The Success of Henry Ford: the Story From Rags to Riches

Henry ford’s life was a rags-to-riches tale. His family went back generations of only working on the farm. Same was expected of Henry, the oldest among his siblings. Being the oldest and doing much of the work, Henry soon got tired of the continues strain of farming. Instead, he grew interest in machines that would make farm life easier for the family. His father allowed him to grow in his fascination of machines and set him up a workstation in the kitchen. Henry first began with watches. He would take them apart and then put them back together, intrigued by the mechanics of it. Not only that, he would study every machine he saw. With the help of his father at the age, Henry moved out of the plantation and into the city of Detroit. For more than a Decade, Ford worked long hours in one shop after another building a career as an expert machinist. In 1890, Ford was hired as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company, Nation’s pioneer in providing electricity. And just within three years of working at the Edison company, using his skills and knowledge, Ford climbed the ranks to become the chief engineer. As exciting as this was, Ford knew his passion laid elsewhere.

At the dawn of the automobile industry in 1890s, most people saw the car as a luxury item for the wealthy. Having grown up in a farm isolated from what the rest of country had to offer with no means to travel, Ford knew that feeling very well and imagined there were many others who desired greater mobility. Ford was determined to change people’s lives, change the narrative of the automobile industry once and for all. And so, he decided to build a car that would be significantly cheaper than 2000 dollars. Ford first began to build a horseless carriage called the quadracycle in his spare time while working at the Edison company. Even though this was no breakthrough nor was it intended to, but quadracycle was still the one of the cheapest cars in the market. And that’s what Ford set out to achieve. Many prominent investors including the mayor himself wanted to back Ford’s invention. Three years after the first drive of the quadracycle, Ford quit his engineering job and with some investors formed one of the first car manufacturing company in the city called the ‘Detroit Automobile Company’. Ford’s quadracycle was a great innovation but even with the improvements it never generated any demand. Company’s investors pushed Ford to build expensive cars instead, but Ford always refused. His backers finally backed out and the company dissolved. Ford felt betrayed by this and he blamed his investors for the company going bankrupt. Ford then made the statement “From now on my shop is going to be my shop. I’m not letting a bunch of rich people tell me what to do. ” He wanted no investors to have control of him. To recover from this, Ford took a break. Ford’s next challenge was building a high-speed engine and so he did. Ford then made a gutsy move of racing the most famous driver in America. To everyone’s surprise, Ford won the race without having any prior experience of driving at high speeds. He simply believed the engine he built was superior to any other. This great victory attracted a whole new group of investors for Ford. And soon after, Ford formed the ‘Ford Motor Company’. A company that will go on to do business in billions of dollars long after he is gone and the one that will soon cement his legacy as one of the ‘Men who built America’. Within weeks, Ford’s newest company revealed its first car, the Model A. This was no Quadracycle, this was a two-seater car with a reliable eight-horsepower engine. Orders for the Model A started to roll in, but Ford was a man of???? he was never satisfied. He wanted the car to be better than it was, the company to produce more cars per dan than it was currently producing. He would meet with engineers, mechanics to discuss innovative designs. Every few months the company would roll out a new improved model working its way through the alphabet.

Then in 1908, two years since company’s last model, Henry Ford introduced his latest hugely improved car- the Model T. Model T had better transmission and ingenious generator. Compared to other cars, Model T didn’t break down a lot even on rough roads and when it did, it was easy to repair. And most importantly, it cost $850 at a time when an average car cost $2000. Model T was Ford’s biggest success yet. Within 5 years, 200,000 Model T were sold. Orders came from all over the country, from doctors, salesman, and farmers - people had never dreamed of owning a car.

With thousands and thousands of orders coming in for Model T, there was a need for Mass Production. In the current state of the company, only 25-30 cars would get fully manufactured in a month. With each car taking approximately 12 hours respectively. Henry Ford then came up with revolutionary idea of Assembly Line in automobile industry. With Assembly line, everyone had a specific task within the factory. The worker was only focused on the one task they have which cut off confusion and delay in progress. And soon, hundreds of cars would be built in a single day and the cost of a Model T dropped to $290 in 1914. Ford had finally achieved his dream of manufacturing 1000 cars a day while making it affordable for every individual of the society.

As great as the mass production though assembly line method was, it was physically exhausting for the workers. Each worker spent around 12-13 hours a day doing the same exact job standing in one position. As a result, many workers would quit within days of being hired. This was increasing company turnover rates. Ford then proposed an unprecedented strategy of increasing each assembly line worker’s wage from $2. 34 to $5. He increased wage would come from the company’s yearly profit which was estimated to be $26 million dollars. This notion by Ford was met with immense disapproval. Many stated it was the most foolish thing ever attempted in the industrial world. But the very next day following the announcement of Ford’s new wage plan, 10,000 men showed up to the factory’s gates. Ford's $5 a day wage did more than just solve his turnover problem. Henry Ford became a national sensation after that. The story was picked up by papers across the country and around the world.

However, Ford’s five-dollar day wasn’t guaranteed particularly for the immigrant workers that represented around 53 nationalities and spoke more than 100 different languages. Ford wanted his immigrant workers to attend English language School. Ford’s reforms went beyond school. He wanted to change the way his workers lived. He hired private inspectors to patrol the neighborhoods of his hired employees and check to see if they were drinking or smoking, illegitimately married. Ford even made a statement 'These peasants have got to become Americans. So, we're going to use the five-dollar day to also Americanize them. ' This was seen as an invasion of privacy via social engineering, something that is unthinkable in our world now.