**Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.** **Kelly McEvers: **Thomas Edison and his family had a ritual. Every winter, they would leave freezing cold New Jersey and head down to Fort Myers, Florida. Back then, Fort Myers was out there. Think swamps and mosquitoes. It was actually easier to get around by boat than over land. The Edisons would do vacation stuff: go fishing, go on boat rides, collect interesting plants. And in 1914, they invited a different branch of American inventing royalty to join them. That year, Henry Ford, of the Model T Ford, came down to Florida with his wife, Clara. Ford must have been psyched because Edison was actually his hero. They’d met briefly years before at a conference when Ford was still a low-level employee at an Edison company. Now they were meeting on something like equal terms. So to celebrate the occasion, Ford had some Model Ts shipped down to Fort Myers. Everyone went out joyriding around the swamps.…