Transforming the automobile from a costly luxury for the elite into an indispensable component of modern society and civilization
Henry Ford
(1863–1947)
Henry Ford was a disruptive innovator, but not an inventor. Ask who invented the automobile, and “Ford” is likely to be the most frequent answer. Ask who invented the assembly line, and, among those who can come up with any answer, it will almost certainly be “Henry Ford.” But Ford invented neither the car nor the assembly line. In fact, he invented nothing at all. Nevertheless, this captain of early twentieth-century American industry created more disruptions of the social, economic, technological, political, and material environment than any inventor ever did or (probably) ever could.
Ford was born on July 30, 1863, in Michigan’s Greenfield Township. His father, William, was a farmer hailing from County Cork, Ireland, and his mother, Mary Litogot, was a born Michigander, the daughter of Belgian immigrants. Ford had four siblings, two boys and two girls.
There is a story about young Henry, one of those stories that seems so fitting as to be fiction. William gave his teenage son a pocket watch, which Henry took apart and—more importantly—reassembled repeatedly for the edification and entertainment of his friends and neighbors. True or not, Henry never seriously considered becoming a farmer like his father. Crops didn’t interest him. Machinery did. And so, in 1879, he packed his things and set off for nearby Detroit, where he apprenticed to a machinist’s firm, James F. Flower & Bros., and then moved on to the Detroit Dry Dock Co. He returned to Dearborn and the farm in 1882, but soon earned a local reputation for his ability to operate, adjust, maintain, and repair the Westinghouse portable steam engine, which was growing in popularity among farmers. The Westinghouse company hired Ford to service their steam engines.
But if young Henry did not see himself as a farmer, neither did he see himself as simply a mechanic. He took an accounting and bookkeeping course at Goldsmith, Bryant & Stratton Business College in Detroit. Clearly, he had a vision of someday running his own enterprise.
But not quite yet. In 1888, when he was twenty-five, Henry Ford married Clara Jane Bryant. He returned to farming to ensure that he could support his wife, and he made extra money operating a sawmill. In 1893, their one child, Edsel, was born. That was the same year Henry was promoted to chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company, a Detroit firm he had joined two years earlier. Being the chief had its perks, including the spare cash and time to invest in tinkering with a device Ford found fascinating: the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. He did not invent that engine, but he did modify it for use in a small self-propelled vehicle he hand-built in 1896, the Quadricycle, which he took for its first spin on June 4. It was his first automobile—and it was a wonder. But it was not the first automobile. Carl Benz had patented the first vehicle powered by a gasoline engine ten years earlier, on January 29, 1886.
Eighteen ninety-six was also the year that Ford met his boss, Thomas Edison, at a meeting of Edison company executives. He told the inventor-industrialist about his automotive experiments. Had Edison been more of an industrialist and less of an inventor, he might have expressed some displeasure at his employee’s extracurricular use of his time. Instead, Edison encouraged Ford and advised him to keep experimenting—Edison being the trial-and-error inventor who once declared “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
Edison was enough of a businessman to recognize that Ford was far from alone in his automotive passion. A lot of young men in America were building cars in their barns and sheds, just like Henry Ford. Unlike him, however, most stopped after they had managed to get something to run. Ford, however, recognized that the Quadricycle, with its four wire-spoke bicycle-type wheels and its inability to travel in reverse, left room for a great deal of improvement. He did not want merely to build an automobile, he wanted to build and sell many automobiles.
In 1898, two years after the debut of the Quadricycle, Ford built his second vehicle. He designed it as a prototype to recruit investors in a company—his company—to manufacture what the world was calling horseless carriages. In two ways, Ford had achieved success: his second automobile was much better than his first, and he had demonstrated a genius for putting his vision into words sufficiently persuasive to attract investment. In a third way, however, Ford failed. He could not generate sufficient demand to make his new vehicle a commercial success. He tried again, with a second company. When it also failed, Ford decided that he had to do something to create public excitement about the automobile.
He realized that there was nothing all that exciting about a “horseless carriage”; but just as everyone loved a horse race, the prospect of racing cars was even more exciting. He recruited a former bicycle racer named Tom Cooper to work with him on a race car with a large, better-than-80-horsepower motor. He called it the 999 and paid America’s first professional racecar driver, Barney Oldfield, to race it. In an October 1902 contest, the 999 beat all comers.
The 999 was an impressive vehicle and attracted to Ford the financial backing of a friend, Alexander Y. Malcomson, a prosperous Detroit-area coal dealer. Together, they started Ford & Malcomson, Ltd., to manufacture automobiles—inexpensive cars within reach of any reasonably well-off driver. With slow sales, Malcomson convinced Ford of the need to reincorporate with more investors, and on June 16, 1903, the Ford Motor Company was born. A second version of the 999 helped to publicize the new company when it achieved a record-breaking speed of 91.37 mph in a demonstration on a frozen Lake Clair.
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American myth focuses on Ford working alone in a shed to build his Quadricycle. Americans like stories about “lone wolf” inventors who work (like Ford) in a shed or (like Steve Jobs) in a garage. But one of Henry Ford’s greatest talents was an instinct for talent in others and his natural ability to build a team of really good people. The vehicles he developed after 1896 and 1898 were all the efforts of a company of talented people.
