The Car for Everyone

Very early one morning in June 1896, a young engineer stood in a small brick shed behind his house in Detroit, looking at the thing he had built.

It was a light frame on four bicycle wheels, with a small petrol engine and a tiller to steer it. He called it the Quadricycle. There was only one problem. The machine was wider than the shed's door.

So Henry Ford picked up an axe and knocked a hole in the brick wall. Then he drove out into the dark, rainy street.

The farm boy who fixed watches

Henry Ford was born on 30 July 1863 on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan. His father expected him to become a farmer, but Henry disliked the endless heavy work of the fields. What he loved was machinery.

As a boy, he took apart and repaired watches for neighbours, using tools he made himself. When he was thirteen, his mother, Mary, died. He was heartbroken, and later said the farm felt empty without her.

At sixteen he left for Detroit to work as an apprentice in a machine shop. Years later, he became an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, which supplied Detroit with electricity. He married Clara Bryant, a farmer's daughter who believed in him from the start, and they had one son, Edsel.

In his spare hours, he worked on his engine.

Two failures

After the Quadricycle, Ford wanted to build cars for a living. In 1899 he left his secure job and, with the backing of some wealthy Detroit men, started the Detroit Automobile Company.

It failed within about two years. The cars were expensive and slow to make, and Ford kept wanting to improve them instead of selling them. His backers lost patience.

He tried again with a second company. This time he spent much of his energy building racing cars, because winning races brought attention. The investors grew unhappy, and Ford left. The company carried on without him under a new name.

He was nearly forty. He had failed twice in public, and many people in Detroit thought he was a dreamer who could not run a business.

The third try

In 1903, with a small group of investors, he founded the Ford Motor Company.

This time he had a clear idea. Cars were then mostly toys for the rich. Ford wanted to build a car for the great mass of ordinary people: strong, simple, easy to repair, and cheap enough for a farmer or a factory worker to buy.

On 1 October 1908, the company launched the Model T. It was high off the ground, so it could cross the muddy, rutted country roads of the time. It was light and tough. A farmer could fix it with simple tools. People gave it nicknames and told jokes about it, and they bought it in huge numbers.

The moving line

Demand was so great that the company could not build cars fast enough. So Ford and his engineers began to rethink how a car was made.

Instead of workers walking around a car standing still, they brought the work to the workers. At the Highland Park factory, by the end of 1913, a moving assembly line carried each car past a row of workers, each doing one task. The time needed to build a Model T fell dramatically.

As production became cheaper, Ford cut the price again and again. A car that had cost a large sum in 1908 cost far less by the 1920s. In January 1914, he also announced that many of his workers would earn five dollars a day, around double the usual wage, so that the people who built the cars could afford to buy them.

By the time production ended in 1927, more than fifteen million Model Ts had been made. Families could visit relatives in other towns, farmers could reach markets, and doctors could reach patients. The car had stopped being a luxury.

The other side

Ford's later life was much less admirable. The same stubbornness that had helped him succeed made him hard to work with, and he treated his son Edsel harshly. In the 1920s, a newspaper he owned published antisemitic articles that did real harm, and in the 1930s his company used force against workers trying to form a union.

His story is a reminder that a person can do something that changes the world for the better and still be badly wrong in other ways. Both things are true.

Want to read more?

Douglas Brinkley's Wheels for the World tells the story of Ford and his company. Steven Watts's The People's Tycoon is a balanced biography of the man himself. The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, holds the Quadricycle and many records of his life.