Ford

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young," Said Henry Ford to one reporter for the Work Employment Society. Ford was born on a prosperous farm in Springwells Township, now known as the city of Dearborn, Michigan. William Ford (1826-1905) and Mary Litogot, Ford's parents, were immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. The family was evicted from their land in Somerest, Ireland. During the summer of 1873, Henry saw his first self-propelled road machine, a stationary steam engine that could be used for threshing or to power a saw mill. The operator, Fred Reden, had mounted it on wheels connected with a drive chain. Henry was fascinated with the machine. Henry took this passion about mechanics into his home. His father had given him a pocket watch in his early teen years. By fifteen, he had a reputation as a watch repairman, having dismantled and reassembled watches of friends and neighbors dozens of times.

His mother died in 1876. That devastated young Henry. His father expected Henry to eventually take over the family farm. But Henry hated farm work, with his mother dead, there was no reason to keep him on the farm. He later said, "I never had any particular love for the farm. It was the mother on the farm I loved." www.hfmgv.org. In 1879, he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co. In 1882, he returned to Dearborn to work on the farm and became very good at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. This led to his being hired by Westinghouse Company to service their steam engines. In 1888, he married Clara Bryant and they had a single child, Edsel Bryant Ford (1893-1943). For the next three years he supported his family by farming and running a sawmill.

In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, and after his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893, he had enough time and money to devote his time to his personal experiments on gas engines. In 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the Quadricycle, which he test drove on June 4 1896. After various test-drives, Henry Ford brainstormed ways to improve the Quadricycle.

After this first success, Ford went to Edison Illuminating in 1899, with other investors and they formed the Detroit Automobile Company. The Detroit Automobile Company went bankrupt soon afterward because Ford continued to improve the design, instead of selling cars. Ford raced his vehicles against other manufacturers to show the greatness of his designs. With his interest in race cars, he formed a second company, the Henry Ford Company. During this period, he himself drove one of his cars to victory in a race against Alexander Winton, a well-known driver which the crowd favored on October 10, 1901. In 1902, Ford continued to work on his race car. They wanted a high-end production model and brought in Henry M. Leland to do it. Ford said later that "I resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders." www.ideafinder.com (1). The company was reorganized as Cadillac. Henry Ford, with eleven other investors and $28,000 in capital, incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In a newly-designed car, Ford drove in an exhibition in which the car covered the distance of a mile on the ice of Lake St. Clair in 39.4 seconds, which was a new land speed record. Convinced by this success, the famous racecar driver Barney Oldfield, named this new Ford model "999" in honor of a racing locomotive. Oldfield took the car around the country and thereby made the Ford brand known throughout the United States. Henry Ford was also one of the early racers of the Indianapolis 500. Henry Ford shocked his fellow workers by more than doubling the daily wage of most of his workers in 1914, eleven years after he established his first automobile factory. He knew what he was doing. The buying power of his workers was increased. Ford called it 'wage motive.

After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The infant company produced only a few cars a day at the Ford factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit. Groups of two or three men worked on each car from components made to order by other companies.

Henry Ford realized his dream of producing an automobile that was reasonably priced, reliable, and efficient with the introduction of the Model T in 1908. This vehicle initiated a new era in personal transportation. It was easy to operate, maintain, and handle on rough roads, immediately becoming a huge success.

By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model