Read Online Big Money by John Dos Passos - Free Book Online

across town and was on the New York train. He had a letter in his pocket from Joe Askew telling him Joe would be in town to meet him. He had what was left of the three hundred berries Hedwig coughed up after deducting his board and lodging all winter at ten dollars a week. But on the New York train he stopped thinking about all that and about Emiscah and the mean time he’d had and let himself think about New York and airplane motors and Doris Humphries.
    When he woke up in the morning in the lower berth he pushed up the shade and looked out; the train was going through the Pennsylvania hills, the fields were freshplowed, some of the trees had a little fuzz of green on them. In a farmyard a flock of yellow chickens were picking around under a peartree in bloom. “By God,” he said aloud, “I’m through with the sticks.”

Newsreel XLVIII
    truly the Steel Corporation stands forth as a corporate colossus both physically and financially
    Â 
Now the folks in Georgia they done gone wild
Over that brand new dancin’ style
              
Called      Shake That Thing
    Â 
    CARBARNS BLAZE
    Â 
    GYPSY ARRESTED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
    Â 
    Horsewhipping Hastens Wedding
    Â 
    that strength has long since become almost a truism as steel’s expanding career progressed, yet the dimensions thereof need at times to be freshly measured to be caught in proper perspective
    Â 
    DAZED BY MAINE DEMOCRATS CRY FOR MONEY
    Â 
shake that thing
    Â 
    Woman of Mystery Tries Suicide in Park Lake
    Â 
    Â Â Â Â           
shake that thing
    Â 
    OLIVE THOMAS DEAD FROM POISON
    Â 
    LETTER SAID GET OUT OF WALL STREET
    Â 
    BOMB WAGON TRACED TO JERSEY
    Â 
Shake      That      Thing
    Â 
    Writer of Warnings Arrives
    Â 
    BODY FOUND LASHED TO BICYCLE
    Â 
    FIND BOMB CLOCKWORK

Tin Lizzie
    â€œ
Mr. Ford the automobileer
” the featurewriter wrote in 1900,
    â€œ
Mr. Ford the automobileer began by giving his steed three or four sharp jerks with the lever at the righthand side of the seat; that is, he pulled the lever up and down sharply in order, as he said, to mix air with gasoline and drive the charge into the exploding cylinder. . . . Mr. Ford slipped a small electric switch handle and there followed a puff, puff, puff. . . . The puffing of the machine assumed a higher key. She was flying along about eight miles an hour. The ruts in the road were deep, but the machine certainly went with a dreamlike smoothness. There was none of the bumping common even to a streetcar. . . . By this time the boulevard had been reached, and the automobileer, letting a lever fall a little, let her out. Whiz! She picked up speed with infinite rapidity. As she ran on there was a clattering behind, the new noise of the automobile.
”
    For twenty years or more,
    ever since he’d left his father’s farm when he was sixteen to get a job in a Detroit machineshop, Henry Ford had been nuts about machinery. First it was watches, then he designed a steamtractor, then he built a horseless carriage with an engine adapted from the Otto gasengine he’d read about in
The World of Science
, then a mechanical buggy with a onecylinder fourcycle motor, that would run forward but not back;
    at last, in ninetyeight, he felt he was far enough along to risk throwing up his job with the Detroit Edison Company, where he’d worked his way up from night fireman to chief engineer, to put all his time into working on a new gasoline engine,
    (in the late eighties he’d met Edison at a meeting of electriclight employees in Atlantic City. He’d gone up to Edison after Edison had delivered an address and asked him if he thought gasoline was practical as a motor fuel. Edison had said yes. If Edison said it, it was true. Edison was the great admiration of Henry Ford’s life);
    and in driving his