Henry Ford: The Man Who Made America Move

At 4 a.m. on June 4, 1896, Henry Ford finished building his first automobile in a brick shed behind his rented duplex in Detroit. Then he discovered it wouldn’t fit through the door. He grabbed an axe, knocked out part of the wall, and took the thing for a drive.

That willingness to smash through obstacles—sometimes literally—defined Ford’s career. He failed at two automobile companies before founding a third. He enraged Wall Street by paying workers double the going rate. He bet his fortune on a single car model when competitors offered dozens. Most of the time, it worked.

Growing Up on a Michigan Farm

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in Springwells Township, Michigan, about nine miles from Detroit. He was the eldest of six children born to William and Mary Ford. His father had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, in 1847.

Ford attended a one-room schoolhouse for eight years and spent the rest of his time doing farm chores. He hated them. “My earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Ford loved machinery. By age 12, he had set up his own machine shop in a shed on the family property. He taught himself watch repair, making his own tools from old nails and discarded corset springs. At 15, he built his first steam engine from scrap metal and junkyard parts. At 16, he walked to Detroit to find work in the machine shops.

Early Career as a Machinist and Engineer

Ford’s early career followed a winding path through Detroit’s growing industrial economy.

The Detroit Automobile Company failed within 18 months. A second venture, the Henry Ford Company, lasted four months before Ford left over disagreements with investors. That company was later reorganized as Cadillac.

The Quadricycle and Ford’s First Experiments with Automobiles

While working nights at the Edison Illuminating Company, Ford spent his spare time tinkering with gasoline engines. In 1893, he built a small one-cylinder engine on the kitchen table of his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. His wife Clara held the intake valve open while he dripped gasoline into it.

Three years later came the Quadricycle—a frame fitted with four bicycle wheels, powered by a two-cylinder gasoline engine. It had no reverse gear and no brakes worth mentioning. Ford sold it for $200 and immediately started on a second version.

Founding Ford Motor Company in 1903

On June 16, 1903, Ford tried again. With $28,000 from a group of investors, he founded the Ford Motor Company. This time it worked.

Ford’s approach differed from other automakers. While competitors built expensive cars for the wealthy, Ford wanted to build what he called “a motor car for the great multitude.” He went through a series of models—A, B, C, F, K, N, R, S—before arriving at the design that would change everything.

The Model T Transforms American Transportation

The Model T debuted on October 1, 1908. Ford described his vision: “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”

The car was an immediate success. Within days of its announcement, Ford had 15,000 orders.

Key Model T innovations:

• Steering wheel on the left side (most American cars had it on the right)
• Engine block and crankcase cast as a single unit
• Removable cylinder head for easy access
• Extensive use of vanadium steel, a lightweight but strong alloy
• Simple planetary transmission that made shifting gears easy
• High ground clearance for rough American roads

The Model T became famous for its durability. It climbed the stairs of the Tennessee State Capitol and reached the top of Pikes Peak. Ford boasted: “There’s no use trying to pass a Ford, because there’s always another one just ahead.”

The Moving Assembly Line at Highland Park

In 1910, Ford moved production to a massive new plant in Highland Park, Michigan, designed by architect Albert Kahn. There, Ford’s engineers began experimenting with ways to speed up manufacturing.

The inspiration came from an unlikely source: Chicago meatpacking plants, where overhead trolleys moved carcasses past workers who each performed a single cutting operation. Ford’s team reversed the process—instead of disassembly, they would build cars piece by piece along a moving line.

The first moving assembly line started on October 7, 1913. Workers had previously built flywheel magnetos individually, taking about 20 minutes each. The new system divided the work into 29 operations performed by 29 men along a moving belt. Assembly time dropped to 13 minutes, then to 5.

On December 1, 1913, Ford installed the first moving assembly line for complete automobiles. The chassis moved past workers on a motor-driven belt at six feet per minute.

By May 1927, Ford had sold over 15 million Model Ts. It remained the best-selling car in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.

“Any Color So Long As It Is Black”

The famous quote appears in Ford’s 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work. He describes a 1909 meeting with salespeople who wanted more models. “I remarked: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.'”

The reality was more complicated. From 1908 to 1913, the Model T came in gray, green, blue, and red. The black-only policy began in 1914, the same year the assembly line reached full speed. Black paint was cheapest and most durable. Using a single color meant the line never stopped for equipment cleaning.

