Ford, Henry

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The American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) is, along with Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, one of those who best symbolized the use of technology to transform human life in the early twentieth century. Ford himself recognized the social orientation of his efforts. As he explained in his 1922 autobiography, he believed that successful manufacturing was rooted in public service rather than in money making. He was equally clear about his own public service goal: "To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition." Somewhat unexpectedly, however, his focus shifted when he discovered "that people were more interested in something that would travel on the road than in something that would do the work on the farms".

Ford was born on a farm in Wayne County, Michigan, on July 30 and died in Dearborn, Michigan, on April 7. As a boy he experienced the agrarian way of life that once had dominated the American economy but that during his lifetime, in part as a result of his efforts, would be replaced by manufacturing. Among the relevant features of his youth were his education in rural schools (1871–1879), the early death of his mother (1876), and his fascination with machinery. That interest led to an apprenticeship in nearby Detroit (1879–1882) and a traveling job servicing steam traction engines. After his marriage in 1888 Ford's father gave him a forty-acre farm, but rather than take up farming, Henry Ford and his wife moved to Detroit, where he became an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company.

By the early 1890s, when Ford turned his attention to using internal combustion engines to power road vehicles, the effort to develop automobiles had been under way for several decades. By that time American manufacturers had incorporated the general principles of machine production, interchangeable parts, and cost-based management, along with other practices of the factory system and large-scale business. Thus, Ford began neither the specific process of creating automobiles nor the overall process of industrialization. However, he would achieve lasting fame as well as notoriety by helping bring both processes to full maturity.

Ford's historic achievement was twofold. First, he rethought the basic idea of the automobile (making him more an innovator than an inventor), by aiming not for a large luxury vehicle but for one that was light and sturdy enough for unimproved rural roads and inexpensive enough for the average family. Second, he, along with the mechanics and engineers he employed, redesigned the manufacturing process to allow for the mass production of a product of unprecedented complexity.

The main features of this frequently told story include the completion of Ford's first experimental car (1896), his early interest in building race cars (driven by Barney Oldfield), the formation of the Ford Motor Company (1903), the introduction of the Model N (1906), and the successful challenge of the Seldon patent (1911), which ruled that George B. Seldon, a Rochester lawyer who was issued a patent in 1896 for the horseless carriage, was not entitled to a royalty for each car manufactured. However, looming over everything else was the Model T. First sold in 1908 for $825, the Model T remained in production until 1927, by which time 15 million had been made and the price had dropped to $290.

To lower costs and increase output, the company adopted the practices of progressive assembly at its Highland Park plant. The capstone of that effort was the continuously moving assembly line for attaching the various components to the chassis, which was put in place during the winter of 1913–1914. Although not a direct application of scientific management, Ford's system bore similarities to it, including the dramatically higher pay rate of "the Five Dollar Day" (1914). During and after World War I the company went on to construct the River Rouge plant, where production of the Model T achieved a high degree of vertical integration.

This system was widely admired, copied, detested, and critiqued. Its place in the modern psyche can be seen in widely different cultural products, such as Charlie Chaplin's performance in the film Modern Times (1936) and the convention for numbering years that Aldous Huxley devised in Brave New World (1932): "A.F." for "After Ford."

Those achievements must be attributed to many people in addition to Henry Ford. Nevertheless, Ford personally led the enterprise. Before World War I the result was a highly favorable public image. However, "the Five Dollar Day" was accompanied by the systematic investigation by the Ford Motor Company of individual workers outside the plant, and after World War I that arrangement was replaced for the most part by a more traditional approach involving company spies and threats of violence. Meanwhile, with wealth and power also came the expression of personal idiosyncrasies. A newspaper Ford owned, for example, propounded anti-Semitic views that later struck a resonant chord in Nazi Germany.

From the vantage point of the present, however, probably the most significant of Ford's shortcomings was his failure to give up personal control of the company he had founded. He consolidated that control after World War I and held on to it until almost the time of his death. One result was continued production of the Model T until the company had saturated its market, making more difficult the conversion to other models (the Model A in 1928 and the V-8 engine in 1932). Limitations also can be seen in other products the company attempted to produce: submarine chasers during World War I and farm tractors and trimotor commercial aircraft in the interwar years. Even when the products were well conceived, problems arose with production or marketing; those problems could be traced back in part to Ford's personal control of the company.

Although the Ford Motor Company was his primary achievement, Henry Ford created other organizations of lasting importance, including the Ford Foundation and The Henry Ford (formerly the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village) in Dearborn, Michigan.

Automobiles;; Edison, Thomas;; Taylor, Frederick W.

Ford, Henry, with Samuel Crowther. (1922). My Life and Work. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. The first of several co-authored books that presented Ford's views and life story to the public.

Hounshell, David A. (1984). From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Places Ford's technological achievement in the context of the larger trend toward mass production.

Meyer, Stephen III. (1981). The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921. Albany: State University of New York Press. Explores the practices of Ford's company as a social system of production.

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. (1954). Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. (1957). Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. (1963). Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933–1962. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. These three books by Nevins and Hill remain the most detailed treatment of Ford and the company he founded.

Wik, Reynold M. (1972). Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Explores Ford's impact on popular culture.

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