Indusr* Industi* Industra* Industrializai* (for Industrial*)

My my, people appear to be rather industrious when it comes to misspelling today's word. Misspelling and typos for industrial shows up throughout the Ballard list on different levels in different spelling. The four I listed are just a few.

Speaking of industrial - in this case a huge industrial misstep - Henry Ford was sick of sharing profits from his cars with Goodyear and/or Firestone tires and decided to open his own rubber manufacturing plant in Brazil in 1928. But, like any good colonialist, just producing the rubber wasn't enough. Henry built himself a town which he christened Fordlandia. Not only was it a self-contained company town, it also followed the American lifestyle of consuming hamburgers and not consuming alcohol. One wonders if prohibition would been repealed there as it was here several years later. We'll never know as, unfortunately for Mr. Ford, the workers rebelled, chasing the managers into the jungle until they were rescued by Brazilian army.

Ford tried opening another plant in a different part of Brazil, but between blight and the invention of synthetic rubber in 1945, his industrial Utopian ideal dried up and the land was sold at a loss of $20 million. (Eh, probably needed the tax write-off anyway.)

For more information, you can read about Fordlandia in fiction, non-fiction, a French comic book, or hear an orchestral piece named after it. You industrial types will have plenty of time do your research before the movie comes out next year.

(Still taken from the in-public-domain film Man with a Movie Camera directed by Dziga Vertov - 1929. Sorry for any confusion - it has nothing to do with Fordlandia or Henry Ford, I just like the industrial look of the photo.)

Brian Dahlvig