Ford Motor Company is one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers and has played a critical part of the evolution of the automobile over the years. This post is going to take a look at some of its early years.
Founded by Henry Ford
The founder of the Ford Motor Company was Henry Ford who was born on his family’s farm in 1863 in Michigan. He was expected to take over the family farm but at the age of 16 left home to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. Over the next 20 years, he worked on steam engines, learned book keeping, and eventually was promoted to Chief Engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in 1893. In his spare time, he worked on his own projects specifically focusing on building a gasoline-powered horseless carriage. During this time he built the Ford Quadricycle and began looking at ways to improve it. In 1899 he resigned from the Edison Company to found the Detroit Automobile Company which was dissolved less than two years later. He then helped form the Henry Ford Company (later renamed the Cadillac Automobile Company) in late 1901 which he left the following year to form the Ford & Malcomson Ltd partnership. This partnership was reincorporated as the Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903.
Early Car Models
The first car produced by Ford was the Ford Model A which began production in 1903. The vehicle sold for a base price of $750 and had a top speed of 28 mph. They continued to improve on this first model and released new models over the next several years such as the Model B, Model C, Model K, Model S, and more. The Model T was introduced in 1908 and is the most important car in Ford’s history. The Model T was seen as the first affordable automobile and made owning a car possible for middle-class America. Due to innovations in the production process, Ford was able to manufacture automobiles much faster and cheaper than ever before and their sales reflected this. In 1909 production for the Model T was 10,666 and by 1913 this grew to 170,211. Overall, 16.5 million Model Ts were sold.
Moving Assembly Line
The introduction of the moving assembly line allowed Ford to grow quickly as they were able to produce cars significantly faster than ever before. This allowed Ford to decrease production time from 12.5 man-hours per vehicle to roughly 1.5 hours per vehicle. In fact, the cars were being produced so quickly that the drying of the paint became the bottleneck for production which led Ford to switch to only painting cars with Japan black as it was the only paint that would dry fast enough for their process. Ford continued to improve their process with the focus being on quicker production. This was hard on employees and led to high worker turn over. Ford responded by increasing worker pay to $5 a day and cutting shifts from nine hours to eight hours a day. Ford was actually criticized by Wall Street for its generous labor practices.
Much More to Talk About
There is so much more to talk about with Ford and we’ll cover it further in a future post.