Colors returned in 1926, just before the Model T was discontinued.

The $5 Day That Changed American Labor

The assembly line made cars faster, but workers hated it. The work was repetitive, relentless, and boring. By late 1913, Ford’s labor turnover had reached 370 percent. The company had to hire 53,000 workers a year just to keep 14,000 jobs filled.

On January 5, 1914, Ford announced a solution that stunned the business world. He would pay workers $5 for an eight-hour day, more than double the previous rate of $2.34 for nine hours. The financial editor of the New York Times reportedly staggered into the newsroom and asked his colleagues: “He’s crazy, isn’t he? Don’t you think he’s crazy?”

The $5 day came with conditions. It was technically a profit-sharing plan, with the base wage remaining at about $2.30. To qualify for the bonus, workers had to meet requirements set by Ford’s Sociological Department:

• Abstain from alcohol
• Not physically abuse their families
• Not take in boarders
• Keep their homes clean
• Contribute regularly to savings

Within one year, employee turnover fell from 370 percent to 16 percent. Production increased by over 40 percent. Other automakers raised their wages to compete for workers.

The River Rouge Complex: World’s Largest Integrated Factory

In 1915, Ford purchased 2,000 acres along the Rouge River in Dearborn. He originally considered turning it into a bird sanctuary. World War I changed those plans. The Navy asked Ford to build submarine-chasing vessels called Eagle Boats, and Ford erected the first buildings on the site to fulfill the contract.

By 1928, the Rouge had become the largest integrated factory in the world.

River Rouge Complex specifications:

• 1.5 miles wide by 1 mile long
• 93 buildings
• 16 million square feet of factory floor space
• 100 miles of internal railroad track
• Peak employment: 120,000 workers during World War II

The Rouge embodied Ford’s vision of vertical integration—controlling every step from raw materials to finished product. Raw materials came in one end, finished automobiles rolled out the other.

Facilities at River Rouge:

• Dock facilities for Great Lakes ore freighters
• Blast furnaces and steel mills
• Foundries and rolling mills
• A glass manufacturing plant
• A tire factory
• Its own power plant generating electricity for the complex

Ford controlled the entire supply chain. He owned 700,000 acres of forest, iron mines in Michigan and Minnesota, coal mines in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and even a rubber plantation in Brazil called Fordlandia.

The Ford Tri-Motor Airplane Takes to the Skies

In 1925, Ford purchased the Stout Metal Airplane Company. The Ford Tri-Motor, nicknamed the “Tin Goose,” first flew on June 11, 1926.

The all-metal, three-engine design solved a problem for the young airline industry. Wood-and-fabric aircraft made passengers nervous. The Ford name and metal construction made air travel seem safer.

Ford Tri-Motor achievements:

• Richard Byrd flew a Tri-Motor over the South Pole in 1929
• Transcontinental Air Transport used Tri-Motors for the first regular coast-to-coast air-rail passenger service in 1929
• Pan American used Tri-Motors for regular international airmail starting in 1927
• Franklin D. Roosevelt chartered a Tri-Motor in 1932, becoming the first major-party presidential candidate to fly

Ford helped build out early aviation infrastructure: paved runways, passenger terminals, hangars, airmail routes, and radio navigation systems. The company stopped making aircraft in 1933, but the Tri-Motor’s rugged construction kept many flying for decades.

The Flathead V8 Engine of 1932

After the Model T was discontinued in 1927, Ford introduced the Model A. But by the early 1930s, Ford needed something new to compete with Chevrolet’s more powerful six-cylinder engine.

In 1930, Ford launched a secret project to develop an affordable V8 engine. Most engineers thought it impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine block as a single unit at low cost. Ford’s team spent two years on the problem.

The flathead Ford V8 came out in 1932—the first low-priced eight-cylinder engine. It produced 65 horsepower, far more than competitors at the same price point. Variants remained in Ford vehicles for twenty years.

Charcoal Briquettes: Turning Factory Waste into Profit

Ford hated waste. When his sawmills in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula produced mountains of wood scraps, he looked for ways to use them.

