Imagine Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos piling into a fleet of Elon Musk's self-driving Teslas one summer week on a pilgrimage to the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif. People line the interstates to watch the cavalcade hum by. Vloggers breathlessly record its progress on Facebook and Instagram while TV news helicopters hover overhead. The travelers pause in Omaha, Neb., where Warren Buffett offers them Cherry Cokes, See's Candies and investment tips. Donald Trump lampoons them on Twitter as “Tech Bozos.”
That would be today's equivalent of the summer road trips that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford made in the early decades of the 20th century. They were among the paramount celebrities of the day, especially the rumpled Edison, who had invented the phonograph, incandescent light bulbs and the generators to power them, and an early movie camera. Ford, who as a race driver set an automobile speed record of 91.37 mph in 1904, was the father of the revolutionary Model T's that rolled off the assembly line at his Dearborn, Mich., plant. He had become beloved to many Americans in 1914 when he doubled wages to $5 a day at his plant—$129 in today's money—and cut the workday to eight hours. He ran for the U.S. Senate from Michigan and once hoped to run for president.
Jeff Guinn, who usually specializes in true-crime narratives, tells the story of their adventures on the road in “The Vagabonds.” An amiable and inconsequential book, it belongs on the shelf with tales of other American oddities, like the saga of Edward Payson Weston, who walked across America in 1909 to great acclaim.
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