“You must earn the right to play.”
When
the 20th century ended, Fortune magazine called him the
“Businessman of the Century.”
Of
his childhood inclinations, he would write, “My father was not entirely in
sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that I ought to be a
farmer.”
When
Henry Ford he left his father William’s farm at the age of 16 to seek fame
and fortune in nearby Detroit, he wrote, “I was all but given up for lost.”
His father often said, “Oh, Henry ain’t much of a farmer. He is more of
a tinkerer.”
As
a child, young Henry enjoyed taking apart and reassembling classmates’ pocket watches.
He and other boys built a steam engine using a 10-gallon can for a
boiler. When it exploded, sending tin shrapnel flying all
over the boys, one of the whizzing shards tore in to Ford’s face, leaving
a scar on his cheek.
An
early biographer wrote that he "worked with his tools always against the
wishes of his father.” He made pocket money repairing neighbors' watches.
He would wait until his father went to sleep before stealing away to their farm
houses to pick up broken timepieces.
When
Ford built a prototype car a few years later, his father disapproved of it,
saying “it was something that would scare all the horses off the road.” It’s
said he even called his son “an awful fool.”
As
my mother would have wished
Other
family accounts say father and son got along well. For example,
relatives say Ford didn’t exactly run off to Detroit. Although he walked, it
was only nine miles away, and he went to live with an aunt. When his first job
didn’t pan out, his father came to the future Motor City to
assure his new employer that he was a fine young man.
Ford doted on his mother Mary. “I have tried to live my life
as my mother would have wished,” he said.
He remembered the lessons she taught him, such as “Life will give you many
unpleasant tasks to do; your duty will be hard and disagreeable and painful to
you at times, but you must do it” and “You must earn the right to play.”
Mary
was also a fiend for efficiency. A half-century after her passing,
Ford said “Mother believed in doing things and getting things done, not in
talking about things and wishing they might be done. She was systematic and
orderly and thorough, and she demanded that from us.”
Sensible
words. Considering that her son would become famed for his skill at
mass-producing vast numbers of automobiles, her lessons clearly made a
difference in his development.
By
the end of the 1880s, the thought of building a horseless carriage obsessed
Ford. He experimented with designs for gas-powered engines at a time when
other entrepreneurs focused steam and electric-powered vehicles.
He was far from alone in his
interest in commercializing the horseless carriage. Between 1900 and 1908, 501
American companies vied for dominance in the emerging car industry.
In 1896 created (and drove) his
first vehicle, the Quadricycle. It had a two-cylinder engine, a steering bar,
bicycle tires mounted on a frame, a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and not
much else.
He wasn’t the first inventor to
drive a car in Detroit, but he wasn’t far behind. Literally. When that first
car made its debut in March 1896, Ford was there— engaging in
industrial espionage. He trailed his competitor on his bicycle.
When Ford to hit the streets in
July, he had to knock down the wall of his one-room factory/laboratory. In his
zeal to build his vehicle, he forgot that the door to his shed was too narrow
to accommodate an exiting vehicle.
A
month later a decisive moment came in Ford’s life. He wangled his way into a
fancy dinner party for prominent local business leaders. The guest of honor?
Thomas Alva Edison.
Keep
at it!
During
a discussion of how electric car batteries would be charged, someone sitting near Edison mentioned that the young man at the far end of the table had driven a
gas-powered car. Edison expressed curiosity. (In fact, it’s said this was the
first time Edison had heard the word ‘gasoline.’)
Edison invited Ford to sit next to him. Edison was deaf and wanted Ford to
draw diagrams of his experiments.
Did
the wizard of electricity scoff at the notion of powering a vehicle with a dangerous elixir like gasoline? No. After 'hearing' Ford’s description, Edison told the whippersnapper, “You have it. Keep at it!....Your car is self-contained—it carries its
own power-plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam. You have the thing.
Keep at it.”
This
marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the two great inventors.
And Edison’s words of praise encouraged and comforted Ford mightily.
After
several failed business ventures in the early 1900s, Ford vowed to change
American life—He would make internal combustion-powered vehicles available to
everyone.
“I
will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Ford said. “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 material, 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—and enjoy
with this family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”
He
made his mark with the Model T. Within days of the first cars leaving his factory in
1908, it became a sensation. Orders for more than 15,000 more deluged Ford. The
price was right—$850 ($22,000 in today’s money). When production ramped up, the
cost fell to $360 (or $7,000) in 1914.
It was the everyman’s car—easy for
anyone with modest mechanical aptitude to take apart or repair. By end of World
War I, half of all cars in America were Model T’s. Ford built 82,000 of them in
1908. In 1923, his massive vertically integrated Rouge River Plant turned out
two million. By the time the last one came off the assembly line in 1927, Ford
had built 15 million flivvers.
It’s a myth that the car was only available in black. Though Ford joked that
“You can have it in any color you want, so long as it’s black," until 1914
customers could buy models in in green, gray, blue, red. Thereafter, Model T’s
only came in black. It was a cost-saving measure.
By
the end of Ford’s life, he had become thoroughly controversial. He ruthlessly
used violence to suppress unions. He openly sympathized with the
“efficient” Nazi regime in the 1930s. He mistreated his eldest son Edsel to
such a point that emotional distress may have contributed to his early death at
the age of 49.
On
the other hand, Ford astonished America in the early 1900s when he decided to
pay his factory workers twice the going rate. And he only required a 40-hour
work week. Although conditions in his factories were slavish by modern
standards, he wanted his employees to be well-compensated for their labor—and
to have time home with their families.
Ford
lived his dreams. Said the great automaker: “To make a sensation, be one.”
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