FORD, HENRY (1863– ), American manufacturer, was born on a farm near Dearborn, Mich, 9m. W. of Detroit, of Wil liam and Mary Litogot Ford. William Ford was of English de scent; born near Cork, Ireland, whence the Ford family emigrated to America in 1847, settling near Dearborn. Mary Litogot was born in the United States of Dutch parents. Mrs. Ford died when her son was Henry Ford went to school until he was about 15, but worked on the farm after school hours and during vacations. He began early to develop an intense interest in mechanics. He was attracted first to watches, and at 13 he took a watch apart and put it together again. In a little while he was repairing watches and clocks throughout the surrounding country, not for pay but because he had a burning curiosity to see how watches and clocks were made. His only tools were a screwdriver made from a knitting needle and a pair of tweezers fashioned from an old watch spring. All this work was done at night ; later it was done secretly, because William Ford objected to the son giving his services free. Also, he wanted the boy to be a farmer, while the boy wanted to be a mechanic.
At 16 Henry could no longer tolerate farm work. He left home. walked to Detroit, and apprenticed himself in a machine shop at a weekly wage of $2.50, working ten hours a day. His board and lodging cost him $3.50 a week. In order to make up the deficit he took employment with a jeweller from 7 to 11 in the evening, for which he received $2.00 a week. In about a year he turned from machine shop to an engine shop to learn something of the building of engines. There he stayed two years. A com pany manufacturing small steam engines for farm use needed a man to install them ; Ford took the place and for two years more set up and repaired these engines. He had gone back to the farm to live; there he spent all his spare time in a little workshop trying to build a farm tractor—for his experience with the portable engines, as well as his own farm experience, had convinced him that power should be put to work on the farm and that it was a waste to keep horses. Eventually he built a single-cylinder engine steam tractor, but he could not devise a boiler to provide pressure enough to keep the tractor at work ploughing and yet be light enough for his requirements. For the time being he gave up his tractor until he could discover a more suitable boiler. Large steam tractors were already in use, but Ford's thought even then was in the direction of inexpensive, simple apparatus.
In 1884 Ford's father offered him 4oac. of land in order to draw him away from his mechanics. The land was mostly wooded. Henry cut the timber, set up a sawmill and sold lumber. In the summer he repaired farm engines. In 1887 he married Clara Bryant, who lived in the neighbourhood. He sawed the lumber for his house, which he built himself on his plot of ground, and having done this he moved his workshop from his father's farm to his new home. Securing a job with the Detroit Edison company as an engineer and machinist he moved from the farm to Detroit, where he set up his shop in a shed at the back of his house. After hours he worked on the building of a gasolene motor car. In 1892 he completed it—although it did not run properly until the following year. This, his first car, had two cylinders with a 2 zin. bore and a 6in. stroke, set side by side over the rear axle, and developed about 4 h.p., which was transmitted from the motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a chain. He ran this car about i,000m. and then sold it for $too, in order to start the building of another car which would be lighter and stronger. In 1899, feeling that he had the experience he needed, Ford left his job with the electric light company and went into the making of automobiles as a business, with a company, of which he was the chief engineer, known as the Detroit Automobile company. He held only a small portion of the stock, and the company would not follow the lines of manu facturing to which he had committed himself. The directors wanted to make cars to order only ; Ford had in his mind a uni versal car which could be made in quantities. In 1902 he resigned in order to go into business for himself when the opportunity should arise. In the meantime he rented a one-storey brick shed and continued his experiments. He built several cars, two of them solely for speed. One he called the "999" and the other the "Arrow." Each had a four-cylinder engine giving 8o horse power. The "999" won every race it entered, and in 1903, on the reputation of this speed car, Ford formed the Ford Motor company, with a capitalization of $1oo,000. Actually only $28,000 in stock was ever subscribed, and of this only about one-half was in actual cash. The company in 1926 had assets of about $1,000, 000,000 and was the largest motor car company in the world and the third largest industry in the United States, comprising in it self about 5o other industries and employing some 2oo,000 people directly and an equal number indirectly. It has been built up entirely by turning back profits into construction. The company has never issued bonds or borrowed money; nor has it issued stock otherwise than to enlarge the original capitalization so as to have it more nearly correspond with values. It is entirely owned by Henry Ford and his son, Edsel B. Ford, they having bought out the minority stockholders in 1919 for $7o,000,000.
