Course description

The Ford Motor Company & the Modern Production Line

Between 1899 and 1903, Henry Ford began three companies. The first, the Detroit Automobile Company, failed less than two years after it began business. He resigned from the second, Ford and Malcomson Limited, because of difficulties with his partner. But, in 1903, he opened the Ford Motor Company. Fifteen years later, half the cars in the USA came from his factories.

But Henry Ford did more than make cars. He had a vision about how to sell them. He knew that the American public wanted inexpensive cars and he believed that motoring was not only for the rich but for everyone. To make this happen, Ford changed the ways he made cars so that they could make more of them and make them faster.

Ford also had strong opinions about what a job should mean for a worker: a good salary, a five-day week and a share in the company’s profits.

But not all Ford’s ideas were so happy. He tried to link workers’ personal lives to sharing company profits. He thought that unions were bad for business and, for many years, did not allow them in his factories. He did not like Jews and told everybody about it. And he never used accountants.

Ford’s father was a farmer and he hoped his son would follow him. Ford later said,

“I never had any special love for the farm – it was the mother on the farm I loved.”

When she died in 1876 when Henry was only thirteen years old, the boy was heartbroken. He began, however, to develop a new interest. His father gave him a watch and the boy took this to pieces and then put it back together again. Soon, his neighbours brought their broken watches to Henry for him to repair. He started to fall in love with machines.

Ford got his first job repairing steam engines – but he also made sure that he studied accounting in his free time. He was so good at his job that Thomas Edison employed him in 1891 and, two years later, he became Chief Engineer. He began playing around with cars and enjoyed making new designs. That was when Ford left his job and started the first of his companies, which, we know, was not successful.

It was a brave decision to leave his well-paid job with Edison. Ford was now married and had a young son. But he believed in himself.

When he started the Ford Motor Company, Henry began racing cars. Later in life, he often said that he thought it was a sport for idiots. He was not especially interested in speed but he understood that racing was a good advertisement for his car business.

Ford’s breakthrough came in 1908, when he started to produce the Model T Ford. Many working men could afford it and sales quickly increased. In 1914, he sold a quarter of a million cars. In 1916, the price of a car fell to $360 (or about $8,000 – 6,50,000 taka – in today’s money)  and sales of the Model T jumped to half a million.

The company managed to produce more and more cars because they were simple to make. Ford famously said:

“You can have whatever colour Model T you want but only if it’s black.”

But he also started the ‘production line’. This meant that every worker had a small job to do on the car before it went to the next worker, who did another job, and so on. Before Ford, a group of employees made the whole car together. This took a lot longer. This seems so clear to us today but in Ford’s time, it was a revolution.

But Ford’s ideas about factories did not stop with the production line. He also paid higher salaries than other companies. In the 1920s, he was paying $5 a day minimum. This was a great day’s pay at the time. After six months with the company, every worker also got a share in the profits. At first, Ford tried to make sure this money only went to good husbands and fathers. He gave jobs to fifty investigators who looked into the employees’ home lives. Did they smoke? (Ford was against smoking – a very unusual thing at that time!) Did they drink? Did they bet on horses and so on? Of course, this was very unpopular, but the boss learnt his lesson and changed the decision.

Much more popular was the five-day week. Ford was the first employer in the US who believed that production would go up if workers had a two-day weekend. And he was right!

So, Ford Motor Company was not just about cars. It was a new way of looking at working lives.

Ford sold fifteen million Model Ts but, by the mid-1920s, there was more and more competition. Many companies allowed their customers to pay month by month for cars but Ford refused. He started to lose money. His answer was not to do the same as other companies. It was to design a new car. He began to sell the Model A at the end of 1927 and, by 1931, he sold four million of them.

He also began a successful airline, but this closed in the 1920s because of the Depression. People just did not have enough money to fly.

There were two things that have blackened Ford’s reputation as a man who fought for the workers! The first was that he hated Jews. He even bought a newspaper where he explained his ideas about them destroying the energy of the USA. This made him very popular with Hitler.

By the way, he even got a medal from Nazi Germany in 1938, just before the Second World War. He accepted it!

The other thing was that Ford did not allow workers to join unions to represent them. Ford argued against this again and again. He even thought about closing his company when all the men went on strike. It was only his wife who changed his mind. She told him that if he closed Ford Motor Company and destroyed their child’s future, she would divorce him. Ford allowed unions into his factories. In fact, his agreement with the unions was the best any company made with them.

During the 1930s, Ford’s health got worse and worse. When his son, Edsel, died of cancer in 1943, Ford took over the company again, although he was eighty years old. He could not decide things so easily anymore and, in 1945, he retired, dying two years later.

Henry Ford was a new kind of businessman. He changed the car industry and, so, the twentieth century. Industry was never the same again after him.

Videos :

1. Who was Henry Ford (2:59)

2. Henry ford’s real footage (5:05)

3. Ford’s talk with Edison and Firestone(2:17)

4. Ford’s 40-hour work week (2:05)

5. Unionization at Ford (7:11)

6. Ford’s model T (3:16)

7. Henry Ford with his son Edsel Ford (0:53)

8. Henry ford’s death (0:40)

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