April 17: The Founder Who Never Stopped, A Car That Became a Dream, Home Against All Odds

America has always had a particular genius for invention — for looking at the world as it is and imagining, with stubborn optimism, what it might yet become. April 17 offers three of that genius's finest expressions: a man who spent eighty-four years accumulating knowledge and applying it with a practicality that shaped a nation; an automobile that arrived at a World's Fair and immediately became something more than transportation; and a spacecraft crew that came home from the edge of death on nothing more than improvised engineering and the refusal to accept that the story was over. Together they make the case that the most distinctly American quality may not be power or ambition, but the particular determination to find a way through when the way through does not yet exist.

The First American

On April 17, 1790, Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-four, and twenty thousand people — roughly a tenth of the city's entire population — attended his funeral. The scope of the mourning was a measure of the scope of the life. Franklin had been, in sequence and often simultaneously, a printer's apprentice, a newspaper publisher, the author of Poor Richard's Almanack, the founder of the first public library and the first fire department in Philadelphia, the inventor of the lightning rod and bifocal spectacles, the first Postmaster General of the United States, a diplomat who secured the French alliance that made American independence possible, a delegate to both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and the author of one of the great autobiographies in the English language. He had, by the time he died, lived longer and done more than seemed possible for a single human being — and he had done most of it through a quality that he valued above almost all others: curiosity.

What distinguished Franklin from many of his fellow Founders was the texture of his intelligence — practical, empirical, self-deprecating, and relentlessly applied to the problems immediately in front of him. He did not theorize electricity; he flew a kite into a thunderstorm and drew lightning down a wire. He did not propose improvements to Philadelphia's civic life; he organized them. He arrived in Paris as America's ambassador in 1778 without a court wardrobe or aristocratic credentials, wearing a fur cap and a plain suit, and charmed the most sophisticated court in Europe into financing a revolution. When he signed the Constitution in 1787, he was eighty-one years old and had to be carried to the hall in a sedan chair. He is the only Founding Father whose face appears on American currency without having served as president — because the office, when it was created, was felt by many to be beneath him. He left his estate to the cities of Philadelphia and Boston, with the instruction that the funds be lent to young tradesmen at low interest, compounding over two hundred years. The final distributions were made in 1993. Even in death, Franklin was still at work.

The Pony Runs

On April 17, 1964, the Ford Mustang made its public debut at the New York World's Fair and immediately became something the automotive industry had not fully anticipated: a cultural phenomenon. Ford had designed the Mustang to a specific brief — a sporty, affordable car that could appeal to the postwar baby boom generation coming of age in the early 1960s, a generation with money in its pocket and a taste for style that the boxy family sedans of the Eisenhower era had done nothing to satisfy. The result was a long-hooded, short-decked fastback that started at $2,368, looked like it cost three times as much, and arrived at the World's Fair with the kind of reception that car companies spend decades trying to engineer and almost never achieve. Ford had projected first-year sales of 100,000 units. It sold 418,000 in the first twelve months. Dealers reported customers sleeping in their showrooms rather than risk missing delivery.

The Mustang did more than sell well — it invented a category. The term "pony car," coined in the wake of the Mustang's success, described a new class of American automobile: sporty in appearance, compact in proportion, affordable in price, and aspirational in identity. Competitors rushed to respond — the Chevrolet Camaro, the Pontiac Firebird, the Plymouth Barracuda — but none quite captured the particular cultural electricity of the original. The Mustang appeared in films, in songs, on posters in the bedrooms of a generation that associated it not with the commute to work but with the road stretching out ahead, unbounded and inviting. Steve McQueen drove one through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Wilson Pickett sang about it. It became, in the shorthand of American iconography, a synonym for a certain kind of freedom — young, mobile, wind-in-the-hair, consequence-optional. More than sixty years and several complete redesigns later, the Mustang is still in production, still carrying the same name, still recognizable at a glance as the car that arrived at a World's Fair in 1964 and refused to leave.

Splashdown

On April 17, 1970, the command module Odyssey splashed down in the South Pacific at 1:07 p.m. Eastern time, and Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were pulled from the water alive. Six days earlier they had launched from Kennedy Space Center bound for the Moon; four days earlier, an oxygen tank in their service module had ruptured 200,000 miles from Earth, crippling their spacecraft and forcing them to abandon the mission and shelter in the lunar module — a lifeboat built for two, for two days, now asked to sustain three men for four days across the void of space. That they made it home at all was the product of an improvisation so intricate and so precisely executed that it has been studied in engineering and management schools ever since. The carbon dioxide scrubbers that would have slowly poisoned the crew were jury-rigged from spare parts and plastic bags using instructions read up from Houston. The return trajectory was calculated by hand. The frozen command module, reactivated in sequence on procedures written in real time, held together through reentry.

Mission commander Jim Lovell called the mission "a successful failure" — a phrase that captures, with characteristic precision, both what was lost and what was found. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon; it never came close. But what it demonstrated, in the most unforgiving possible laboratory, was the depth of the human capacity for problem-solving under pressure: the willingness of engineers and astronauts to work without sleep, without precedent, and without the luxury of a second chance toward a solution that existed nowhere except in the collective intelligence of the people working the problem. NASA awarded the mission's ground crew the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The crew returned to a heroes' welcome and to a place in the history of space exploration that no successful Moon landing could have given them — not despite the failure of their mission, but because of it. Apollo 13 remains the definitive answer to the question of what human beings do when everything goes wrong at once.