Henry Ford

• Born: July 30, 1863
• Birthplace: Springwells township (now Dearborn), Michigan
• Died: April 7, 1947
• Place of death: Dearborn, Michigan

American industrialist

Combining ruthlessness with concern for the average worker, Ford revolutionized the early automobile industry by creating a low-priced car, the Model T, through the now famous assembly-line method. He also created the Ford Foundation, a nationwide philanthropy.

Areas of achievement Business and industry, invention and technology, philanthropy

Early Life

Using money that belonged to his wife, Mary (née Litogot), William Ford, an Irish immigrant, bought a farm in Springwells township, near Dearborn, Michigan; Henry Ford was born there. In those years, the nation was divided by civil war: Abraham Lincoln was president of the twenty-four states of the Union, while Jefferson Davis was president of the eleven states of the Confederacy. Although content as a boy on the prosperous family farm, Henry did not want to spend his life as a farmer, and his independence and mechanical skills steered him in other directions. His interest in machines began early. He was never an inventor but rather someone who loved to tinker with anything that had moving parts. He would disassemble anything in the home to find out how it worked and then put it back together. At thirteen, Henry repaired his first watch, and he became obsessed with watch repair, fixing more than three hundred without ever charging a fee. Once he took a shingle nail and sharpened it on a grindstone to create a screwdriver. Then he made a pair of tweezers from one of his mother’s discarded corset stays. With these homemade tools, he took a watch apart, discovered the problem, and fixed it. Throughout his life he enjoyed repairing watches, and even later, as president of Ford Motor Company, he delighted in repairing the watches of his visitors.

Henry had little use for school and learned almost nothing there except for the epigrams found in McGuffey’s readers. He never learned to spell, to write a formed hand, to read freely, or to express himself well in the simplest written sentence. Throughout his life, Ford rarely took notes, kept no diary, and refrained from most writing.

In 1876, the Ford family was shocked by the death of Henry’s mother, Mary Ford, at thirty-seven, a few days after giving birth to a stillborn child. The same year, however, also brought something magical to Henry: He saw his first self-propelled machine. While he and his father rode to Detroit on the farm wagon, Henry noticed ahead of them a machine with a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank. This huge iron monster could be operated by one man who stood on a platform behind the boiler, shoveled coal, operated the throttle, and steered.

In 1879, at the age of sixteen, Henry quit school, helped his father bring in the summer harvest, and moved to Detroit. In Detroit he lived with his aunt, Rebecca Ford Flaherty, whose daughter Jane had been a surrogate mother to the Dearborn Fords since the death of Mary Ford.

Henry began work at the James Flower and Brothers Machine Shop, not far from his aunt’s house. The machine shop was a perfect environment for the young Henry, since the Flower brothers manufactured everything in the line of brass and iron globe and gate valves, gongs, steam whistles, fire hydrants, valves for water pipes, and the huge machinery for Detroit’s first waterworks. The shop also had a variety of machines to make and repair what was sold.

The machine shop paid $2.50 a week. Henry returned to his partiality for working on watches and made fifty cents a night working for a jeweler who hid him from customers so that they would not know how young the person was who repaired the watches. Thus, Henry had managed to combine his two main interests, and he dreamed of the future.

In 1880, Henry returned home to help his father with the harvest. Although he disliked the farmwork, early in life he learned the values of hard work and responsibility. When he returned to Detroit late in the same year, he began working for the Detroit Drydock, where he came in contact for the first time with the internal combustion engine. Henry stayed at the shipbuilding firm until 1882, when he was hired by Westinghouse to service steam engines. During the next few summers, he traveled all over Michigan servicing the Westinghouse engine, a machine that could be used for threshing or sawing wood. During this period, Henry’s dream of a vehicle moving under its own power began to take shape.

In winter, when the roads were snowed in, he experimented in a shop he set up on the farm. After several winters, he created a small “farm locomotive,” a pioneer tractor that had an old mowing engine for its chassis and a homemade steam engine. Later, Ford realized that the steam engine was too dangerous for an automobile.

On April 11, 1888, Ford married Clara J. Bryant, and he remained her the rest of his life. In 1891 the couple moved to Detroit, and two years later Ford was made chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company. On November 6, 1893, the Fords’ only child, Edsel Bryant, was born. Ford now had the responsibility of a family to add to his dreams for the future.

Life’s Work

In 1895, Ford, by then a chief engineer at Edison, attended a banquet at which Thomas Alva Edison himself was present. Ford told him about his work and the dream of the automobile and asked the nearly deaf Edison if he thought there was a future in the internal combustion machine. Edison replied, “Yes, there is a big future for any light-weight engine that can develop a high horsepower and is self-contained. . . . Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a great future.” Ford’s morale skyrocketed and Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, became his idol. Later, Ford and Edison would become good friends.