The Ford Motor Company’s first car was the Model A—of 1903–1904, not to be confused with the Model A series of 1927–1931. It was a practical vehicle, available in two- and four-seat versions, looking significantly less like a carriage (horseless or otherwise) and more like an automobile. Most notably, it had a steering wheel rather than the tiller on Ford’s 1896 and 1898 vehicles. Its 8-horsepower motor pushed the car to 28 mph, and its transmission offered two forward speeds and two in reverse as well. It was not cheap, at $800 to $900, and it was followed later in 1904 by a higher-end 24-horsepower Model B two-row, four-passenger touring car. The placement of the big engine, under a hood at the front of the vehicle, was a large step forward toward the look of a modern automobile. The price, however, was a steep $2,000 (equivalent to a $53,000 car today). A Model C was also offered, with a slightly more powerful engine than the Model A and a price of $850.
All of these were important vehicles, but all were inherently limited by their hefty price tags. A four-cylinder Model N, released in 1907, produced 15 horsepower and was priced at $500 to $600, a good enough value to make it the best-selling car in the country, which translated into just 7,000 units by 1908, the last year of production.
Ford believed he was going in the right direction—toward an affordable, high-value product. But he was impatient. Seven thousand cars counted as a success, but Ford dreamed much bigger. His disruptive vision was to manufacture a “motorcar for the great multitude.” That is the assignment he gave to a select working group of his top employees. The result, introduced on October 1, 1908, was the Model T.
Easy to operate, maintain, and handle on rough roads—which were the nation had in 1908—the new model had a redesigned four-cylinder, 20 horsepower engine that could easily achieve 45 mph. It had many new mechanical features and could run on gasoline, kerosene, or ethanol. It was water-cooled with water pumps, and it had an improved and highly reliable ignition system. Most of all, it was built to be sturdy and reliable. Even at an initial price of $850, it was a runaway success. Ford knew that he could easily sell all the Model Ts he could make, but he was determined to make all that could be sold. He invested in a bigger factory, which was ready by 1910, in Highland Park, north of Detroit.
But Ford realized that a big factory was not enough. He needed to find many more ways to both increase production and lower costs. Ford introduced a version of the still-evolving assembly-line method of manufacture. But the real breakthrough came after one of his employees, William “Pa” Klann, took a tour of the Swift & Company slaughterhouse in Chicago. What he saw was something the meatpacker’s managers called a “disassembly line.” Animal carcasses were suspended from an overhead conveyor that ran past a succession of workers, each of whom was responsible for removing one specified portion of the carcass as the suspended animal moved by. This specialization—numerous workers removing an assigned piece over and over instead of a single skilled butcher laboring over one whole carcass at a time—greatly increased efficiency.
Pa Klann brought the idea back to Ford’s Peter E. Martin, who, while skeptical, encouraged Klann to present the idea. Ford, who had recently toured an automated order-handling facility at the mail-order headquarters of Sears, Roebuck, was instantly excited by the possibility. Over a period of the next six years, through trial and error, a moving assembly line evolved within the new Highland Park plant.
In 1908, Ford produced 10,607 Model Ts that sold for $850. By 1916, when the assembly line had been perfected, the Highland Park plant turned out 730,041 cars at a retail price of $360, well within the reach of most American workers, including those who made the Model T. It was a sturdy, reliable, and generic product of mass production in one of its earliest incarnations. It changed not only America but civilization itself, fostering a consumer-driven society. The assembly-line-built Model T leveled economic classes by endowing them all with unprecedented mobility. The profusion of cars—by 1927, the final year of production, 15 million Model Ts had been manufactured—began the greater unification of the nation by stimulating a demand for an increasingly complex and far-reaching network of roads. The suburbanization of the country commenced. Equally profound was the impact of the Ford-perfected assembly line on the nature of work itself. The relation of labor to management was forever changed.
In some ways, it was not changed for the better. Ford workers grew restive over the demands of the assembly line, which forced them to keep pace with the machinery. The workday was repetitive and relentless. Turnover became a major problem, forcing the company to hire 53,000 people a year to keep 14,000 jobs staffed. Ford responded to the growing crisis with perhaps the most disruptive move any capitalist can make. In a single stroke, he doubled the wages of each assembly-line worker, paying an unheard-of $5 per day in 1914. The work was still miserable, but the pay could not be beat. As production rose, the price of the Model T dropped to a low of $269, and by 1922 one out of every two cars in the United States was a Model T.
Ford, wealthy as any plutocrat, was also a populist and an earnest antiwar activist who, in 1915, before U.S. entry into World War I, funded a “Peace Ship,” in which he led a citizen pacifist mission to Europe.
On the other hand, after the war, Ford also funded publication of a weekly anti-Semitic national newspaper, The Dearborn Independent; reprinted the confabulated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to expose a secret plot for world domination by Jews; and published a collection of his own anti-Semitic articles in a volume titled The International Jew. for which he accepted in 1938 the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the government of Nazi Germany. Hitler greatly approved of The International Jew, and, in a twist of tragic irony, the killing machine that was the Nazi death camps of World War II, in which millions of Jews were murdered and cremated with stunning efficiency, was inspired in part by Ford’s moving assembly line.