, okay, where's the diagrams? Henry Ford had engineers. He had, he was building enormous factories. Anyway, he should have had a huge backlog of information. And there are eyewitness accounts that he did. There were a lot of meetings held at the Ford company. There were a lot of discussions. Supposedly there were a lot of documents. None of them. Well, very few of them are available publicly. Wow.

There's a real question in my mind about what happened to those documents. What is the question or what is the answer? The answer is, I mean, in my view, it's a Henry Ford archives. I spent a week at the Ford archives. They have a wonderful library and a wonderful historical repository for many of the papers. Most of the executive papers are secret though, because it's a private archive. It's not a public archive. It's not like, you know, the national archives in the, in the government, you don't have access to it as a researcher.

So I worked every angle I could think of to find out what happened to those papers. A lot after Ford was out of power and his, well, his son Edsel didn't take over. His son Edsel died young. But Henry Ford II took over, and there was a house cleaning that happened. There were a lot of things that the Ford company doesn't want, I think, wouldn't benefit from having in the public domain. And there may be parts of this story that did not reflect well on Henry Ford, like this secret deal with Coolidge or, you know, some of the ways that political arm twisting was done when he was trying to get his... Anyway, I couldn't find diagrams there are some

there are a lot of illustrations in the book wow this sounds like an amazing story to take and read uh anything we haven't touched on that you want to tease out in the book i mean we could tell everybody about the whole book at this pace but uh anything you want to tease out to get people to pick up the book no well i'll tell you i. I think it's a book that would be of interest in anyone, for any readers who are interested in kind of how America got to be what it is. The interesting thing to me was all these resonances, you know, these echoes of what they were dealing with 100 years ago with Henry Ford's bid and today. And one of the big ones, I think, is this tension

between kind of who should we have in charge in America? Should it be private, like business people, or should it be public politicians? You know, that's a very simplistic way of looking at this dynamic, but it's kind of there. And it's there in American history going way back. In the 1920s, this Ford bid was all about that. It was about, he said, I'm the best guy to like turn this part of the country around and build something grand and new. That's me, Henry Ford.

I'm the guy who can get it done. And a lot of Americans believed he was. The government came in and said, no, we think we're the best people to get it done because we a lot of Americans believed he was. The government came in and said, no, we think we're the best people to get it done because we'll do it for the people. We won't do it for private good to make Henry Ford rich. We'll do it for the public good. And that's what they did through the Tennessee Valley Authority. They really thought not just about industrializing the area, but about flood control and about access to public facilities for fishing, for public parks, for the public as a whole to benefit from this. And they angled it that way. But the same question exists now.

You know, you see it all the time, public discussions. Who's the smartest? Where's the expertise? Who are the smartest guys, public or private? And so anyway, that part was interesting. That is awesome. This is going to be a fun read for people because I love looking at those old schematics they used to build and some of the different ideas they had.

And some of it, you know, I saw a 1960s video the other day of like someday you'll have a phone that fits in your pocket and flips open and you can talk to people on the screen. And you're just like, wow, man, they weren't 60 years off, 50 years off or 40 years off. I don't know. Believe me, that's where my head's in the same place i uh people you know we live in this society we're like surrounded by technology and we kind of forget that there was a time when it didn't exist you know oh yeah life was different and all that stuff was like in the sky it was like sci-fi yeah We made choices during that period long ago. We made choices that led us to where we are today,

and now we take it for granted. We can't imagine life without all the phones that fit in our pockets or whatever. Every time I try and explain a record player or a phone booth to a millennial, they just look at me with their eyes glazed over. So, Thomas, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Give us your plugs as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you in order of the book. Yeah, sure.

Just put my name into a search engine or do thomashager.net. The new book is out from Abrams. Abrams Press, my favorite publisher, and they did a terrific job in producing. It's got a beautiful cover. It certainly does. I like it. It has that fun sort of old-timey feel to it, you know, the old poster.

So thanks for coming on the show, Thomas. We really appreciate you coming by. Pleasure, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks to you. And thanks, Manas, for coming by as well. Pick up the book at all your fine retailers. The book, Sales, Electric City,

The Lost History of Ford and Edison's American Utopia. It should be a great read, an interesting read, especially those of you who are kind of science buffs, I think. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. See us on all the groups on, what is it, Facebook, LinkedIn, all that sort of good stuff. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.