Henry Ford and the Automobile

THE name of Henry Ford is known and his personality is respected wherever civilized man dwells. As head of the company that has produced or has scheduled for current production something like $700,000,000 of automobiles in eleven years, there can be no question about his rank in the industry. As the chief of 100,000 workmen, most of whom he developed from mere laborers to the grade of skilled mechanics, each deemed worthy of mechanics’ wages but schooled to perform only a single operation, he has gained fame.

The world is interested in Henry Ford as a pacifist, educator and philanthropist, but the automobile industry recognizes in Ford a scientist, a bulldog fighter and a manufacturer par excellence.

Ford invented and built with his own hands a two-cylinder, four-cycle gasoline car that ran at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour in the spring of 1893. That places him so close to the top of the list of American automobile inventors that there is a doubt as to exactly how he ranks. From the best data available as to his status in the list, he should be credited with making the second gasoline car that ran in the United States. Duryea certainly built and ran a car in 1893 and tried out his Buggyaut, commenced in 1891, quite extensively before the date of Ford’s first car, but the weight of the testimony is that Ford was second.

He fought the Selden patent to a standstill, without proving anticipation of its claims.

His car has been the strongest educational force the industry has produced, because the ranks of motorists are increased from the bottom and Ford cars are the first cars purchased by entries into the motor field in a large percentage of cases. The array of 1,500,000 Ford cars and the service they have done needs no emphasis here.

Henry Ford and the Ford car are the best advertisements the automobile industry has enjoyed. Speaking broadly, their value to the rest of the industry is incalculable.

Of full medium height, Mr. Ford is slenderly built but sinewy as hickory. Equipped with meager primary schooling, he has taken all the degrees conferred by the University of the World.

There has been an immense amount of Rub-dub written about Ford’s hardships; his luck and his genius, but the only real hardship he ever had was that he chose to work hard. He was successful because he worked out an important problem at the right time and his genius may be described as the logical sequence of the hard work and success.

Ford’s genius rests upon his ability and willingness to do an astounding amount of work. He made a monumental success because he did the work and expended the intelligent effort at the right time, and then kept right on expending intelligent effort until the whole world recognized it.

Ford was the eldest of three sons and three daughters, born to William Ford, native of Ireland but of English blood, who emigrated to this country and settled eight miles west of Detroit, Michigan, in 1847. The young Irish-English immigrant was a man of strong personality and was a steady and moderately successful farmer. He married Mary Litogot some yeara after reaching Michigan, and Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863.

A great storm of criticism and protest has been raised concerning the attitude of Ford toward war. Opinions may differ according to the partisanship of those who hold them, but the stern position assumed by Ford is perfectly clear and logical from his point of view. Hatred of war comes naturally to Henry Ford, for he was born to the sound of fife and drum. His mother listened to the tramp of armed hosts and heard the dismal music of the funeral bands; the wailing bugle call of "Taps" over the graves of fallen warriors. She saw an endless line of maimed men come back from the battle front and she gave to Henry Ford an inherited aversion to war that is as deeply ingrained in his being as it is possible for anything to be.

There is nothing in his attitude to show that he fears war—he simply hates it.

The boy Henry was a baby until the end of the struggle between the States, and his childhood was little different from that of the average farmer boy, where there is a measure of prosperity. For the father was not poor. The boy had enough to eat and wear and a comfortable home in which to live. He had to work hard and long as soon as he was able. But that is the lot of all farmer boys. He was no laggard and between the farm work and the rudimentary schooling he received, he found time to rig up a little shop on the farm where he had a vise, a lathe and a rude forge, as well as tool equipment of miscellaneous kinds. He fairly reveled in mechanics and sought out repair work, mostly for the love of the work itself rather than for any money returns that might result.

At sixteen, he was a slender but nearly full-grown man and had developed considerable skill in mechanical work. So much interested was the boy in this line of industry that he and his father disagreed. Henry said he wanted to be a mechanic and his father insisted that he should be a farmer. The result was that Henry went to Detroit and got a job with Flower Brothers, general machinists and steam engine builders. He worked at night as a helper and laborer in the machine shop and gained a vivid conception of the application of machinery. At the end of nine months he secured a better position with the Dry Dock Company, a concern with a larger machine shop than Flower Brothers, and remained with his new employer for two years.

He had become interested in steam engines while still on the farm, and the part of farm work that he really liked was during the seasons when the farm required the service of steam engines. Ford was in his glory while serving as helper about the harvesting machines. When he was working in the Detroit machine shops he continued his interest in steam engines and did quite a lot of experimenting before he was nineteen years old.

Before his twentieth birthday, Ford left the Dry Dock Company and was employed as "road expert" by the Michigan state agent of George Westinghouse & Company, of Schenectady, New York, and put in several years in the service of that company, constantly in touch with the engine and constantly learning more about men and affairs.

