When Henry Ford was starting out on his remarkable career in Detroit, a bustling town which gave full vent to the creative energies of some amazing innovators, the economy of was showing enormous cracks. But at the time, even the most prescient of fortune-tellers would have had trouble forecasting what was about to happen. Carriage and buggy-whip makers were still turning handsome profits in a growing market, and the few cars on the dusty, unpaved roads were little more than fanciful toys for the adventurous rich. Some of the communications technologies pioneered toward the end of the nineteenth century must have seemed just as esoteric to the leading financiers and industrialists of the day, wh