Chester Mumpower
MGNT 4680
May 24, 2005
Henry Ford
Henry Ford, an extremely hardworking man, was very curious in his early life because he liked to take things apart and ask many questions. He lead and designed the manufacturing of many cars, including the Model T which was the second largest selling car totaling over 15,000,000. In addition to doing this, he lead and managed an enormous company with the help of very few people. When Henry spoke, people listened. Henry had a few dreams that he thought would change the world. For example, he saw that most of the car companies were making cars for the very wealthy, but Ford looked beyond this and dreamed that every family in the United States would own their own car, even the poor farming families.
Henry was born into a rather poor farming family during Abraham Lincoln's presidency on July 30, 1863, in a small town called Dearborn located in Michigan. During the first years of Henry's life, he would work on the farm, take his toys apart, and ask many questions such as, "How does a clock work?" (Marcus,p. 45). At the age of 16, Henry left home and found a job as a machinist apprentice. Then, from about 1880 until about 1884, he worked many other jobs usually fixing watches and clocks (Marcus, p.53). While doing this, he was learning more and more about mechanics.
Then, in 1885, the first car was invented (Aird, p. 89). Made by Benz, this car was three-wheeled, very uncomfortable and extremely slow, going approximately 10 miles per hour. From that date forward, Henry Ford found out what he was destined to do, build an incredible car. Before Henry was going to build any car, he had to first get some money so he decided to work for Westinghouse Steam Engines in southern Michigan.
April 11, 1888, was a great day for Henry, because he married Clara J. Bryant. Mr. and Mrs. Ford moved to Detroit in 1891 to try and settle down. Then, in 1893, Henry was made chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company, he lead this division and they paid him well (Aird, p. 79"). While he was working for them, in his own spare time he constructed a one-cylinder gasoline motor, which was an enormous step for Henry. Then, a couple of months later, on the sixth day of November, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford had their only child, a boy named Edsel Bryant Ford (Marcus, p. 45).
In June of 1896, Henry built his first car: a two cylinder lightweight carriage, called the "quadricycle" 1899 came, and Henry decided to resign from the Edison Illuminating Company to organize the Detroit Automobile Company. After two years of hard work, the company went bankrupt because of the lack of cars sold (Marcus, p. 98).
Henry Ford decided that building and driving race cars was the best thing for him to do at this time, so late in 1901, he decided to race and sell cars (Marcus, p. 120). He ran the greatest race team and won the most important race against Alexander Winston at Gross Pointe Michigan in October of 1901. The driver of Ford's car was Barney Oldfield who beat Alexander by only a few seconds. Later, in January of 1904, Ford drove his "999" to a world's record of 39.4 seconds in a mile over the ice of Lake St. Claire (Lacy, p. 68). After doing a few years of racing, Henry decided to try and open a company one more time. The company was called The Ford Motor Company named after his family. Ford had three other partners when the company first opened on June 16, 1903 ("Lacy P.116). These partners were C. H. Wills as Ford's company assistant, James Couzens as Ford's business expertise, and Malcomson as Ford's office manager. All three men followed the man with a dream because they believed in him and his ideas. Henry was an excellent salesman. At the time the company opened, Ford only owned 25.5% of the company which was worth $28,000.
The first car made in the company was the Model A in 1903. The first one of these made was sold within a month, and orders started pouring in after that for more cars. In 1905, Ford's office manager, Malcomson, was forced to sell his stock, because Ford and he had an argument on which type of car the company should focus on selling, so when Malcomson left, Ford received Malcomson's stock, leaving Ford to be the president of the company. Henry decided that, in 1906, the company should move to Highland Park, Michigan because there wasn't enough room in the old factory to produce the "breakthrough" car that Henry was designing. "It is going to be like simple and sturdy. It is going to be priced so that, most people can afford it which means that we are going to make a whole lot of them." (Ingpen, p.97). Quoted Henry Ford when he had the vision that people needed a "mechanical workhorse" that could do a variety of jobs like take a take a load of cattle feed along rough roads, carry grain to the market, go to the nearest town to get mail or do some shopping, or take the family to a party in a nearby town (Marcus, p. 83). He also saw that simple farmers didn't want a fast, or glamorous car, they wanted a car that was reliable, easy to maintain, and most of all, affordable. This car was called the Model T, and was first produced on October 8, 1908. The model T was a four cylinder, twenty horsepower engine that was sold two ways: as a roadster priced at $825, or as a touring car priced at $850. Even though the model T wasn't cheap when it first came out, it was stronger, easier to maintain, cheaper to run, and more generally useful than any cars at that price. The Model T was such a big hit, that in the first year of production, over 10,000 Model T's were sold and millions of spare parts were made (Lacey, p 67).
Since there were so many orders for the Model T, in 1909 Henry Ford said that from now on, they would concentrate on making only Model T's in the factory (Lacey, p.72). Ford also hired more workers having a total of 3,000 men working for him in 1910 in his Highland Park factory (Marcus, p. 125). The demand for the Model T and extra parts was becoming so great, that Ford decided to start mass-producing the Model Ts. Now production would be faster, and each car and part would be identical so that they would be easier to fix by mechanics. The mass-production idea that Ford had wasn't new. In fact, it was seen as early as 1800 for things such as guns, clocks, watches, sewing machines, and typewriters. It was also seen in 1902, when Russell Olds adopted mass-production methods to make his "Merry Oldsmobile" on an assembly line. The only difference between Ford's assembly line and Russell Olds, was that Ford had a moving conveyor belt along which the car traveled, and each new part was added. Each worker was given a small, but special job to do, and each worker had a smaller conveyor belt to carry parts they needed. When Henry Ford came out with this creative idea of using mass-production, he had many quotes like; "Good work is hard unless you have good tools and clean surroundings. Employees and employers ought to be treated by the same standard. Are they indifferent?" Or, "Old production methods say that machines must aid man. Our idea is that man should aid the machine." He also said this, "Hard labor is for machines, not people.”Lacey, p. 145).
