One of the most remarkable Americans, Henry Ford, was born on this date in 1863. The following is and excerpt from Mr. Ford’s New York Times obituary in 1947:
Renting a one-story brick shed in Detroit, Mr. Ford spent the year 1902 experimenting with two- cylinder and four-cylinder motors. By that time the public had become interested in the speed possibilities of the automobile, which was no longer regarded as a freak. To capitalize on this interest, he built two racing cards, the “999” and the “Arrow,” each with a four-cylinder engine developing eighty horsepower. The “999,” with the celebrated Barney Oldfield at its wheel, won every race in which it was entered.
The resulting publicity helped Mr. Ford to organize the Ford Motor Company, which was capitalized at $100,000, although actually only $28,000 in stock was subscribed. From the beginning Mr. Ford held majority control of this company. In 1919 he and his son, Edsel, became its sole owners, when they bought out the minority stockholders for $70,000,000.
In 1903 the Ford Motor Company sold 1,708 two-cylinder, eight horsepower automobiles. Its operations were soon threatened, however, by a suit for patent infringement brought against it by the Licensed Association of Automobile Manufacturers, who held the rights to a patent obtained by George B. Selden of Rochester, N.Y., in 1895, covering the combination of a gasoline engine and a road locomotive. After protracted litigation, Mr. Ford won the suit when the Supreme Court held that the Selden patent was invalid.
From the beginning of his industrial career, Mr. Ford had in mind the mass production of a car which he could produce and sell at large quantity and low cost, but he was balked for several years by the lack of a steel sufficiently light and strong for his purpose. By chance one day, picking up the pieces of a French racing car that had been wrecked at Palm Beach, he discovered vanadium steel, which had not been manufactured in the United States up to that time.
With this material he began the new era of mass production. He concentrated on a single type of chassis, the celebrated Model T, and specified that “any customer can have a car painted any color he wants, so long as it is black.” On Oct. 1, 1908, he began the production of Model T, which sold for $850. The next year he sold 10,600 cars of this model. Cheap and reliable, the car had a tremendous success. In seven years he built and sold 1,000,000 Fords; by 1925 he was producing them at the rate of almost 2,000,000 a year.
He established two cardinal economic policies during this tremendous expansion: the continued cutting of the cost of the product as improved methods of production made it possible, and the payment of higher wages to his employes. By 1926 the cost of the Model T had been cut to $310, although it was vastly superior to the 1908 model. In January, 1914, he established a minimum pay rate of $5 a day for an eight-hour day, thereby creating a national sensation. Up to that time the average wage throughout his works had been $2.40 a nine-hour day.
The entire obituary is really rather fascinating reading.
Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World (2003) is considered a good biography of Ford and the Ford Motor Company.