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Henry Ford Essay, Research Paper

HENRY FORD

(1863-1947)

American Industrialist

Dennis Keating

English 103

Professor Tague

May 12, 2000

“A bore is a fellow who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.”

-Henry Ford

Henry Ford’s parents left Ireland during the potato famine and settled in the Detroit area in the 1840s. Henry Ford, born July 30, 1863, was the first of William and Mary Ford’s six children. He grew up on a prosperous family farm in what is today Dearborn, Michigan. Henry enjoyed a childhood 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. He had an intelligent, inquisitive nature and was energized by the huge growth of industry occurring in the Detroit area. He was also an avid experimenter. Once, in order to prove the power of steam, he plugged up the spout of a teakettle full of boiling water and it blew apart! As he grew up his father allowed him to “tinker” with many of the tools on the farm. Ford’s mother called him a “born mechanic” and provided him with darning needles and corset stays to make into tools for his watch repair work.

Probably the most dramatic event in Henry Ford’s life happened in 1876 when he was thirteen years old. While riding with his father in a wagon, they saw a steam engine traveling along the road under its own power! Ford jumped off the wagon and excitedly began to question the driver about this remarkable engine. Used for stationary purposes such as sawing wood, the engine had been mounted on wheels to propel itself. The engineer explained all about the machine and even let Ford fire the engine and run it. Ford later said, “That showed me that I was by instinct an engineer.” The seed was planted that there could be a self-propelled vehicle and that thought would haunt his imagination for years.

Although he yearned to go to Detroit and work in the machine shops, Ford stayed on the farm helping the family until he was seventeen. Then, with his father’s blessing, he moved to Detroit and started working at the Michigan Car Company for $1.10 a day. He was fired shortly thereafter because he angered the older employees by making repairs in a ? hour instead of the usual five hours. By 1882 Ford had left Detroit and used the family farm for his address as he traveled around from job to job. In 1885, at a party, he met Clara Jane Bryant. They married April 11, 1888 and their only child, Edsel, named after his boyhood friend Edsel Ruddiman, was born November 6, 1893.

Ford had never given up his dream of a “horseless carriage.” Whenever he had a spare moment he read about gas engines and experimented in his own workshop. By 1891 he and Clara had moved back to Detroit and Ford began working for Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. His promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. In 1893, Ford built a gasoline engine, and within a few years, an automobile, still a novelty item of the rich or do-it-yourself engineers. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle-the Quadricycle. 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. Although Ford was not the first to build a self-propelled vehicle with a gasoline engine, he was, however, one of several automotive pioneers who helped this country become a nation of motorists. Ford’s Quadricycle was ready for a try-out in 1896. It frightened the horses and caused many a protest, but it ran.

It was through working at the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company that Ford met Thomas Edison. At a convention Ford was introduced to Edison as “the young fellow who’s made a gas car.” After discussing his ideas with the great inventor, Ford was glad to hear that Edison thought his ideas had merit. Edison told him, “Young man, you have it, a self-contained unit carrying its own fuel. Keep at it!” The meeting with Thomas Edison gave Henry Ford fresh inspiration and his spirit was renewed by the famous inventor’s words of encouragement.

By 1899 Ford had produced an operable car that was written up in the Detroit Journal. Ford was described as a “mechanical engineer.” Eventually his work developing automobiles conflicted with his position at the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company. Even though the company was well pleased with his work and offered him the General Superintendent position, they asked him to make a choice. Could he give up his “hobby” of automobile building and devote himself to the company? Ford made the decision. He wanted to make automobiles.

In 1899 Ford left Edison to help run the Detroit Automobile Company. Cars were still built essentially one at a time. Ford hoped to incorporate ideas from other industries — standardized parts as Eli Whitney had used with gun manufacturing, or assembly line methods George Eastman tried in photo processing — to make the process more efficient. This idea struck others in his field as nutty, so before long, Ford quite Detroit Automobile Company and began to build his own racing cars. After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The infant company produced only a few cars a day at the Ford factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit. Groups of two or three men worked on each car from components made to order by other companies. In the winter of 1906, Ford had secretly partitioned a twelve-by fifteen-foot room in his plant, on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. With a

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