How Henry Ford and the Model T lost the race and won the country

The ferry broke down at exactly the wrong moment for everyone except Henry Ford.On June 8, 1909, two stripped-down Ford Model Ts rolled onto a little wooden ferry at Glasgow, Mo., and crossed the Missouri River.The cars were filthy, the men inside them were running on fumes, and a Boston-built Shawmut was closing fast behind them in a cross-country race.Then the ferry quit.

The boat that’d just carried the Fords to the western bank suddenly couldn’t return for the Shawmut or the Acme, another trailing car.The official explanation was mechanical failure, but the timing looked almost theatrical.“It’s such an uncanny moment,” Eric Moskowitz, author of the new book “The Hardest, Longest Race: Henry Ford and the Cross-Country Contest That Changed America” (St.

Martins Press), out now, tells The Post.“People sit up whenever I tell them about it.”The Shawmut crew, stranded on the wrong side of the river, had a choice.

They could lose hours searching for another crossing.Or they could aim the car toward the railroad bridge looming above the water, a half-mile of ties, gaps and terror, with no guarantee a train wouldn’t come roaring through.

They chose the bridge.That white-knuckle decision is one of the wildest episodes in Moskowitz’s book, which tells the story of the 1909 Ocean-to-Ocean Race for the Guggenheim Cup, a 4,100-mile contest from New York City to Seattle that helped sell America on the automobile and gave Henry Ford the origin myth every empire needs.It also raised a century-old question: Did Ford win because the Model T was that good, or because his organization was that ruthless?Moskowitz believes the answer is clearly, “Both.”The contest was promoted as the first true coast-to-coast automobile race in America, even though earlier long-distance runs blurred that claim.It began on June 1, 1909, in front of New York’s City Hall, where thousands gathered to watch Mayor George B.

McClellan Jr.fire a gold-plated revolver. The ti...