Jan 12 2009
Henry Ford - ‘father’ of the assembly line
In a series decidated to famous ‘Henries,’ Henry Ford deserves a prominent place. He was born in 1863 in Greenfield/Michigan as a son of a farmer, originally from Cork/Ireland. Although he was brought up in a rural environment and helped out on the farm, Henry disliked farming from an early age on. He left school at age 15 and went to work as an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit. To better his meagre wages, he repaired clocks and watches in the evening.
When his father gave him 40 acres of land to farm on, Henry duly gave it another try, but soon abandoned the exeperiment. He returned to Detroit and worked as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company.
The ’spark’ for his future career and successful inventiones struck, when Henry read an article about the German engineer Nicholas Otto and his invention of an internal combustion engine.
Literally in his garden shed, Henry experimented and built his first self propelled car, the famous Thin Lizzy in 1896. In 1899 he had raised enough money to start his own company. However, success was slow in coming. There were plenty of failures along the way, difficulties in finding investors and backers, but, like every true pioneer with a great vision, Henry Ford never gave up.
His first successful car, the Model A, saw the light of day in 1909. Thereafter, he made two decisions which revolutionised the world of car manufacture: first he decided to built one model only: his model T. And then he came up with the idea of the assembly line, greatly improving production and keeping prices down. A model’s T assembly time was reduced from 1 hour to 33 minutes. ‘Fordism’ was born. Henry soon saw the potential of covering the nation with his cars by offering a Franchise system which put a Ford dealership in every American city.
He also was politically active, joined the Democratic Party and even tried to negotiate peace during World War I with his Ford Peace Ship.
He died in 1947 of a stroke, leaving his vast fortune to his Ford Foundation but making sure that members of his family stayed in control of the Ford Motor Compny permanently.
