HENRY FORD 1863-1947

             Henry Ford is a man who literally transformed the world. The car he built and the changes he made on the techniques of industrial pro­duction revolutionized the lives of people eve­rywhere. As the height of his fame, in the 1920s, Ford was a name known universally. “Fordismus” entered the European vocabu­lary as a word for man production; and corre­spondent in the Soviet Union in 1927 com­mented that Ford’s name was as well known as Lenin’s or Trotsky’s. He was regarded as a symbol of industrial technology.

              Ford himself came from a humble forming background. Born July 30, 1863, in Dear-borne, Michigan, near Detroit, young Hen­ry hated almost everything about farming except the machinery. When he was 16, he went to Detroit to serve as an apprentice in a machine shop. He had a series of jobs and became completely knowledgeable of the way different types of machines operated. He began to experiment with internal combus­tion machines in his home workshop in 1891. He was one of many would-be-inventors working on plans for the automobile; and he discussed his project with other mechan­ics and businessmen working in Detroit. In 1896 he succeeded in building an automo­bile powered by a gasoline engine which he had built in his kitchen sink. Running on four horsepower, the car could teach a speed of 25 miles per hour.

              Ford organized the Detroit Automobile Com­pany in 1899 and produced a small number of cars before the Company collapsed two years later. He designed and manufactured racing cars, and in 1900, raced one model at 70 miles per hour.

              In 1903, with the investment of $21,000 Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company. The automobile was still considered a toy of the rich, and Ford set about to change this situation.

              In the early year of the company’s exist­ence, Ford was involved in legal battles challenging patents which restricted his freedom to alter the internal combustion en­gine to better suit the car he wished to build. Winning a clear victory in the courts, Hen­ry Ford established an early reputation as a foe of monopolies and the champion of the common man.

             The Model T Ford was introduced in 1908. It was boxy and ting-looking, as its nick­name, the “Tin Lizzie” implied; but it was within the purchasing power of people who were not rich. It fulfilled the goal which Ford had set for himself.

             Ford was able to lower the price of the Mo­del T from the $850, which it cost when it first appeared, to $360 in 1916. He did this by introducing mass production assembly line techniques in 1913, Ford conducted his first test of assembly the manufacture. He drew up the techniques which he had ob­served in a Chicago meat parking plant where an overhead trolley moved the car­casses of animals from one butcher to an­other; since each butcher had a special job, he could do his cutting work faster, and more efficiently than when he had to cut up the whole animal by himself.

              The assembly line revolutionized car pro­duction. A chassis that formerly took 12,5 hours to build in the shop, now rolled off the assembly line in an hour and a half. This made it possible to triple the produc­tion of Model T’s within three years.

              Ford also introduced the $5.00 wage for an eight-hour day. Such a salary was un­heard of in 1914, and he attracted both national and international attention when be began his practice. He also introduced a plan which allowed his workers to share in the profits of the company - the profit shar­ing plan which is used by many companies today.

              Ford’s early accomplishment fit in well with the optimism and idealism of the period. Alongside of the political reforms of the Pro­gressive Era, as the years proceeding World War I were called, Ford’s commitment to the free market, to making a socially use­ful product, and to technological advance­ment suggested that a new and better way of life was at hand.

              Following the outbreak of war, Ford paid for the voyage of the Oscar II (popularly known as the Ford Peace Ship) which brought a group of pacifists and feminists to Scandinavia in 1916 to work toward end­ing the war through neutral mediation. He also offered a large prize for a history of war that would “show war in all its hor­rors, instead of glorifying the slaughter - a history that shall discourage war by tell­ing of the great things of peace”.

              Ford was a genuine folk hero to the Ameri­can people. He represented the virtues of an older simpler agrarian society - hard work, self-reliance, and thrift even though he contributed to the demise of agrarian life.

              He was a colourful figure, and stories of his love of running (long before the days of jogging) and his strange notions about diet (he sometimes ate grass sandwiches) were well known. People had an idea of who Henry Ford was - and he in turn people wanted in terms of a product.

              During the 1920s, however, the Ford Mo­tor Company lost much of its popularity with the American public. When other man­ufacturers introduced more stylish relative­ly inexpensive cars, Ford automobile sales began to drop. Though he closed his facto­ries for 18 months in 1927-1928 to pre­pare for a position of leadership in the car industries.

              This was due either to Ford’s unwillingness to change seemed to become fixed. To a great extent, he became isolated and a prisoner of his own prejudices. An early leader in labour-management relations, Ford later resisted the efforts of his workers to unionize and enter into collective bargaining. Only after a strike by his works in 1941, Ford at the age of 79, accepted union mem­bership for his employees.

               As owner of the Ford Motor Company, Hen­ry Ford accumulated more than $1 billion. Between the years 1908 and 1947, when he died, he contributed more than $40 millions to charitable causes, such as public hospi­tals and research institutions. He established the Ford Foundation which continues to support various programmes in education, media, and culture. And he constructed Greenfield Village, near his birthplace in Michigan, as a living museum representing the industrialization of America.

               A controversial figure, Ford saw his ideas adopted and applied throughout the world. Yet Ford himself was frequently the target of criticism. When he ran for public office in 1918, as Democratic candidate for Senator for its state of Michigan, he was defeated. In his satire, Brave New World, Aldus Huxley* used Ford’s name as a curse, and even the comic genius Charlie Chaplin ridiculed Ford’s contributions in his film Modem Times.

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*Huxley, Aldus leonard (1894-1963) - British writer.

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                Without a doubt, however, Ford was a tech­nological genius. Not a great inventor, he was able to borrow ideas and apply them to new uses. In bringing the automobile to the average worker, he altered the structure of society, its cities, and the nations of the world.