Henry Ford Biography – Click on Link Or Copy and paste this link to your web browser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y584yQSu0uo What were some of the major obstacles that Henry Ford had to overcome in order to form the Ford Motor Company? Most people don’t know that before starting the Ford Motor Company in 1903, Henry Ford was a part of two failed automobile enterprises. The first was the Detroit Automobile Company, which folded after Ford failed to ship a working automobile. The second (the Henry Ford Company), eventually became known as the Cadillac Automobile Company after some failed partnership dealings. There was one big reason for the failure of Ford’s first two Automobile companies: Ford’s failure to get his product to market. He didn’t ship. This changed, after starting the Ford Motor Company, because of one man – James J. Couzens. Henry Ford was, among other things, a perfectionist who cared deeply about every minor detail of his automobiles. This perfectionist habit worked in his favor most of the time. Ford racing cars usually outperformed their counterparts simply because of their superior craftsmanship. But when it came to business, his habits got the best of him. For months, his investors waited for a final product to bring to market, but Ford repeatedly failed to submit a final design, insisting on continuing improvements. “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. – Henry Ford” Ford certainly had a point. Quality matters, but in business, so does the almighty dollar. What was the reason that Henry Ford created the assembly line and decided to increase the wages of the his workers? In 1914, Henry Ford made a big announcement that shocked the country. It caused the financial editor at The New York Times to stagger into the newsroom and ask his staff in a stunned whisper, “He’s crazy, isn’t he? Don’t you think he’s crazy? “That morning, Ford would begin paying his employees $5.00 a day, over twice the average wage for automakers in 1914. In addition, he was reducing the workday from 9 hours to 8 hours, a significant drop from the 60hour work week that was the standard in American manufacturing. According to an article (above) in the Post sponsored by the automaker, Ford arrived at the new wage scale during a meeting with his managers. He wrote on the board the Ford wage standards: minimum pay of $2.34 for a nine-hour day. He tossed down the chalk and said: “Figure out how much more we can give our men.” The Ford executives worked all day, cautiously adding 25¢ an hour, and then another 25¢. Every so often Ford walked back in, said: “Not enough,” and walked out. Finally, they had doubled the basic pay—up to $4.80 a day. One man snapped, “Why don’t you make it $5 a day and bust the company right?” “Fine,” said Henry Ford. “We’ll do that.” How did Henry Ford assist the United States during major events and wars that were occuring across the globe? By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, 57,851 airplane engines, 4,291 military gliders, and thousands of engine superchargers and generators (Henry Ford: Helped Lead American World War II Production Efforts)! The idea of an assembly line to build cars came to Ford when he saw the disassembly lines used to process meat at the Armour and Swift meat packing plants. ... While Henry Ford was not the first to attempt the production of low-cost, reliable automobiles, he was the first to make cars affordable to average Americans. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. No cars, commercial trucks, or auto parts were made from February 1942 to October 1945. On January 1, 1942, all sales of cars, as well as the delivery of cars to customers who had previously contracted for them, were frozen by the government's Office of Production Management. During World War II, Ford Motor Company of Canada produced some 335,000 vehicles for defense. Bodies conformed to a military design, but used Ford running gear. ... Willow Run is an Albert Kahn-designed World War II bomber plant near Ypsilanti, Michigan. It was constructed in 1941 by the Ford Motor Company for the mass production of the B-24 Liberator military aircraft. The U.S. government contributed $200 million to the project.
