Every month, we feature a video from Film Source, The Henry Ford’s online collection of historic motion picture films shorts. The films were originally produced by Henry Ford’s motion picture department at Ford Motor Company, which began in 1914. These clips illustrate the impact of the automobile, industrial manufacturing and design, and many other aspects of American culture and everyday life, as well as glimpses of Henry Ford and his family and activities and scenes from Greenfield Village and The Henry Ford Museum. Staff at the Benson Ford Research Center continue to digitize, catalog, and upload more of these clips to our online catalog and to YouTube in order to make them accessible to a wider audience.
In honor of Thanksgiving, this month’s video is a portion of “Harvest of the Years,” produced circa 1938. One of the longer clips in our collection, and one of the few produced with sound, it showcases the spectrum of automobile production, from raw materials to finished product and testing, with a focus on activities of the Rouge River Plant, from the production of raw materials such as steel and glass through to assembly. Design and testing are also given a look. Pervading the film is an emphasis on looking ahead to a better future aided by ever-advancing scientific and industrial progress—a dominant attitude of the time, and indeed one which sometimes lends itself to parody today. On a more serious note, perhaps striking for today’s viewers is the degree of recovery and reuse of waste materials in practice—something not so common in that era, but implemented at Ford primarily due to Henry Ford’s abhorrence of waste (which Ford Bryan discusses at various points in his book Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford). One famous example of by-product reuse, although not mentioned in the film, is Ford’s charcoal briquettes, originally produced from wood waste generated at its Kingsford plant in Northern Michigan. Also noteworthy, despite its ad-copy hyperbole, is the mention of the accumulation and sharing of knowledge for the betterment all of humankind–an ideal we see mirrored in the nobler of our online aspirations today. No matter what their origins, these ideas and practices of efficiency, quality, waste reduction, and reuse can certainly continue to inspire.
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