Henry Ford was born in July 30, 1863, son of an Irish immigrant, William Ford. Williamʼs farm
was by most accounts quite prosperous and he hoped that young Henry would eventually take it
over. Unfortunately, Henry had little interest in farming. As he later remarked “I never had any
particular love for the farm. It was the mother on the farm I loved.” This remark obviously reflected
a note of melancholy as his mother died when he was only thirteen.
He had always shown a keen interest in things mechanical. By the time he was in his teens he had
earned a reputation as a handyman, capable of repairing a wide variety of tools and furnishings.
Even pocket watches posed no difficulty for him. He could quickly dissassemble and reassemble
the complex machinery, finding the smallest mechanical flaw. Henry was especially fascinated by
the self-propelled steam thresher he had seen when he was young and dreamed of one day producing
self propelled vehicles of his own.
Much to the shagrin of his father, in 1879 young Henry left home for Detroit and took up a job as
an apprentice machinist at James F. Flower & Bros. This was quickly followed by a stint with the
Detroit Dry Dock Co. Though he did return briefly to Dearborn to work on the family farm, he
quickly grew tired of the work. Fortunately for Henry the time was not entirely wasted: while at
his fatherʼs farm he developed a great familiarity with servicing the Westinghouse portable steam
engine, a skill he parlayed into a job with Westinghouse.
In 1888 he married Clara Byant and for several years supported himself by running a small sawmill
and even farming, though he disliked the work. In a few years Ford had moved on to became
an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company and by 1893 had been promoted to Chief Engineer.
This afforded him the time and resources to experiment with internal combustion engines
whose light weight, he felt, made them ideal for self propelled vehicles. Soon Ford had developed
his own vehicle called the Quadricycle which made its maiden voyage on June 4, 1896.
He launched the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899, but had a disagreement with his associates
and left soon thereafter. Undeterred, Ford solicited the funds of eleven other like minded investors,
and in 1903 incorporated the Ford Motor Company. Their first car was sold on July 23. In 1907
he bought out the shares of most of his partners which began the tradition of tight control of the
company by the Ford family.
As mentioned in a previous article, Ford cannot be properly credited with the “invention” of the assembly line
for several reasons. Aspects of the assembly line were in operation at least as early as the 1890s,
as the Westinghouse foundry used a system of small wheeled vehicles in the manufacture railway
brakes. Though obviously far less complicated than assembling an entire motorized vehicle, the
essential idea was already there. Further, meat packing plants had well established the reverse process
of “disassembly” which replaced individual butchers with workmen performing one or two cuts as the carcass flowed along a conveyor.
Though certainly less refined, Ransom E. Oldsʼs team should probably take credit for developing
a modern assembly line in 1901. Oldsʼs team made the crucial step of changing manufacture from
a series of individual stations to a single stream of assembly moving from one end of the factory to
the other. It was the tremendous gains in efficiency resulting the new arrangement which allowed
him to increase output from only 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 cars only one year later. Still, we have
to give credit where it is due. The Ford team extended these basic techniques to levels of efficiency
far beyond anything seen before.