His father never had become reconciled to Henry’s defection from the farm, and considered it more or less of a disgrace that his eldest son should work with his hands at anything besides agriculture, and in a final effort to "redeem" the young man from a life of that sort, he presented his son with a heavily "timbered forty" near the old farm.

Ford dutifully abandoned his job with the Westinghouse people and made a careful inspection of his landed estate. He found that the timber was of good quality and thereupon he rigged up a sawmill, cleared the land and marketed the lumber, spending some time in denuding the forty-acre lot.

Ford was a farmer with mechanical leanings in 1887, but his timbering operations had been moderately profitable, and he had fitted up a shop on his farm in which the first Ford car was built. He married Clara J. Bryant in 1887.

The first Ford was a steamer, designed to be run with a single-cylinder engine 2 by 2 inches from a boiler that developed from 250 to 400 pounds pressure per square inch. The car was never completed and was abandoned in 1889.

Ford gave up farming about the same time he abandoned work on his first car and removed to Detroit, where he got a job at $45 a month for 12 hours’ work a day with the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. He was raised to $75 a month in 90 days and was made chief engineer at $100 and then $125 per month, remaining with the company for seven years.

In the early days of his employment with the illuminating company he only worked 12 hours a day; thus leaving him 12 hours for labor at home. But when he was made chief engineer he was supposed to be on the job all the time. Of course the company did not require his presence all the time, and he was able to spend a few hours a day in work at home.

It was the time thus allowed Ford that he used to design and build the first Ford gasoline car. In his leisure (?) moments he constructed a two-cylinder, four-cycle water-cooled motor, in which the cylinders were placed side by side. The cylinders measured 29/16 inches in diameter by 6 inches stroke. He patiently constructed the running gear and the means for transmitting the power of the motor to the driving wheels and early in 1893 gave the car its road trial. The car was not a perfect automobile by any means, but it was a long step in advance of anything that had been seen in America up to that time. It ran swiftly and Ford made twenty-five miles an hour surely, perhaps as much as thirty.

While still connected with the illuminating company he started work on his second car in 1895, a two-cylinder, four-cycle motor measuring 4 by 4. This car was on the road in 1898 and performed very satisfactorily, considering the date and stage of development of the art at that period.

Ford organized the Detroit Automobile Company, a corporation capitalized at $50,000, of which he owned one-sixth and was employed by the company as chief engineer at $100 per month. The company built two or three cars, but in 1901 Ford left it and purchased a machine shop of his own nearby. The Detroit Automobile Company soon became the Cadillac Automobile Company, which has now developed into the Cadillac Motor Car Company, one of the largest motor car factories and one of the most successful in the world.

In 1902 Ford built a car of what is now considered standard gauge, 90-inch wheelbase driven by a double-opposed engine of two 4 by 4 cylinders, using his own resources, and then organized the Ford Motor Company, incorporated, with a capitalization of $100,000. The first modern Ford car built by this company was on the road in June, 1903.

Ford owned 25 1/2 per cent. of the stock of the original company, which was a commercial and financial success from the start. But he appreciated that his interest in the company was too small viewed from every standpoint he could assume, providing the enterprise had the qualifications for a great success and so he obtained $175,000, and purchased 25 1/2 per cent. more of the stock, making his holdings amount to 51 per cent. of the total. Soon afterward he paid 700 per cent. of its face value for 7 1/2 per cent. more of the stock, making 58 1/2 per cent. all told, which is the extent of his interest in the present vast company. Ford has a commanding interest in the Canadian and other subsidiaries and is one of the world’s richest men.

The success of the company has been due to the demand for the automobile, which was supplied by Ford in a different way and on a larger scale than others. In detail, the system of sales which contemplates 90 per cent. of cash on delivery and 10 per cent. of factory branch business, has worked out profitably and efficiently….

One of the little economies that mean millions introduced by Ford is the plan of saving on railroad freight. It was discovered that the shipment of completed cars from factory to distributer cost more than the shipment of parts and assembled units from the main source of production to certain assembly points, because completed cars are bulky in comparison with their weight and consequently take a higher classification in the estimate of the railroads. It was much cheaper to ship ten carloads of parts than ten carloads of cars, particularly when the parts would make many times the number of cars that could be packed into ten railroad freight cars. Consequently assembly plants were installed at various appropriate and convenient places and the finished parts are shipped to such plants and made up for the trade. This branch of the business is in addition to the activity of the great main plant at Highland Park, Detroit.

Luck, in the general sense of the term, has had little to do with his success and apparently Henry Ford does not believe that other factors besides hard, intelligent and successful work should form the basis of success in others.