A Secret History of Brands

by A Secret History of Brands- The Dark

  One might assume that the countless headlines in newspapers and online after the event would highlight the lesser-known public fact that Hugo F. Boss was a member of the Nazi party, but instead there was a collective outrage over the nerve of Russell Brand for bringing up the tender subject of the company’s sketchy history: ‘Why Russell Brand’s Nazi barbs didn’t go over well with Hugo Boss’, ‘Why Russell Brand Made A Controversial Nazi Joke About Hugo Boss‘, ‘Russell Brand stuns GQ Men Of The Year audience with Nazi rant and salute’ and ‘Russell Brand “thrown out of GQ after-party” for offensive Nazi jibes about event sponsors Hugo Boss’.

  Apparently the joke was so poorly received by the sponsors of the event that GQ editor Dylan Jones personally kicked Brand out of the after-show party. This isn’t terribly surprising, considering that the Hugo Boss company had donated a whopping £250,000 to throw the event. Russell Brand later posted the following recount of the event on his official Twitter account: GQ editor: ‘What you did was very offensive to Hugo Boss.’ Me: ‘What Hugo Boss did was very offensive to the Jews.’ #GQAwards #nazitailor

  GQ Magazine wasn’t done with punishing Brand. They went on to erase all mention of him in their ‘Men of the Year’ issue, where Brand had been planned as a focal point. In expected fashion, Russell Brand tweeted the following in retort:

  ‘GQ cleansed me from their issue. That’s what they do when they don’t like something. I guess that’s why they dig the Nazis’.

  Chapter Three

  Henry Ford: The Jewish Conspiracy

  There are several well-known car brands in our world today, but probably none that have the historical significance and reputation of the Ford Motor Company. Founder Henry Ford rose from an engineer to the sole manufacturer of the first mass-produced and affordable automobile. Today, the Ford brand lives on as an icon in the industry, but there was more than one side to the engineering genius that was Henry Ford. He held some very positive social views, that the common people should be able to afford their own automobile for example, and in many ways he was a generous family man and philanthropist. Unfortunately, he was also rabidly anti-Semitic, convinced that there was an international Jewish conspiracy that had the aim of taking down America. Ford’s views would become so radical and so highly circulated that they would even find their way as far as Hitler and his vicious Nazi Party in pre-Second World War Germany. Henry Ford is one of a handful of people from the past century who changed the world. The delicate balance of greatness and madness continue to define Ford’s legacy to this day.

  The History of the Automobile

  Since the days of prehistory, the primary modes of transportation had been some combination of horses pulling a carriage. The roots of this transport can be traced back to the Celts and the ancient Mesopotamians. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that the tide began to finally turn. The end of the nineteenth century saw human inspiration at an all-time high and various kinds of motorised transportation began to emerge. The true automobile surge came in America after the turn of the twentieth century, when Henry Ford began to revolutionise the means and standards of production in his factories. This may be an important point in history, but it is also important to understand the long journey that the automobile took to get there, in order to appreciate the full impact that Ford made, not only on the marketplace, but on society itself.

  The world has always been vast and wild and the question of how to best travel efficiently from one area to another has often been the subject of thought and innovation. Humans have been utilising horse and carriage combinations for thousands of years.

  The use of horses was still the most efficient answer to the concern of travel, both local and long distances, until the eighteenth century. The old ways of travel may have sustained the world at the time, but using a horse-drawn carriage brought its own difficulties. A horse requires rest, food, water, husbandry, and care; to properly maintain a horse can be both expensive and time consuming. Naturally, when a more efficient mode of transportation was on the horizon, the days of the horse and buggy were numbered.

  One of the early pioneers of the automobile industry hailed from Paris, France, in the commune Boulogne-Billancourt in the western suburbs. Louie Renault spent long hours working in his father’s tool shed, until one fateful Christmas Eve in 1898. That day, Louis Renault finished his automobile. He had saved money from his time in the military, so that he could purchase a De-Dion three-wheeler and modified it into a four-wheeler. The De-Dion was a motor-powered tricycle, but the addition of the fourth wheel drastically changed the landscape of motorised vehicles. The Renault was able to climb hills easily and could speed along efficiently, with no clanking belts or chains. Louie drove it to a Christmas party in order to show it off. The partygoers were quite impressed and they ordered a whopping twenty-four cars on the spot.

  Louis was ready to go into business for himself. With his brothers, he established the Renault Frères Company and they manufactured automobiles on their family land in Billancourt. The older brothers handled the business side of things, while Louie dedicated his time to the design and manufacturing angle of the company. Sixty of the Renault vehicles were sold over six months. To purchase a Renault cost well over $1,000 (approximately $27,000 in 2016 or £21,500, which made it rather expensive for the average consumer of the era. The brothers were smart with their profits and reinvested their money into the business. Within a few years, they managed to double the size of the business and employ over one hundred people. Louis was a demanding perfectionist, but he expected excellence from himself as well as his employees. The Renaults were able to obtain various achievements in auto racing, which had become a popular attraction at the turn of the century amongst the well-off Parisians.