During its first year the company built a two-cylinder, 8 h.p. car with a chain drive, and of these 1,708 were produced and sold. In the second year it made three models and during five years various models of f our- and six-cylinder cars. The automobile at that time was considered a pleasure vehicle, but Ford had con ceived of it as a universal method of individual transportation and he was working to produce a light car of great strength, which would require a minimum of care and cost in upkeep. What de layed him was finding a steel sufficiently strong for his purpose, and it was quite by accident that he came upon a piece of vana dium steel, which was not then made in the United States. With that steel he designed Model T—which is what is known to-day as the "Ford car." In 1909 Ford announced that thereafter the company would build only the model T chassis, and that "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." The principles upon which the Ford industries are founded, as Ford has stated them, are : I. An absence of fear of the future or veneration for the past. One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure ; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.
2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another man—criminal because one is then trying to lower for per sonal gain the condition of one's fellowmen—to rule by force instead of by intelligence.
3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It cannot be the basis—it must be the result of service.
4. Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating and sharp dealing tend only to clog this progression.
In the Ford practice the cycle of production starts with the consumer. Ford holds that a commodity must first of all be designed to fit the needs of the largest possible number of con sumers both in quality and price, and that the number of con sumers will be continuously increased by constantly lowering the price of the article. At the same time, by paying the highest possible wages to those engaged in the production and distribution of the article, he creates a high buying power. In Jan. 1914 Ford raised all wages in his industries to a minimum of $5.0o for an eight hour day. The average wage throughout his industries at that time was $2.4o for a nine hour day. The minimum wage in 1926 was $6.00 a day, with an average of $8.00. Model T (the touring car) which in the beginning cost $850, in 1926, with the average wage about four times larger than then and with materials costing at least double, sold for $310, with a self-starter and many im provements. From the introduction of Model T on Oct. 1, 1908, it took the company until Dec. 1 o, 1915, to produce a million cars, but under the new wage programme and the constant lower ing of prices the company was in 1926 producing at the rate of two million cars a year.
The general theory of production in the Ford plants is that everything must be kept moving, and that the work must go to the man instead of the man to the work. For example, the cylin der block is cast on a moving platform in a mould made on a moving platform. Thereafter it passes, without stopping, through a series of machines which perform all the necessary operations, and then, still moving, it passes into assembly, where to it are added, one by one, the hundreds of parts to create a complete motor. Then it moves into the final assembly, where it is joined by other parts until eventually an automobile leaves the final assembly line under its own power. Every part of the motor car has a similar train of construction and assembly, all converging either into the final assembly or into boxes or freight cars for shipment. No man uses more than one tool, all the work comes waist high, a man never has to stoop or to move his feet to get anything, and the speed of the work is controlled, not by the worker's will, but by the pace of the conveyer.
The Ford industries have been steadily reaching back to sources in order to cut out intermediate profits. The industries have their own iron mines, coal mines and forests, their own railway, and an extensive fleet of lake- and ocean-going steamships, all of which are operated on the principle of high wages, high production and low cost. In the forests no tree is permitted to be cut under 1 o inches. The logs are taken directly to the sawmill and, instead of being first converted into lumber and the parts sawed from the lumber, the parts are sawed directly from the log. All the wood working is done at the forest mill, the waste goes to a wood distil lation plant, and there is no waste whatsoever in shipment. At the River Rouge plant, the iron from the furnace goes directly into the foundries and is poured without reheating. The slag from the furnaces goes to a cement plant. A combination of electric furnaces and a large rolling mill converts all the steel scrap. In every direction the pressure is toward preventing the waste of time, men or material.
