Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Having depressed the steering-column handle, the salesman walked around to pull himself aboard with a fluid tug on the wheel. Eddie hopped onto the running board and slid in beside him. His host drew on a rope to swing free the wooden chock locking his rear right tire and shoved back the brass lever by his right elbow. The machine slid forward. Shouting that he’d be back for others, the salesman shifted the lever again, the car slowly picking up momentum as he pulled out onto the street. In moments, they had reached an impressive 13 miles per hour. The boy had hit higher speeds on a bicycle, but this ride’s sheer exhilarating freedom was different. Instead of being pushed forward like a bicycle or pulled on a horse cart, he felt lifted up and along—and carried away. Aproned shop owners, tired teamsters atop their wagons, and annoyed gentlemen on horseback gazed at this portent with little short of wonder. Sitting in that marvel, Eddie was no longer the poor immigrant’s son but something altogether more glorious and potent: the personification of speed, modernity, and movement at will.

Perched higher than in a modern-day SUV, yet without the protection of a windshield or even a dash, the driver and his passenger experienced the dizzying, electrifying raw rush of motion that jangled the senses and watered the eyes while the scenery blurred and the wind plucked at their clothes. The seat swayed pleasantly, like a ship at sea. The salesman leaned forward, his hands clenching the wheel. The Model C’s steering was not geared, and so even the slightest jerk from a pothole or bump could careen this king of the road into a nearby carriage or ditch. Nor, furthermore, had Henry Ford and his engineers yet come up with an effective means of stopping. Braking was a carefully choreographed dance of shifting to low gear and madly pumping the footbrake. The driver devoted his attention to anticipating possible hazards and steering well clear of large obstacles.

To Eddie and the salesman, such difficulties weren’t limitations; the car was all possibility, a taste of sensations never before so satisfactorily encountered, which delivered an exhilarating sense of rumbling headlong into the future. In those electric moments, as the car described a circuit around Ohio’s white-marbled, Greek Revival Statehouse, a dream took shape for that wide-eyed boy: a point where instinct, joy, and rational thought fused together. He would build and drive these new creations—a determination that he would ride into becoming one of the most famous Americans of his generation. In a few short years, everyone in Columbus would know his name; a decade later, every American would recognize the wide, confident grin that broke the craggy angles of his face. As for the salesman, his crazy claims would prove right far more quickly than most anyone had dreamed. By the next decade a significant part of a car-crazy nation would own cars.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the everyday world of America, still framed around technologies from the age of Andrew Jackson, was being upended by a prodigious sequence of breakthroughs. Americans were putting industrial machinery to unprecedented large-scale use, inventing petroleum fuel, the telephone, pasteurized milk, and the cinema. At the World’s Columbian Exposition just a few years earlier, visitors had gawked at typewriters, refrigerators, and flexible artificial limbs. Flush toilets and Edison’s bright incandescent bulbs created a particular stir, one breathless writer announcing in Scientific American that this effervescence of discovery was like “a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficial in its results, that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it.” In scope and magnitude, the Yankee ingenuity of America’s independent inventors—Thomas Alva Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell—rivaled if not surpassed the inventive power of Periclean dramatists, Renaissance artists, late-nineteenth-century Berlin physicists, and Weimar architects in the 1920s.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.