On a spring night in 1896, Ford completed his first car. Mounted on bicycle wheels, the automobile was too big to get out the door, so an excited Ford took an ax and knocked down a wall. At four o’clock in the morning, Ford made a test run around the block. His wife and the baby, Edsel, joined him; the Ford motor car was born.

In 1899, Ford began to organize the Detroit Automobile Company with a number of associates. Disagreements broke out among the backers, and Ford was forced to resign. After this initial debacle, Ford turned to building racing cars, a decision that apparently contradicted his belief in the primacy of two things: mechanical perfection and the common person. Building a race car may have served his search for mechanical perfection, but it had nothing to do with providing the common person with a car. Or did it?

Ford gained fame in 1901 when the “999,” driven by Barney Oldfield, broke all records over a three-mile course. Ford’s name became a household word, and a Detroit coal dealer named Alex Malcomson soon sought out Ford to make an investment in Ford’s company, a move that would attract other investors.

Ford did not like the idea of having partners, but he had no other choice in 1903, when the Ford Motor Company was launched. It was Malcomson’s support that had attracted others, such as James Couzens and Charles Woodall, the lawyer John Anderson, the banker John Gray, the Dodge brothers, Horace Rackham, and Albert Strelow. Strelow turned over a shop he owned for stock, and the Dodge brothers received stock for making motors and transmissions, something they did for the Olds Company. Control 51 percent of the shares was divided between Ford and Malcomson. Ford was able to raise $28,000, and he would never need to augment that from any outside source.

The assembly line was still down the road, but the first car, the Model A (sometimes called the Fordmobile), was built by twelve men in 1903 and rolled out of Strelow’s garage within a month. It sold for $800; the detachable tonneau cost an extra $100. By 1904, at the New York Car Show (at which Ford’s car was placed in the basement), Ford realized that the Model A’s time had passed. On his return to Michigan, Ford began to build different models, attempting to come up with what America wanted. He believed he had built such a car when the Model T was developed in late 1908 (although his associates had made contributions to the design of the Model T, Ford himself was responsible for its overall concept).

When Strelow’s shop became too small to serve as a plant, the company moved to the Piquette-Beaubien plant. By 1907, that plant had also become too small, and Ford bought the sixty-acre Highland Park racetrack, anticipating larger production and sales than ever. The Highland Park plant would be totally financed by company profits and would eventually mass-produce the Model T on what would become the famous assembly line.

Malcomson disagreed with Ford and wanted an expensive car built. He needed money for other investments and sold his $12,000 original stock for $175,000. Albert Strelow and three other minor stockholders also sold out. Strelow received $25,000, lost it all in a gold mine investment, and later returned to Ford Motor begging for a job in a company he had once partially owned. Ford was now the majority stockholder and president.

Ford announced to the world in biblical hyperbole, “I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” and he proceeded to do precisely that. Others tried to talk him out of mass-producing the Model T, stating that the public would want diversity. Ford, however, held fast to his plan: The idea for the Model T had been conceived in 1907, machinery to produce it was built in 1908, and production began in 1909. Eventually forty thousand Model T’s rolled out of the plant in one year. By 1913, mass production had lowered the price of the Model T to $500. Orders flooded the company, and headquarters had to notify dealers that the demand could not be met. In 1927, the last of fifteen million Model T’s was built.

The assembly line was not constructed overnight; it took seven years to perfect. It began simply enough at Highland Park, when work commenced to improve subassembly of the flywheel magneto. In the past, one man had done the job of assembling the magneto in twenty minutes. Ford divided the work into twenty-nine operations. The growing magneto was carried on a conveyor belt, and the assembly time was cut to four minutes. That worked so well that the system was adapted to the construction of the entire car, which was divided into forty-five operations. The total time required for building a car was eventually lowered to ninety-three minutes.

On January 9, 1911, a long court fight over patent rights finally came to an end. In 1877, a clever patent attorney, George Selden, had built an engine and in 1895 had established a patent for it, forcing automobile builders to pay royalties. A group called the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM) was formed to oversee the patent. Ford had ignored the patent and was sued in late 1903. Now, seven years later, the Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the validity of the patent but maintained that it covered only the Brayton engine. Ford as well as other manufacturers, most of whom had been paying royalties, used the Otto engine; the claim was disallowed, and ALAM ceased to exist. It was one of many Ford victories that combined luck with old-fashioned intuition.

