Greenfield Village at Dearborn, Michigan is a fun place to visit. There is a museum right next to it. The whole complex is now called The Henry Ford. Nearly 100 historical buildings were moved to the property from their original locations and arranged in a “village” setting. It is like passing through a time machine that we went back three hundred years ago and come to the present while wondering in the village. I was attracted to the exhibits of Edison, the original light bulb powered by the direct current, and a working phonograph with tin as the recording media. At the urge of the staff, I sang Mary Had a Little Lamb and it did play back. The sound quality is poor compared to what we have currently, of course. The tin media can be reused again after you smooth it out, so it is like a re-writable disk today in the computer. It goes without saying that the Model T cars are genuine and are ready for you to take a ride. The museum is educational full of historical exhibitions and houses the cars and engines in a large section for people interested in mechanics. An IMAX theater was added later after my visit. I learned a lot about Henry Ford in my visit.
Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan. Henry is the oldest son of six children and grew up on a well-to-do family farm. His childhood was typical of the rural nineteenth century, spending days in a one-room school and doing farm chores. At an early age, he showed an interest in mechanical things and a dislike for farm work.
In his autobiography, Henry wrote, “my mother always said that I was born a mechanic.” “In those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home made. My toys were all tools, and every fragment of machinery was a treasure.” “The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine about eight miles out of Detroit one day. I was then twelve years old. The second biggest event was getting a watch, which happened in the same year.”
From the beginning I never could work up much interest in the labour of farming. I wanted to have something to do with machinery. My father was not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that I ought to be a farmer.
He became a self-taught watch repairman and supposedly could repair any timepiece that had not been crushed. At 15, Ford dismantled and reassembled the timepieces of friends and neighbors dozens of times, gaining the reputation of a watch repairman. In 1879, he left home to work as an apprentice machinist in the city of Detroit. “having a liking for fine work and a leaning toward watches I worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. At one period of those early days I think that I must have had fully repaired three hundred watches”. Henry demonstrated his engineering talents and a desire to take up challenges early as he wrote, “It was just about the time when the standard railroad time was being arranged. We had formerly been on sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a good deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighborhood.”
In 1882, he returned to Dearborn to work on the family farm, where he became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He was later hired by Westinghouse Company to service their steam engines. Upon his marriage to Clara Bryant in 1888, Henry supported himself and his wife by running a saw-mill. In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, where he later met Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison played an important role for encouraging Henry Ford in his pursuit of a vehicle for the mass. They became life-long friends. This move to Detroit signified a conscious decision on Ford’s part to dedicate his life to industrial pursuits. His promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. His son, Edsel Bryant Ford, was also born in 1893.
These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of a self-propelled vehicle-the Quadricycle. The vehicle was built inside his house and it was too big to get through the house door, so he had to knock out the wall to get it out. The Quadricycle had four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, was steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse. This exemplifies what it went through in a pioneer venture with unforeseen problems.
Many companies participated in the horseless vehicle industry at the time. However, the price was two and three times higher than a horse and carriage for under $500 and yearly board for $180 in 1895 on top of the notoriously unreliable quality problem. Olds Motor Vehicle Company was able to produce a car at $650 comparable to the horse-trading level in 1903. By 1904, more than 12,500 ‘curved dash’ Oldsmobile had been sold. Unlike many of the current entrepreneurs who succeed at young age, Henry did not get to the tipping point of his career until over age 40 due to his insistence to produce a “perfect” vehicle – affordable good car to the masses. After a few trials of building cars and companies, in 1903, Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company. Ford introduced the Model T in October of 1908 at a price of $850. At the time, this amount was $1,200 less than most other cars. This was still more than the earlier 1903 $650 Olds but it was also 5 years later and the Model T was a better car. The Model T used many advanced technologies at the time for transmission, suspensions, and engine start. There were no paved roads, and the rough terrains caused the vehicle to breakdown often. Model T overcame the tough road conditions and gained popularity with the farmers. The T was Farmer’s Best Friend. The T was easier to start (you need to crank the engine to start), so the house-wives could drive it also. It met the needs of the market at the time.
With improvements in the assembly line, Ford was able to drop his prices and many more units were sold. In 1913, the price dropped to $550, and $440 in 1915, $360 in 1916, and under $300 in the 1920s ($240 in 1925). In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months’ pay. Believe it or not, Ford’s profit on each Model T Ford sold was only about $2, but he sold more than 15 million of them during the Model T’s nineteen production years: 1908 -1927. And contrary to popular belief, Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. That honor goes to Ransom Olds (Oldsmobile) but it was Ford who took Olds’ assembly line method of manufacturing and improved upon it with advanced automation. Initially, only 11 cars were built during the first full month of production. Productivity was achieved by streamlining the process and using less manpower. It used to require 12.5 hours to assemble a car but was reduced to 93 minutes. With multiple production lines, Ford’s cars came off the line in three-minute intervals. The Model T was a great commercial success, and 50 percent of all cars in the world were Fords by 1918. Automobiles became such an important part of US economy that the Auto industry employed one out of six America workers in late 20th century prior to the shakedown in Detroit of financial crisis.
Henry Ford had a strong ego and ran his company in an autocratic style. He was paranoid at details and intolerant to differences. To keep at top efficiency in the mass production assembly line, he eliminated all variations including the color choices of the car. He said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. He also clinched to power and dominated people around him. He thought that his son Edsel needed to show power and strength, so he trained Edsel in a Spartan way and constantly pushed down on his son without realizing that everyone is different. You cannot force a person to be like you even your son. Edsel died of cancer in May, 1943. The relationships were strained between father and son. It is really sad in my opinion.
Henry Ford befriended with Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs in his life. It was Burroughs who introduced the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry, and he was heavily influenced by Emerson ever since they met in 1913. Emerson opened Henry’s mind and lifted his spirits to a higher level. Henry found in Emerson the technological sublime that machines were new and necessary facts which, when designed and employed with integrity, were essentially in harmony with nature.
Henry Ford worked out the relationships of the business, employees, and society as he learned deeply from Emerson. The Ford Company introduced a $5 per day wages for an eighth-our day from a $2.34 ten-hour day pay in January 1914. It was unheard-of at the time when business usually squeezed the workers to maximize the profits. The approach improved the morale of the employees, and increased the productivity which then allowed the company to reduce the price without sacrificing the profits. In turn, the lower price attracted more people to buy including the employees. The net effect propelled America into a consumer society.
In one advertising campaign, the marketing staff came up the slogan of “Buy a Ford and Save the Difference!” Henry revised it to read “Buy a Ford and Spend the Difference!” Saving money was good, Henry explained, but if carried too far it would strangle American industry. Spending, rather than saving, now held the key to happiness, and it is the wiser thing to do. “Society lives by circulation, and not by congestion.”
In ill health, Henry Ford ceded the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II in September 1945 and went into retirement. He died in 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 83 in Fair Lane, his Dearborn estate. His legacy lives on and the Ford Company survived the financial crisis occurred in 2008.
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Written in March 2013