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Ugo Okonkwo

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Henry Ford

Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)

Ford was born in Michigan to his parents, William and Mary Ford, immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. He was the eldest of six children.

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. After completion of his apprenticeship, Ford got a job with the Westinghouse company working on gasoline engines.

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 attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the Quadricycle, which he test-drove on June 4th that year (this was also the first automobile he ever drove).

After this initial success, Ford left Edison Illuminating and, with other investors, formed the Detroit Automobile Company . The Detroit Automobile Company, however, went bankrupt soon afterward because Ford continued to improve the design instead of selling cars. Ford raced his vehicles against those of other manufacturers to show the superiority of his designs. With the interest in his race cars, he formed a second company, the Henry Ford Company.

In the 1920s, Ford began work to turn Sudbury, Massachusetts into an Americana-themed historical village. He moved the schoolhouse from the Mary had a little lamb nursery rhyme from Sterling, Massachusetts and purchased the historical Wayside Inn. This plan never saw fruition, but Ford repeated it with the creation of Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It may have inspired the creation of Old Sturbridge Village as well.

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 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 race driver Barney Oldfield, who named this new Ford model "999" in honor of a racing locomotive of the day, took the car around the country and thereby made the Ford marque well-known throughout the U.S.

In 1908, the Ford company released the Model T. From 1909 to 1913, Ford entered stripped-down Model Ts into races as well, finishing first (although later disqualified) in an "ocean-to-ocean" (across the USA) race in 1909, and setting a one-mile oval speed record at Detroit Fairgrounds in 1911 with driver Frank Kulick.

Racing was, by 1913, no longer necessary from a publicity standpoint—the Model T was famous, and ubiquitous on American roads. It was in this year Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly belts into his plants, which enabled an enormous increase in production. By 1918 half of all cars in America were Model Ts.

On January 1, 1919, after unsuccessfully seeking a seat in the United States Senate, [1] Henry Ford turned the presidency of Ford Motor Company over to his son Edsel, although still maintaining a firm hand in its management—few company decisions under Edsel's presidency were made without being approved by Henry, and those few that were, Henry often reversed. Also at this time, Henry and Edsel purchased all remaining stock from other investors, thus becoming sole owners of the company. This began a period of decline for Ford Motor Company, since the stock buyout caused them to borrow heavily just before the postwar recession hit the country.

In about 1920, Ford purchased a vast tract of land in Brazil, to grow rubber for his car tires. It proved a financial disaster and by the time he sold it in 1945, he had lost a fortune.

By the mid 1920's, sales of the Model T began to decline, in part because of the rise of consumer credit. Other auto makers offered payment plans through which consumers could buy their cars, which usually included more modern mechanical features and styling not available with the Model T. Despite urgings from his son Edsel, the company president, Henry Ford steadfastly refused to incorporate new features into the Model T or to form a customer credit plan (the former to keep prices low and affordable, the latter because he believed such plans were bad for the economy).

By 1926, flagging sales of the Model T convinced Henry Ford of what Edsel had been suggesting for some time: a new model was necessary. The elder Ford pursued the project with a great deal of technical expertise in design of the engine, chassis and other mechanical necessities, while leaving it to his son to develop the body design. Edsel also managed to prevail over his father's initial objections in the inclusion of a sliding-shift transmission. The result was the highly successful Ford Model A, introduced December, 1927 and produced through 1931, with a total output of over four million automobiles. Subsequently the company adopted an annual model change system similar to that in use by automakers today.

During the thirties, Ford also overcame his objection to finance companies, and the Ford-owned Universal Credit Company became a major car financing operation.

Henry Ford long had an interest in plastics developed from agricultural products, especially soybeans. Soybean-based plastics were used in Ford automobiles throughout the 1930s in plastic parts such as car horns, in paint, etc. This project culminated in 1942, when on January 13 Ford patented an automobile made almost entirely of plastic, attached to a tubular welded frame. It weighed 30% less than a standard car of the same size, and was said to be able to withstand blows ten times greater than could steel. Futhermore, it ran on grain alchohol (ethanol Alcohol fuel) instead of gasoline. The design never caught on.

On May 26, 1943, Edsel Ford died, leaving a vacancy in the company presidency. Henry Ford advocated the spot be taken by Harry Bennett. Edsel's widow Eleanor, who had inherited Edsel's voting stock, wanted her son Henry Ford II to take over the position. The issue was settled for a period when Henry himself, at the age of 79, took over the presidency personally. The company saw hard times during the next two years, losing $10 million a month. President Roosevelt considered a federal bailout for Ford Motor Company so that wartime production could continue.

Ford also published, in his name, several anti-Jewish articles for the Independent which were released in the early 1920s as a set of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." Denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring rather to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves. These articles were written by several authors, including Ford's personal secretary of 34 years, Ernest Liebold. None were actually penned by Ford, though since he was the paper's publisher they required his tacit approval.

At the end of the war, the elder Henry, in ill health, ceded the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II on September 21, 1945 and went into retirement. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 83 at Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn, and is buried at the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.

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