"When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind,
not with it."
Henry Ford was born on July 30th, 1863, on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan to Mary and William Ford. He was the eldest son of his five siblings.
When his mother died, when he was 13, he was completely devastated. His father owned a prosperous farm and expected Henry to take it over someday. Henry hated farm work.
Henry was educated at the local one-room school for eight years where he demonstrated an early interest in mechanical objects.
His father gave him a pocket watch in his early teens. At 15, Henry could disassemble and reassemble friends and neighbors watches, giving him the reputation of being a watch repairman.
He constructed his first steam engine in 1878.
Three years after his mom died, Henry left home to work in Detroit as a apprentice machinist. He returned home in 1882 to work on the family farm, where he became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He later worked frequently at Westinghouse to service their steam engines. Henry also studied bookkeeping at Goldsmith, Bryant & Stratton Business College in Detroit.
Henry married Clara Jane Bryant, who had grown up on a nearby farm, on April 11th, 1888. He supported them by farming and running a sawmill.
They had one child together named Edsel Ford.
Henry returned to Detroit in 1891, taking a position as night engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. He was promoted to chief engineer in 1893, which gave him enough money and time to devote attention to his personal experiments on gasoline engines.
This led to his invention of his "Quadricycle" in 1896. The quadricycle was comprised of a light metal buggy frame mounted on four bicycle wheels and was powered by a two-cylinder, four-horsepower gasoline engine. The fuel tank was under the seat and a tiller was used for steering. He sold his invention for $200 to finance future endeavours.
Also in 1896, Henry met Thomas Edison at a work meeting. He approved of Henry's automobile experimentation and encourage him to design and build a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. Backed by the capital of Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy, Henry resigned from the Edison Company and founded the Detroit Automobile Company on August 5, 1899 with Edison. The company was dissolved in January 1901 because the automobiles that were produced were of a lower quality and higher price than Ford wanted and ultimately, the company was not successful.
Did you know that Henry had Edison's last breath saved in a test tube and you can still see the test tube at the Henry Ford Museum.
In October 1901 and with the help of C. Harold Wills, Henry designed, built, and successfully raced a 26-horsepower automobile.
The Henry Ford Company started in November 1901 with Henry as the chief engineer. He left the company after three months and after he was gone the company was renamed the Cadillac Automobile Company.
In 1902, Henry partnered up with with former racing cyclist Tom Cooper, and produced the 80+ horsepower racer "999". It was driven to victory in a race in October of that year.
Did you know that Henry was one of the early backers of the Indianapolis 500.
Henry received the backing of an old acquaintance and a coal dealer, Alexander Y. Malcomson. Together they formed "Ford & Malcomson, Ltd." to manufacture practical automobiles. The duo leased a factory and contracted with a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge to supply over $160,000 in parts. Sales were slow, and a crisis arose when the Dodge brothers demanded payment for their first shipment. So Malcomson brought in another group of investors and and convinced the Dodge Brothers to accept a portion of the new company. On June 16, 1903, Ford & Malcomson was reincorporated and the Ford Motor Company was born.
Henry then demonstrated a newly designed car on the ice of Lake St. Clair and set a new land speed record, driving 1 mile in 39.4 seconds at 91.3 miles per hour.
Henry decided that every man, rich or poor, should be able to own an automobile and continually brought prices down. He did have to bow to stockholders` pressure and ended up building the six-cylinder Model K. He continued to release Models using the alphabet, until he came to the T.
In 1908, the company introduced its famous Model T vehicle and was the first automobile to be mass produced. It's steering wheel was on it's left, which other companies shortly copied and the entire engine and transmission were enclosed. The four cylinders were cast in a solid block and the suspension used two semi-elliptic springs. It was easy to drive and cheap and just as easy to repair. It was priced at just $825 and within months demand became so high that production could not keep up. That is when Henry introduce the first assembly line in 1913.
Henry said,
"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."
The Model T was such great success for Ford and his company, that by 1918, more than half of the automobiles on United States roads were Fords.
Henry was a firm believe in a livable wage, so he raised the pay rate from $2.34 to $5 a day for employees over 21, when the normal minimum wage was only $1. He also reduced the daily work hours from nine to eight hours.
Did you know that in 1918, Henry was convinced by President Woodrow Wilson to compete for the seat of senate as a Democrat and lost by only 4500 votes?