Working with a chemist named Orin Stafford, Ford developed a process for converting wood waste into charcoal briquettes. The scraps were burned in special ovens, crushed, mixed with cornstarch, and compressed into uniform lumps.

Ford’s brother-in-law, E.G. Kingsford, helped establish the charcoal manufacturing operation. The product was sold through Ford dealerships alongside cars and eventually became Kingsford Charcoal—still one of the leading brands today.

At peak production, the operation turned out nearly 100 tons of briquettes daily.

Soybean Research and the Experimental Plastic Car of 1941

In the 1920s, Ford became obsessed with finding industrial uses for agricultural products. He believed farmers and manufacturers should work together, and he established a research laboratory dedicated to the idea.

In 1931, Ford settled on soybeans as his focus. His researchers extracted oil for paints and protein meal for plastics. By the mid-1930s, Ford was using soybean-based materials in car parts including gearshift knobs, horn buttons, and interior trim.

Soybean applications at Ford:

• Soybean oil for enamel paints
• Soybean meal for plastic parts
• Soybean-based fabric for upholstery
• Soybean oil for glycerin (used in shock absorbers)

In August 1941, Ford unveiled a prototype car with body panels made from soybean-based plastic. The “soybean car” weighed about 1,000 pounds less than a conventional steel-bodied vehicle. Ford demonstrated the panels’ strength by hitting them with an axe.

World War II ended the project before it reached production.

The Village Industries: Small Factories in Rural Michigan

Ford didn’t just want to transform cities. He wanted to preserve rural life while bringing it the benefits of industry.

Starting in the 1920s, he built a network of small factories in rural Michigan, powered by local waterways. These “village industries” produced parts for Ford vehicles—everything from generator cutouts to cigar lighters—while allowing workers to remain in their communities and continue farming part-time.

At their peak, about twenty village industry plants employed several thousand workers. Ford saw them as an alternative to massive urban factories. Most closed after his death.

The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

Ford had a deep interest in American history, particularly the everyday objects of rural and small-town life. In 1929, he opened the Edison Institute (now the Henry Ford Museum) in Dearborn to house his vast collection.

Greenfield Village, adjacent to the museum, gathered more than 80 historic structures from across America: Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, and the Redstone Schoolhouse from Sterling, Massachusetts—supposedly the school from “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Labor Conflicts and the Battle of the Overpass

Ford’s relationship with workers grew hostile during the 1930s. He promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department—officially responsible for plant security, but in practice a force for intimidating workers and blocking union organizers.

Bennett hired ex-convicts and boxers as enforcers. Workers who talked to union representatives risked being followed, harassed, or fired. The Service Department maintained files on employees and planted informants on the factory floor.

On March 7, 1932, during the Great Depression, unemployed workers marched to the Rouge plant to present demands. Dearborn police and Ford security guards opened fire. Five marchers died. Sixty more were injured.

On May 26, 1937, Bennett’s men attacked United Automobile Workers organizers, including Walter Reuther, with clubs outside the Rouge plant. Photographers captured the beatings. The pictures ran in newspapers nationwide, and the incident became known as the Battle of the Overpass.

Ford resisted unionization longer than GM or Chrysler. In April 1941, 50,000 Rouge workers went on strike. Under pressure from his son Edsel, the unions, and the federal government (which had war contracts at stake), Ford finally signed an agreement in June. He gave the UAW a union shop, top industry wages, and dues deducted from paychecks.

The Final Years and Death of Henry Ford

Edsel Ford died of stomach cancer on May 26, 1943, at age 49. Henry, then 79, resumed control of the company but was too frail to make decisions effectively.

By 1945, Ford’s wife Clara and Edsel’s widow Eleanor threatened to sell their stock if Henry didn’t turn over control to his grandson, Henry Ford II. He agreed and formally retired in September 1945.

Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947, at age 83, from a cerebral hemorrhage at his estate, Fair Lane, in Dearborn. Flooding on the Rouge River had cut electrical power to the house. He died by kerosene lamp.

An estimated 100,000 people viewed his remains at Greenfield Village. Ford factories and showrooms worldwide closed.

Legacy: How Ford Changed American Life

Henry Ford left most of his wealth to the Ford Foundation, which became one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations. Control of the company passed to his family, where it remained for decades.

In 1999, Fortune magazine named Henry Ford the Businessman of the Century.

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