As the business developed, it became apparent that it was a waste to assemble the cars at the factory and ship them complete. The manufacturing plants then ceased in effect to manufacture automobiles; instead, they make parts, and these are shipped to 35 branches in the United States, where they are assembled into complete motor cars. Similar branches or associated companies are situated in nearly every part of the world, and these branches also manufacture if the costs permit. Foreign branches, under the theory of building consumption, employ only natives of the country in which they are located. All the branches use the same methods and pay the same wages as the home plants. The in dustry does not use a single warehouse—everything is in transit. The centre of the industry is at River Rouge, Michigan, on the outskirts of the city of Detroit; but with the method of assembling cars at the point of use, a decentralizing of manu facturing is taking place and comparatively small plants are being located out in the country wherever proper water-power sites are available. Each of these plants makes only a single part ; the thought behind their establishment is to strike a balance be tween industry and agriculture. None of these plants employs more than Soo men, and in most cases the men divide their time between agriculture and industry. This is one of the most impor tant developments.
In the spring of 1927 car number 15,000,000 was produced, and shortly thereafter it was decided to discontinue the making of Model T, on which the business had been founded, and turn to a new model. Thereupon came the test of the mobility of an in dustry that had been built entirely upon the making of one thing. The new Model T was in most respects unlike the first Model T, but the parts of the new Model T were all interchangeable with those of the first—although in most cases the designs had been changed and the materials were constantly changing. Ford does not interpret quantity production as rigid production. The new model, however, marked a complete departure from the old model, both in design and in many methods of manufacturing. In the design of the new model it was decided to make use of new devel opments in manufacturing, particularly in electric welding and in the forging and spinning of metals. Also nearly all wood was eliminated. The purpose of the original car was to provide cheap and simple transportation. When it came out, people were unac customed to the management of machinery, they knew nothing about internal combustion engines, and the roads were bad. In the meantime, they have become accustomed to machinery and the roads have bettered. Therefore, the new car was designed to fill a function different from that of the old Model T but at the same price. Into it was put a standard gear shift, a new type of engine capable of picking up very quickly and of attaining a speed of between 6o and 7om. an hour, the chassis was lower hung, and the designs of all the bodies were changed in the interests of appear ance. The advance in manufacturing skill permitted the new car to be made with tolerances approaching five-thousandths of an inch, whereas in the old Model T a thousandth of an inch had to be the practical limit of accuracy in quantity production. The difficulties attending the putting of the new model into production were largely those of detail, excepting as touching the new methods and more powerful machinery. This involved increasing the power used at the plant from about 100,00o to 250,00o horse power. Aside from the new methods, the work was largely one of detail in chang ing over single purpose tools to new purposes and in devising new sequences of operations. The cost of this ran into about $200,000, 00o in addition to which was the loss both to the company and its distributors of not producing cars for sale during a period of nearly six months. The expense, however, while large in dollars, due to the magnitude of the operation, was not excessive on a percentage basis, running to less than 20% of the value of the plant, and so much of this was due to the new methods that it is almost im possible to discover exactly how much was due solely to design.
The demonstration, however, has been made that the rigidity of quantity production has been over-estimated, and that the economies to be effected by this method of production are so great as amply to justify it in spite of the costs of introducing new models.
Henry Ford is firmly against paternalism in any form. He be lieves charity greatly harms those who receive it. Carrying out this thought, he has a trade school for the education of boys with dependents, in which the boys make useful articles. They earn an average of about $15 a week while receiving their education. The Henry Ford hospital in Detroit, which is open to any one., is conceived on the theory that a hospital should be self-supporting.
All its rooms are precisely alike, all have baths attached, all the fees and services are at a scheduled rate, which is the same to everyone, and all the surgeons, physicians and nurses are on salary and have no financial relations with the patients.
The Ford Motor company also builds a light farm tractor under the same methods and principles as the motor car, and in 1926 built experimentally all-metal aeroplanes and maintained for ex perimental purposes a number of air routes with the eventual aim of putting the Ford principles into aeronautics. Henry Ford has taken no active part in politics, although he was nominated in 1918 for U.S. senator from Michigan ; at the election he was de feated by a small margin. He took no part whatsoever in the campaign. In 1915 he was convinced by certain peace advocates of foreign extraction that it might be possible to end the World War if a sufficient gesture were made. He thereupon chartered a ship and proceeded to Christiania, Norway. Then, convinced that the mission was futile, he returned home. Ford does not believe in war, but he is not an active pacifist. He refused to adopt the "Blue Eagle" of the NIRA, although his wages and standards of working conditions exceeded those required by the law.
See My Life and Work (1922), and To-day and To-morrow 0926). both by Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther.
(S. CR.; W. J. CN.I