by Andre Sanchez

The argument as to whether or not Deerborn Michigan was called that when Henry Ford was born is totally irrelevant to their eulogising of a man who is regarded as an American Hero, not only for his automobiles, but also for his contribution to manufacturing process history with his significant modification of the concept of the ‘assembly line’ to streamline the efficiency of his auto plants.

The man who made cars affordable and available to the people of America was born in Dearbornville, Michigan, on July 30, 1863 into a country that had just endured a Civil War that placed great strains upon the social intercourse of those that survived.  His hatred and demonization of Jews in the Dearborn Independent and on the books that he wrote must call into question the adulation that Americans gave him, but had little to do with his success as a businessman.

It was this success that brought the automobile into the price range of ordinary people.  In the early 1900s, a car was affordable by very few but the very rich.  It was not used as much as a means of transport but as a status symbol.  It was, after all, much quicker to travel by horse or locomotive, but the American rich had few status symbols that could be used to display their wealth to others. The car was ideal for this, and prior to Henry Ford’s Model T and assembly line, they were true status symbols.

Many people wrongly believe that Henry Ford invented the motor car, or at least introduced it to the USA, but they are wrong. Prior to Henry Ford, automobiles required chauffeurs who had been trained in the mystery of car mechanics to make it work, and it must be remembered that there were no gas stations or body shops in these days.  If something went wrong, your chauffeur fixed it, and you had your own gas delivered to your home.

What Henry Ford did was to design a car that was simple to manufacture, and to develop a means of manufacturing it that allowed rapid production rates with minimum time wasted.  The profits made were used to lower the price even further and also to develop even more innovative ways of manufacturing cars.  He did to automobiles what the early retail entrepreneurs were doing to other consumer goods:  piling high and selling cheap. It was due to Henry Ford that the car became less of a status symbol for the rich and more of a commodity.

There were no frills because none was needed then, the concept being so new.  You could have any color of Model T you wanted as long as it was black. The Model T, incidentally, was the first American car with the steering wheel on the left. That model was sold in 1908 at $825 and by 1912 the price had dropped to $575.  Two years later Ford had secured almost half the American market.  Most of this was due to the assembly line whereby the worker did not go to the car; the car came to the worker who had one or two specific tasks to be carried out in a set period of time.

The assembly line was not new when Henry Ford adopted it, but he refined it.  He organized each section of the line so that work required at each took exactly the same time to carry out.  This involved some operatives carry out more than one task to take up the time, but everybody was fully occupied during the time that each car was at rest on the line.  This was manufacturing efficiency at its best and all before the First World War.

It was he who cut the hours of work for his workforce to 8 hours so that he could operate a 24 hours three shift system. Prices plummeted and he was eventually producing a car every 24 seconds thanks to his assembly line.  It was his cars that were responsible for a radical change in the American way of life from horse-centered to auto-centered.  He saw the construction of a national highway system.  When the last Model T came off the assembly line on 27th May, 1927, 15 million, seven thousand and thirty two cars had rolled off before it.

Although most biographies of Henry Ford rightly place much emphasis on his Motor Company, it should be mentioned that prior to that he was a chief engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company and also personally set a new land speed record of 91.3 MPH on a frozen Lake St Clair. 

When Henry Ford died on 7th April, 1947, he was regarded as an all American hero, although his achievements have to many been tainted by his attitude to the Jews and his acceptance of an award from Hitler in 1938.  However, this has been ameliorated somewhat by his plants in the UK being used to support the British troops in North Africa.

Henry Ford was a remarkable, if controversial, man, and will rightly hold his place in history as a pioneer in American industrial history.

A Brief Biography of Henry Ford was originally published at http://www.businessmannow.com