Henry Ford (Founder of Ford motors)

About

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. He didn’t even invent the assembly line. But more than any other single individual, he was responsible for transforming the automobile from an invention of unknown utility into an innovation that profoundly shaped the 20th century and continues to affect our lives today.

Innovators change things. They take new ideas, sometimes their own, sometimes other people’s, and develop and promote those ideas until they become an accepted part of daily life. Innovation requires self-confidence, a taste for taking risks, leadership ability and a vision of what the future should be. Henry Ford had all these characteristics, but it took him many years to develop all of them fully.

                                                      

Ford’s beginnings were perfectly ordinary. He was born on his father’s farm in what is now Dearborn, Michigan on July 30, 1863. Early on Ford demonstrated some of the characteristics that would make him successful, powerful, and famous. He organized other boys to build rudimentary water wheels and steam engines. He learned about full-sized steam engines by becoming friends with the men who ran them. He taught himself to fix watches, and used the watches as textbooks to learn the rudiments of machine design. Thus, young Ford demonstrated mechanical ability, a facility for leadership, and a preference for learning by trial-and-error. These characteristics would become the foundation of his whole career.

Ford could have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a farmer. But young Henry was fascinated by machines and was willing to take risks to pursue that fascination. In 1879 he left the farm to become an apprentice at the Michigan Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars in Detroit. Over the next two-and-one-half years he held several similar jobs, sometimes moving when he thought he could learn more somewhere else.
                                                            

He returned home in 1882 but did little farming. Instead he operated and serviced portable steam engines used by farmers, occasionally worked in factories in Detroit, and cut and sold timber from 40 acres of his father’s land. By now Ford was demonstrating another characteristic—a preference for working on his own rather than for somebody else. In 1888 Ford married Clara Bryant and in 1891 they moved to Detroit where Henry had taken a job as night engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. Ford did not know a great deal about electricity. He saw the job in part as an opportunity to learn.


Henry was an apt pupil, and by 1896 had risen to chief engineer of the Illuminating Company. But he had other interests. He became one of scores of people working in barns and small shops across the country trying to build horseless carriages. Aided by a team of friends, his experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his first self-propelled vehicle, the Quadricycle. It had four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, was steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse.

A second car followed in 1898. Ford now demonstrated one of the keys to his future success—the ability to articulate a vision and convince other people to sign on and help him achieve that vision. He persuaded a group of businessmen to back him in the biggest risk of his life—a company to make and sell horseless carriages. But Ford knew nothing about running a business, and learning by trial-and-error always involves failure. The new company failed, as did a second. To revive his fortunes Ford took bigger risks, building and even driving racing cars. The success of these cars attracted additional financial backers, and on June 16, 1903 Henry incorporated his third automotive venture, Ford Motor Company.
                    

Ford’s success and growing fame caused him to look for new challenges beyond the auto industry. Disgusted by the carnage of the World War in Europe, Ford chartered a “Peace Ship” in 1915 and sailed across the Atlantic to stop the war. It was a well-intentioned yet foolish effort that was doomed to fail. Three years later, at the urging of President Wilson, Ford ran for the US Senate, losing in a close election.


Henry Ford made major contributions to the aviation industry. The all-metal Ford Trimotor flew for airlines around the globe. Dearborn’s Ford Airport was among the best in the world when it opened in 1925, and the nearby Dearborn Inn was one of the country’s first airport hotels. Ford’s advancements in radio navigation made flying safer for everyone. Though important, his aviation ventures were not profitable and Ford ended them in 1932. The Great Depression forced him to focus on his core automobile business, and airplane technology was changing too rapidly for his assembly-line techniques.

As early as 1912, Henry Ford was collecting “relics” such as wagons and threshing machines that represented American industrial progress as well as objects that reflected a world that was vanishing with every Model T that rolled off the assembly line. These collections were eventually showcased in a museum complex with the purpose of educating America’s youth. Greenfield Village opened as a campus for the private Edison Institute Schools in September 1929.

As the 1930s wore on Henry Ford devoted more and more time to his growing museum, the Edison Institute (now known simply as The Henry Ford), where he assembled one of the great collections of significant buildings and artifacts from American history.
                                           

Henry Ford had laid the foundation of the twentieth century. The assembly line became the century’s characteristic production mode, eventually applied to everything from phonographs to hamburgers. The vast quantities of war material turned out on those assembly lines were crucial to the Allied victory in World War II. High wage, low skilled factory jobs pioneered by Ford accelerated both immigration from overseas and the movement of Americans from the farms to the cities. The same jobs also accelerated the movement of the same people into an ever expanding middle class. In a dramatic demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, the creation of huge numbers of low skilled workers gave rise in the 1930s to industrial unionism as a potent social and political force. The Model T spawned mass automobility, altering our living patterns, our leisure activities, our landscape, even our atmosphere. 
                                                     

Henry Ford was a complex and at times, contradictory personality with a wide range of interests and strongly held opinions. You probably know about Ford's achievements in automobile production, but...


As a child, he was inspired by his mother, who encouraged his interest in tinkering.

His father was a farmer. He encouraged Henry’s interest in the use of machines on the farm.

He was inspired by steam-powered tractors when he was a teenager. This made him think about the way things work.

He was fired from his first job.

Henry built his first gasoline engine at home and tested it in the kitchen. He mounted it on the kitchen sink.

Thomas Edison was Henry Ford’s role model and later his close friend.

He built and drove race cars early in his career to demonstrate that his engineering designs produced reliable vehicles.

He failed with his first two companies before he succeeded with Ford Motor Company.

The idea for using a moving assembly line for car production came from the meat-packing industry.

He financed a pacifist expedition to Europe during WWI.

He adopted a paternalistic policy to reform his workers' lives both at home and at work.

He was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate in 1918.

He owned a controversial newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that published anti-Jewish articles which offended many and tarnished his image.

He promoted the early use of aviation technology.

Henry Ford built Village Industries, small factories in rural Michigan, where people could work and farm during different seasons, thereby bridging the urban and rural experience.

He sought ways to use agricultural products in industrial production, including soybean-based plastic automobile components such as this experimental automobile trunk.

He was one of the nation's foremost opponents of labor unions in the 1930s and was the last automobile manufacturer to unionize his work force.

Ford mobilized his factories for the war effort and produced bombers, Jeeps, and tanks for World War II.

He established schools in several areas of the country that provided educational experiences based on traditional one room school techniques, modern teaching methods, and "learning through doing".

He established an indoor/outdoor museum--The Henry Ford--to preserve historical items that illustrated the American experience and American ingenuity.