  In the 1901 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris car race the Renaults won the first four places. In the Paris-Berlin race, the first three places, and in 1902 Marcel Renault won against Mercedes and Panhard. The many achievements gained by the Renaults provided their vehicles with a good amount of prestige and popularity throughout France. In 1903, tragedy struck when Marcel Renault was killed after losing control of his race car, but the company continued to move forward despite the loss of one brother, with Louis taking on more responsibilities. Louis continued to develop new ideas and one of those was to adapt their automobile to better fit the lives of the consumer.

  In 1904 they released a roomier vehicle that comfortably seated four passengers. It was a move that would pave the way to the future of the company, for it was the following year that their business model would suddenly change. A Paris taxi company put in an order to Renault for a whopping 250 automobiles. Three years later the company had sold over 1,000 taxis around Europe. Renault soon became the largest auto producer in France, selling over 3,000 vehicles. Louis began to create models for specific sections of society, everything from an economy two cylinder, two-seater car, to a Coupe de Ville and a limousine for luxury.

  In 1886 German Karl Benz introduced his Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which is often regarded as the first modern automobile, but it would be Gottlieb that first brought his design to America. In 1888 Gottlieb Daimler and Steinway & Sons came to a distribution agreement that would bring Daimler vehicles to the United States of America. The first American-made car was the Duryea automobile, built by the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in 1893. The open-air car featured a gasoline-powered one-cylinder engine.

  Ransom Olds was also experimenting during the time that Henry Ford was beginning to work with motor carriages. A fire destroyed the Olds factory in 1901 and only a curved-dash model vehicle survived. Olds used the remaining car as a prototype and through some strategic subcontracting he managed to produce over 400 cars that year. The Oldsmobile was designed for a larger consumer base, not just the wealthy. It was extremely economical and sturdy.

  Henry Ford entered the marketplace with his vehicles in 1908, but automakers quickly encountered an issue, thanks to the Seldin patent. George B. Seldin was a patent attorney that h
ad the ingenious idea of getting a patent on all gasoline-powered vehicles, so it become impossible for anyone to produce a gas-powered vehicle without paying a healthy royalty to Seldin. This hiccup was nothing more than an annoyance and didn’t stop the industry from experiencing plenty of growth. Henry Ford would challenge the Seldin monopoly in court and in 1911 he won his final victory over it, freeing all automakers from the confines of Seldin’s patent.

  The automobile began to change from a novelty item for the wealthy into a viable transportation option for the ordinary citizen, thanks to the efforts of Henry Ford. Slowly, but surely the streets were becoming filled with noisy cars rather than horse drawn carriages. There was a new enthusiasm in developing motorised vehicles as a means of transport for all. There were more than eight million cars on the road by 1926, and by 1929 forty-five million Americans were using cars as a means to vacation across the country. The number of service stations would increase tenfold throughout the 1920s, along with roadside restaurants and motels. Los Angeles, California, was the first major city to be built around the use of the car and helped to develop a ‘car culture’ that would spread across the nation.

  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the car allowed families to escape the dustbowl by heading out West in search of a new life. The car was such an important part of American life that by the 1930s, citizens owned more cars than either telephones or bathtubs. The roads began to get paved and citizens were put to work, building bridges and tunnels to accommodate the intense growth of traffic on the roads. The 1939 World’s Fair was centred largely around the automobile industry, with several major companies showing off their new innovations and advances. The start of the Second World War halted the progress of the car for a time, but not before Henry Ford revolutionised the industry.

  Henry Ford’s Early Life and Career

  Henry Ford was born on 30 July 1863, in Greenfield Township, Michigan. The son of farmers, he never completed the eighth grade, but from a young age Henry showed a serious interest in the then modern study of mechanics. His parents supported his ambitions by constructing a workbench for him in the already cramped kitchen. Henry spent a lot of time at his workbench, tinkering and teaching himself all about how things worked. Life on the farm was very isolating to Ford and this gave him a great perspective later in life on the need for affordable transportation for the common person and how the new idea of a horseless carriage could transform the world.

  Ford worked as a machinist throughout his twenties, until he got the opportunity to work for Thomas Edison. Henry Ford began his career as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company in 1891, where he rose to the rank of Chief Engineer in 1893. It was during this time that Ford would experiment with gasoline engines and self-propelled horseless carriages, such as his quadricycle. Ford eventually crossed paths with Edison himself in 1896 and was given encouragement to move forward with a second vehicle. Ford launched his quadricycle and tested it around Detroit on 4 June, 1896. The horseless carriage featured 28in bicycle wheels, no brakes, and could reach top speeds of up to 20mph. The quadricycle wasn’t quite the vehicle Ford envisioned and had a few major flaws, such as the inability to go in reverse and a propensity to overheat.

  Ford decided that it was time to branch out on his own and on 5 August, 1899, he founded the Detroit Automobile Company. He began to produce automobiles, backed by Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy. America had the railroads, but other transportation methods were terribly inconvenient. During this time an automobile-manufacturing boom hit the city and over fifty more companies sprung up that same year, with more to follow the next year. The majority of these companies would inevitably fail. The Detroit Automobile Company produced cars for two years, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Ford attributed this to a poor quality product that was overpriced. Henry Ford was beginning to form a vision for the automobile industry and it required him to have more control over all aspects of production.

