Henry Ford did not just build cars; he effectively built the modern world. While most people credit him with inventing the automobile, he actually perfected the method of making them efficiently. He transformed a luxury toy for the rich into a necessity for every family. However, his genius came with a strange side, involving failed jungle cities and an unexpected obsession with square dancing. Let’s look under the hood of the man who put the world on wheels.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford repaired watches for his neighbors long before he built cars. Remarkably, he taught himself to fix complex timepieces by dismantling them and putting them back together as a teenager.
He did not invent the automobile or the assembly line. Instead, he perfected the assembly line process to reduce the chassis production time from 12 hours to just 90 minutes.
Surprisingly, he failed at business twice before achieving success. His first two ventures, the Detroit Automobile Company and the Henry Ford Company, both collapsed due to high costs and low sales.
He famously doubled the daily wage of his workers to $5 a day in 1914. Strategically, he did this to reduce employee turnover and ensure his own workers could afford to buy the cars they built.
Henry Ford built an entire American-style town in the middle of the Amazon rainforest called Fordlandia. Unfortunately, this attempt to secure a private source of rubber failed miserably due to disease and local resistance.
He possessed a deep fascination with soybeans and their potential uses. Consequently, he wore a suit made of soy fibers and even built a prototype car with plastic panels derived from soybeans.
Thomas Edison was his hero and closest friend. Strangely, when Edison died, Ford asked the inventor’s son to seal his final breath in a test tube, which he kept as a memorial.
He helped create the modern charcoal industry through his connection to Kingsford. He used the wood scraps from his car factories to make charcoal briquettes, which his relative E.G. Kingsford sold.
The famous quote “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black” was only true for a short time. In the early and late years of the Model T, the factory actually offered red, blue, and green paint.
He hated jazz music and blamed it for the moral decay of society. Therefore, he spent significant money promoting country music and square dancing to encourage traditional values.
To secure funding for his car company, he had to race his own vehicle. Fortunately, he won a high-stakes race against Alexander Winton in 1901, which convinced investors to back his vision.
He chartered a “Peace Ship” to Europe during World War I. Naively, he sailed to Norway with a group of activists in a failed attempt to negotiate an end to the war before America joined.
He bought the Wayside Inn, the oldest operating inn in the United States. He turned the property into a living museum because he wanted to preserve a piece of pre-industrial history.
During World War II, his company produced one B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. His Willow Run factory demonstrated that his mass production techniques worked for airplanes just as well as cars.
He disliked the very changes his cars brought to the world. Ironically, he spent his later years collecting old buildings for Greenfield Village to recreate the slow, rural life that the automobile helped destroy.