In 1914, the average American worker in the manufacturing industries was making about $11 per week. Ford stunned the working world and made front-page news when he announced that every Ford worker would receive a minimum of $5 per day. Thus did Ford reward loyal workers who had endured unbelievable monotony and who were not allowed to smoke or drink on the job and were encouraged to abstain from these practices off the job. Later the workers were allowed to buy shares in the company, but Ford ruthlessly fought to prevent unionization.

In 1917 the stockholders filed suit because Ford had failed to pay dividends. He lost that suit and in December, 1918, in a cunning move, resigned the presidency and made his son, Edsel, president. From vacation in California, Ford announced in vague terms a new car that would compete with the Model T and cost only $250. The stockholders began selling out, except for Couzens. He raised the price of his shares and then sold.

Ford now had what he wanted: complete control. The stockholders were owed $75 million, and even Ford did not have that. Ford distrusted bankers but was forced to borrow the money from bankers in New York. He produced ninety thousand cars in record speed and shipped them, unordered, to the dealers. They balked, but Ford warned them to take them or lose their franchises. Cash was demanded on delivery, and panic-stricken dealers were forced to borrow from the banks to pay Ford. Thus, Ford had transferred his burden to his dealers and quickly paid off the New York banks.

Significance

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) satirizes Ford by referring to his time as the Year of Our Ford, thus pointing to the dangers inherent in a near-perfect system of mechanization under the control of one person.

Ford’s famous 1933 picture reveals the kind-looking face of a man very out of place in a suit and tie. In a way, he looks like everybody’s grandfather: His combed hair, clean-shaven face, and half-smile betoken a patriarchal goodness; his status as a folk hero rests on the fact that he wanted to make cars for the multitude and did. Nevertheless, Ford’s life was filled with contradiction and ruthlessness: He made fun of the rich but was himself a billionaire; by mass-producing a reliable car that everyone could afford, he became one of the richest men in America.

Created in 1936, the Ford Foundation, which received the nonvoting stock of the Ford Motor Company on Ford’s, Edsel’s, and Clara Bryant Ford’s deaths, became an agency that controlled resources in excess of $500 million. Until 1950, it granted funds for charitable activities of special interest to the Ford family. Then, as a result of substantially increased funds from the estates of its founders, it became a nationwide philanthropy.

Further Reading

Arnold, Horace L., and Fay L. Faurote. Ford Methods and Ford Shops. New York: Engineering Magazine Company, 1915. A classic that describes Ford’s techniques in nontechnical language. Includes the design and installation methods of the Model T.

Bak, Richard. Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2003. Biography of both Ford and his son, Edsel. The two had an often troubled relationship, in which Ford refused to allow Edsel to assume control of the Ford Motor Company.

Brinkley, Douglas. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Viking, 2003. The Ford Motor Company allowed Brinkley access to its archives to write a book about the firm on its one-hundredth anniversary. The result is a business and social history of the company, which includes biographical information about the man who founded it.

Brough, James. The Ford Dynasty: An American Story. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. Very well written biography. Contains the detailed story of all the members of the Ford family, as well as two pages of acknowledgments of sources on which the book was based.

Dahlinger, John Côté, and Frances Spatz Leighton. The Secret Life of Henry Ford. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978. A view of the Henry Ford family from Ford’s illegitimate son. Ford took care of the Dahlinger family, and the scandal was not really known until 1976, on publication of David Lewis’s The Public Image of Henry Ford.

Ford, Henry, with Samuel Crowther. My Life and Work. 1922. Reprint. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987. Ford’s memory was extremely unreliable, and since he dictated much of this book, it is filled with errors, yet it gives great insight into Ford as a person.

Gelderman, Carol. Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist. New York: Dial Press, 1981. A thoroughly researched biography, based on the Ford Archives. Particularly well-researched coverage of the Dodge and Chicago Tribune lawsuits. Sources include the Labor Archives, previously unavailable to biographers.

Lacey, Robert. Ford: The Men and the Machine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. An excellent biography of Henry Ford, Edsel Ford, Henry Ford II, and Lee Iacocca. Claims that Henry hounded Edsel to an early grave when Edsel served as president of Ford Motor Company. Details are given of Henry Ford’s mistress and illegitimate child. Contains an exhaustive, twenty-four-page bibliography.

Lewis, David L. The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1976. This book is devoted solely to the life of Henry Ford. Lewis published a million words about Ford prior to this book. Claims that he probably knows more about Ford than any other writer. An exhaustive set of notes is provided for each chapter. Lewis’s sources include the Ford Archives and the Henry Ford Museum.

Watts, Steven. The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2005. Meticulously researched and balanced account of Ford’s life, his career, and his influence on American life and culture. Watts maintains that Ford embodied both the promise and problems inherent in American democracy.