Biography Of Henry Ford

Childhood & Early Life

·  Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, in Dearborn, Michigan, to William and Mary Ford. He had four siblings.

·    He was bright and curious as a child. He was in his teens when his father gave him a pocket watch which he dismantled and reassembled by himself. He also practiced on the timepieces of friends and neighbors, and soon gained the reputation of a watch repairman. From a young age he demonstrated mechanical ability and leadership qualities.

·    He left home in 1879 to work as an apprentice machinist with James F. Flower & Bros. in Detroit. Later on he went to work for the Detroit Dry Dock Co. before returning home in 1882.

Early Career

·    Back home, he started working on the family farm and became an expert at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. His technical skills gained recognition and he was later hired by Westinghouse to service their steam engines.

·    His mechanical skills and ability to grasp new things led to his appointment as night engineer for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1891. He found the job very exciting as he got the opportunity to learn more about electricity which was a fairly new concept back then.

·    Hard working and determined, Ford rose to the position of a chief engineer of the Illuminating Company by 1896. Alongside working on his job, he also started working on something he had always been fascinated with: building automobiles.

·    He teamed up with a group of friends and built a self-propelled vehicle, the Quadricycle. With four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, it could be steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse.

·    He met with Thomas Edison who approved of his experimentation. Motivated, Ford continued on bettering his model of automobile, and completed a second vehicle in 1898.

·    Ford then decided to form his own company and resigned from his job. He founded the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. However, the automobiles produced by the company did not perform well at the market and very soon he was forced to close down the business.

·    Ever the resilient soul, he started working on improving the quality of his automobiles and successfully raced a 26-horsepower automobile in October 1901. Then he teamed up the stockholders in his Detroit Automobile Company to form the Henry Ford Company in November 1901.

·    However, some issues came up between Ford and the other stockholders and Ford left the company which was later renamed Cadillac Automobile Company after Ford’s departure.

·    Undaunted by the failure of yet another venture, he continued to pursue his passion of building automobiles. He built several racing cars over the ensuing years, including the “999” racer which looked quite promising.

Ford Motor Company

·    In 1903, Henry incorporated the Ford Motor Company. The original investors included Henry Ford, Alexander Y. Malcomson, the Dodge brothers, and John S. Gray, among others. Around this time, the race driver Barney Oldfield drove the “999” around the country, making the Ford brand known throughout the United States.

·    The company launched the Model T in October 1908. The vehicle had a steering wheel on the left—an idea which other automobile companies soon copied. The model proved to be highly successful as it was not only affordable, but also very simple to drive, and easy and cheap to repair.

·    The Model T was so successful that Ford had to greatly expand his production in order to meet the ever-increasing demand. For this, Ford, along with the company staff developed a moving assembly line for automobiles in 1913. The company developed techniques of mass-production which enabled them to greatly increase their output.

·    The Model T dominated the automobile market for several years and by 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's. In 1918, Ford also handed over the presidency of Ford Motor Company to his son, Edsel Ford, even though he retained the final decision authority.

·    By the mid-1920s, the sales of the Model T had begun to decline. Thus the company introduced the Ford Model A in 1927 which sold profitably till 1931. But the company continued to decline in the 1930s and by 1936, Ford Motor Company had fallen to third place in the US market, behind both General Motors and Chrysler Corporation.

·    Henry Ford was a pacifist and when the Second World War broke out in 1939, he opposed the United States’ entry into the war. However, when America entered the war, Ford Motor Company became one of the major US military contractors, supplying airplanes, engines, jeeps and tanks.

·    A tragedy befell the aging Ford in 1943 when his son Edsel died of cancer. Even though Henry Ford formally resumed control of the company after his son’s death, he no longer exercised absolute authority. The key decisions were taken by others in his name and he was increasingly sidelined. Eventually his grandson, Henry Ford II, was made the president.

Awards & Achievements

·    Ford was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1928.

·    In 1938, Ford was awarded Nazi Germany's Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a medal given to foreigners sympathetic to Nazism.

Inspirational Quotes of Henry Ford –

·         There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

·         Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

·         Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

·         Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

·         Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.

·         Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

·         Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

·         Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

·         Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

·         The people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’

·         You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

·         If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

·         Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.

·         Vision without execution is just hallucination.

·         There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.

·         I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say what is and what is definitely not possible.

·         You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.

·         Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.