When I've read it I knew I had to take all the rest with a big grain of salt :|

I don't quite see that since the author dates the quote to 20 years before Ford's popularisation of automobiles, he obviously couldn't have been the inventor of something being investigated by a congressional committee long before his age.

Then again, the "report" is an anachronistic piece of fiction: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars roughly 10 years after his peers in Europe.

If you look at the quote then this interpretation makes more sense IMO - the quote clearly considers the position that cars were being made commercially 20 years before Ford.

TL;DR the Ford point is he democratised car use in the face of congress's earlier consideration that such widespread use would kill agriculture and people. (Mind you the congress memo quote seems pretty right on).

IIRC Olds already had a one-job production line, but the line was static and workers had to move around between assemblies. Ford's innovation was to make the workers "static" (with well laid out workspaces) and move the assembly between the jobs.

The author is talking about product innovation, all the examples are on people who invented famous products.

When he says : "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced..".

Well the congress's statement is from 1875, 20 years later the first cars appeared. Ford came 10 years later. The event he's referring to is clearly the car invention

It's quite obvious that he's presenting Ford as the inventor of the car.

Closer to 20 and he was neither pioneer of production-line manufacturing (that was Olds) nor of US car manufacturing (that's Duryea followed by Studebaker). The something he was on to was the moving assembly line (where the posts are fixed and the assembly moves around), inspired by slaughterhouse butchery lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric

I am sure you are right about steam being the expected winner, but gosh the past is a complex place!

I wonder if there are any other good examples of technologies that had explosions in different technical approaches to the problem before becoming more standardised?

I just think it's interesting how difficult it is to see good ideas when they haven't been invented yet. And how easy it is to relentlessly pursue bad ideas.

Modern fighter planes are unstable, but are stabilized by computers, not the pilot.

Absolutely untrue. The Wright Brothers brought their breakthrough into the market in a big way, becoming a (not the only) major manufacturer of commercially available, working, reliable aircraft.

True, they fought patent battles, and in the end their reliance on wing warping (covered well by their patents) held them back when it became clear that ailerons were the way foreward - but they certainly were more than just experimental researchers. They truly did usher in the age of practical, heavier-than-air flight.

I believe that this was not true for Santos-Dumont[1] though. I wonder if he had more media coverage at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont

Wrong! One of them was Traian Vuia, struggling with financial difficulties which significantly delayed both the plane development and its final public demonstration in Paris! Other not so wealthy pioneers are Percy Pilcher, Lawrence Hargrave, Samuel Franklin Cody, Otto Lilienthal, Aurel Vlaicu, and many others.