  The next venture that Ford undertook was far more successful, but in order to attract backers he had to do something bold. Ford built a race car in secret to help build publicity for himself. On 10 October 1901, Ford took on famous racing driver Alexander Winston in a one-on-one sweepstakes race. Ford had no money or reputation to hire a real driver, so he put himself behind the wheel. It was a risky venture, to be sure, but Henry Ford was never afraid to take the risks necessary to succeed. He also didn’t fear the potential failure; in fact it seemed to drive him on. On the sixth lap, Ford closed the gap and his rival’s engine overheated; Ford won by nearly a mile. It was as a result of this spectacle that Ford was able to forge the Ford Motor Company.

  The journey started with Ford & Malcomson Ltd., which was a partnership he formed with coal dealer Alexander Y. Malcomson. The two leased a factory and made a deal with the Dodge Brothers, John and Horace, and Ford began work on designing his inexpensive automobile. After some shifting around of investors, the company would be rebranded on 16 June 1903 as the Ford Motor Company. Ford managed to get the then famous racing driver, Barney Oldfield, to drive his Ford 999 model across the country, which is what it took to get a brand recognised at the turn of the twentieth century. Ford would also find good promotion in backing the early days of the Indianapolis 500 race in the coming years. The Ford Model N was introduced to the marketplace and sold for two years from 1906 for a price of $600 ($15,127.50 in today’s terms). The relative success of this car emboldened Ford and he went back to work, developing an even better model for the masses.

  Henry Ford was driven, and sure of his own vision, but not everyone felt the same way. He duped backers by producing parts for cars he never intended to build. Ford used their money and time instead to work on perfecting his magnum opus, the Model T. He had no time for investors or their ideas, in fact he blamed the investors for the past issues he had had. Ford harboured a hatred for the rich and for his own investors.

  In 1907 Henry Ford walled off a corner of his factory, wide enough only for the chassis of a car. There was one door that remained locked at all times. Ford put his engineers and team in the secret room to have them develop a new suspension system and engine. Ford himself wasn’t shy about getting his hands dirty and worked side by side with his men. His passion and drive took centre stage, far above any position or prestige that he held at the time. It wasn’t until later in life that his ego would inflate to a dangerous level.

  Ford kept introducing new car models into the marketplace. The Model K was too heavy and expensive, the Model N was lighter, but had an engine in four pieces instead of one block. He kept working his way through the automobile alphabet, working towards the T, where he would finally realise his vision for the people’s automobile, something that would connect the country and close the gaps in society.

  In October of 1908, after two years of intense development, the Ford Model T would emerge. The car featured new innovations such as a four-cylinder twenty horsepower engine, a much-improved transmission, and a magnetic generator that powered the ignition and lights. The Model T also featured an open top design at first, with an optional add-on cover. The original colour scheme of the car was green, but that would soon change to only black. The Model T weighed 1,200lbs and could reach speeds of up to 40mph. The old horse-drawn carriages could take up to ten hours or more to travel forty miles, so the mobility that the Model T offered was vastly improved. Wells Fargo and Company was one of the more well known stagecoach companies that would transport people across the often dangerous territories, but even those could only travel an average of 5mph with teams of four to six horses. The official Wells Fargo website also adds that the drivers had to stop every twelve miles to change out the horses and every forty-five miles to allow the drivers and passengers to eat.

  It was with the introduction of the Model T in 1908 that Ford began to really solidify his position in the marketplace and in the history of the automobile in America. The Model T featured the very first left-side steering wheel, among other innovations t
hat made it the first mass-purchased automobile. The Model T helped to revolutionise the marketplace, primarily because it was so easy to drive and to repair. The four-cylinder vehicle would cost the consumer a whopping $825, which would presently translate to $20,392 (or £14,128) in today’s market. This was the first time that a mass market of consumers in America could actually afford their own automobile. Prior to that it was a privilege frill of the wealthy citizens, with the average cost of a vehicle running around $2,000, which is $53,225.79 (£42,189.75) in today’s money. The average annual salary in the United States at the time was only around $450, or about $10,000 (£7,900) today, so the price of a car made all the difference. ‘I’m going to democratise the automobile,’ Ford is said to have declared in 1909. ‘When I’m through, everybody will be able to afford one, and about everybody will have one.’ It was thanks to this great attitude towards the public that so many could finally realise their dreams of mobility. The Ford Model T gave the citizens the ability to travel outside of their own towns and opened up the country in a way that it hadn’t been previously. The added control it gave people over their lives and locations made a huge impact, but if automobiles were going to become the norm, they would need to keep dropping in price to meet the needs of the consumer. Not only did the price start low, but Ford kept dropping it year after year, bringing the cost of the basic touring car down to only $360, or $8,572 (£5,939) today. The sales rose to 472,000 units by 1914, making the Model T so prolific that most Americans of the era actually learned to drive in it.