Henry Ford
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Henry Ford is a man who literally transformed the world. The car he built and the changes he made on the techniques of industrial production revolutionized the lives of people everywhere. At the height of his fame, in the 1920s, Ford was a name known universally. "Fordismus" entered the European vocabulary as a word for mass production; and a correspondent in the Soviet Union in 1927 commented that Ford's name was as well known as Lenin's or Trotsky's. He was regarded as a symbol of industrial technology.
Ford himself came from a humble farming background. Born July 30, 1363, in Dearborne, Michigan, near Detroit, young Henry hated almost everything about farming except the machinery. When he was 16, he went to Detroit to serve as an apprentice in a machine shop. He held a series of jobs and became completely knowledgeable of the way different types of machines operated.
He began to experiment with internal combustion machines in his home workshop in 1891.He was one of many would-be-inventors working on plans for the automobile; and he discussed his project with other mechanics and businessmen working in Detroit. In 1896 Ford succeeded in building an automobile powered by a gasoline engine which he had built in his kitchen sink. Running on four horsepower, the car could reach a speed of 25 miles per hour.
Ford organized the Detroit Automobile
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Company in 1899 and produced a small number of cars before the company collapsed two years later. He designed and manufactured racing cars, and in 1900, raced one model at 70 miles per hour.
In 1903, at the age of 40, and with an investment of $28,000, Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company. The automobile was still considered a toy of the rich, and Ford set about to change this situation.
Ford's philosophy of manufacturing and business is set forth in his autobiography:
"Ask a hundred people how they want a particular article made. About eighty will not know; they will leave it to you. Fifteen will think that they must say something, while five will really have preferences and reasons. The ninety-five, made up of those who do not know and admit it and the fifteen who do not know but do not admit it, constitute the real market for any product. The majority will consider quality and buy the biggest dollar's worth of quality. If therefore you discover what will give this 95 percent of the people the best all-round service and then arrange to manufacture at the very highest quality and sell at the very lowest price, you will be meeting a demand which is so large that it may be called universal....The only further step required is to throw overboard the idea of pricing on what the traffic will bear and instead go to the common-sense basis of pricing on what it costs to manufacture and then
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reducing the cost of manufacture..."
In the early years of the company's existence, Ford was involved in legal battles challenging patents which restricted his freedom to alter the internal combustion engine to better suit the car he wished to build. Winning a clear victory in the courts, Henry Ford established an early reputation as a foe of monopolies and the champion of the common man.
The Model T Ford was introduced in 1908. It was boxy and tinny-looking, as its nickname, the "Tin Lizzie," implied; but it was within the purchasing power of people who were not rich. It fulfilled the goal which Ford had set for himself:
"I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials by the best men to be hired, after the simpliest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."
Ford was able to lower the price of the Model T from the $850, which it cost when it first appeared, to $360 in 1916. He did this by introducing mass production assembly line techniques. In 1913 Ford conducted his first test of assembly line manufacture. He drew up the techniques which he had observed in a Chicago meat packing plant
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where an overhead trolley moved the carcasses of animals from one butcher to another; since each butcher had a special job, he could do his cutting work faster and more efficiently than when he had to cut up the whole animal by himself.
The assembly line revolutionized car production. A chassis that formely took 12,5 hours to build in the shop, now rolled off the assembly line in an hour and a half. This made it possible to triple the production of Model T's within three years.
Ford also introduced the $5.00 wage for an eight-hour day. Such a salary was unheard of in 1914, and he attracted both national and international attention when he began this practice. He also introduced a plan which allowed his workers to share in the profits of the company - the profit sharing plan whichis used by many companies today.
Ford's early accomplishments fit in well with the optimism and idealism of the period. Alongside of the political reforms of the Progressive Era, as the years preceeding World War I were called, Ford's commitment to the free market, to making a socially useful product, and to technological advancement suggested that a new and better way of life was at hand.
Following the outbreak of war, Ford paid for the voyage of the Oscar // (popularly known as the Ford Peace Ship) which brought a group of pacifists and feminists to Scandinavia in 1916 to work toward
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ending the war through neutral mediation. He also offered a large prize for a history of war that would "show war in all its horrors, instead of glorifying the slaughter - a history that shall discourage war by telling of the great things of peace."
Ford was a genuine folk hereto the American people. He represented the virtues of an older, simpler agrarian society—hard work, self-reliance, and thrift even though he contributed to the demise of agrarian life. He was a colorful figure, and stories of his love of running (long before the days of jogging) and his strange notions about diet (he sometimes ate grass sandwiches) were well known. People had an idea of who Henry Ford was - and he in turn, seemed to know what the American people wanted in terms of a product.
During the 1920s, however, the Ford Motor Company lost much of its popularity with the American public. When other manufacturers introduced more stylish, relatively inexpensive cars, Ford automobile sales began to drop. Though he closed his factories for 18 months in 1927-28 to prepare for a new Ford car, the Model A, he never regained his position of leadership in the car industry.
This was due either to Ford's unwillingness or inability to change with the time. Already in his sixties, his ideas seemed to become fixed. He said, at this time: "I don't like books. They muss up my mind." And to a great extent, he became isolated
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and a prisoner of his own prejudices. An early leader in, labor-management relations, Ford later resisted the efforts of his workers to unionize
and enter into collective bargaining. Only after a strike by his workers in 1941, did Ford, at the age of 78, accept union membership for his employees.
As owner of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford accumulated more than $1 billion. Between the years 1908 and 1947, when he died, he contributed more than $40 million to charitable causes, such as public hospitals, and research institutions. He established the Ford Foundation which continues to support various programs in education, media, and culture. And he constructed Greenfield Village, near his birthplace in Michigan, as a living museum representing the industrialization of America.
A controversial figure, Ford saw his ideas adopted and applied throughout the world. Yet Ford himself was frequently the target of criticism. When he ran for public office in 1918, as Democratic candidate for Senator for the state of Michigan, he was defeated. In his satire, Brave New World, Aldus Huxley used Ford's name as a curse, and even the comic genius Charles Chaplin ridiculed Ford's
contributions in his film Modern Times. Without a doubt, however, Ford was a technological genius.
Not a great inventor, he was able to borrow ideas and apply them to new uses. In bringing the automobile to the average worker, he altered the structure of society, its cities, and the nations of the
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