Stockholders wanted to split all the profits for themselves, Henry didn't want his company run that way, so he bought out all of the stockholders in 1919.
Henry was adamantly against labor unions and thought they were too heavily influenced by some leaders who, despite their good intentions, would end up doing more harm than good for workers. He promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing.
In the 1920's, the marketplace was changing and Ford began to fall behind the times. At the time, Ford's biggest competitor was Chevrolet. Chevrolet had an improved model every year and soon surpassed Ford in sales. Ford's "Tin Lizzie" was in need of a change.
In May 1927, thousands of workers were laid off while 64 year old Henry, tried to find a way to get back into the marketplace. With the release of a brand new Model A, the company came roaring back to life. And with the success of the new Model A, when the stock market crashed in October 1929, the company rode out the first two years of the Depression relatively untouched. He raised his employee's wages and lowered the price of his automobiles.
The Depression caught up to the company in 1931 ant it was again forced to shut down production and send workers home.
The Ford V-8 with it's innovative eight-cylinder engine put Ford back on top and workers came back to discover that working conditions had drastically changed. To ensure his workers put in a full day's work, Henry hired a foreman and a group of supervisors creating the Service Department. Many of the members of the service department were ex-cons and boxers, who ruled the plant through fear and coercion.
Henry also founded the Ford Airline Company during World War I due to his interest in the aviation industry and built Liberty engines. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 the company became a major supplier of weapons, especially the Liberty engine for airplanes, and anti-submarine boats. Ford plants in the United Kingdom produced tractors as well as trucks and aircraft engines.
His most successful aircraft was the Ford 4AT Trimotor, often called the "Tin Goose" because of its corrugated metal construction. It first flew on June 11th, 1926 and and was the first successful U.S. passenger airliner, accommodating about 12 passengers comfortably. The company shut down in 1933 because of the Great Depression.
Henry hated war and insisted that "war was the product of greedy financiers who sought profit in human destruction". He was a conspiracy theorist who, in 1939, claimed that the torpedoing of U.S. merchant ships by German submarines was the result of conspiratorial activities undertaken by financier war-makers. He thought the war-makers were Jews. He also accused the Jews of instigating the first World War.
He never liked or entirely trusted the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and when World War II erupted, Henry and his company continued to do business with Nazi Germany, including the manufacture of war material.
Hitler said he regarded Ford as his "inspiration", and kept Ford's life-size portrait next to his desk.
In Germany in 1940, the Ford-Werke was under the control of the Ford Motor Company when requisitioned between 100 and 200 French POWs to work as slave laborer.
When the U.S. entered World War II the next year, Henry supported the war effort. The government asked him to build the B-24 Liberator Bomber but he had suffered a stroke that year, and due to his rapidly deteriorating physical and mental health, supervision of the project fell largely to Ford's only son, Edsel. This became too much for Edsel to handle and in May 1943, 50-year-old Edsel Ford died. At the age of 80, in spite of his clearly diminished capacities, Henry Ford once again was at the helm of Ford Motor Company.
The company began to decline, losing more than $10 million a month and the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt had been considering a government takeover of the company in order to ensure continued war production.
Instead, in August 1943, the Navy sent Ford's 26-year-old grandson, Henry Ford II, home in hopes that he could bring order to the chaos. With much protest on Henry's part he ceded the company Presidency to his grandson in September 1945. Henry then went into seclusion, appearing only occasionally at company events.
Henry Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 83 on April 7th, 1947. He was in his wife's arms at Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn when it happened. At his public viewing at Greenfield Village up to 5,000 people per hour filed past the casket. Funeral services were held in Detroit's Cathedral Church of St. Paul and he was buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.
Did you know that Henry tried to build a city in the middle of the Amazon to obtain a supply of rubber. It was called Fordlandia, and it didn't work out. The town is still empty to this day.
Henry was a Freemason and was raised in Palestine Lodge No. 357, Detroit, in 1894. When he received the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite in 1940, he said, "Masonry is the best balance wheel the United States has."
Retired curator of transportation at The Henry Ford, Bob Casey admired Henry and said,
" Henry was one of these people who didn't take a job because he knew how to do it.
He often took jobs because he didn't know how to do them, and they were opportunities to learn.
It's a very gutsy way to learn."
Did you know that Henry believed in recreation?
