Ford Offered the Masses Freedom of Movement
“History is more or less bunk,” said Henry Ford. “The only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”
There’s no small measure of irony in the fact that Ford, who had little regard for the judgments of history, completely altered society, lifestyles, commerce and history itself by creating the Model T and selling it to the masses.
When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 he said, “I will build a motor car for the great multitude.” And he did. In the next 20 years Ford sold 17 million Model Ts, about half of all the cars produced in the world during that time. The automobile became the fulcrum for a new economy. It spurred travel, pushed the growth of cities outward and eventually helped create suburban life.
“Most people had never been more than 20 miles from their homes prior to the introduction of the Model T. It was a staggering change in the history of mankind. It changed where people lived, where they worked,” said another Ford, William Clay Ford Jr., Henry’s great-grandson and the first family member to lead Ford Motor Co. in nearly two decades.
Beyond the auto itself--the freedom of movement it affords us weighed against the price it exacts in dirty air, traffic congestion and roadway fatalities--Ford’s legacy also rests on his application of the moving assembly line to mass production and his visionary conception of the mass market.
Ford was not the first to build a horseless carriage. Nor was he the first to think of mechanically delivering components to waiting workers. Rudimentary conveyor systems had been employed for years in meatpacking and food canning.
But Ford was a gifted mechanic who had a knack for elevating good ideas to something sublime. He also had the iron will, the supreme confidence in his ideas, to put them into practice.
“Yes, he was a man who came along at the right time. But that’s what we call vision today,” said David Lewis, professor of business history at the University of Michigan.
Ford’s vision had its roots in his Michigan farm upbringing, which inspired his early efforts to build tractors. But recognizing that people were more interested in “something that would travel on the road,” he set out to build a car “large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for [and] so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”
That car was the gasoline-powered Model T. It was a simple machine--rugged, durable, basic, even ungainly--a mechanical extension of Ford himself. It cost $850 in 1908 and, as its utilitarian-minded creator later said, “any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black.”
At that price, the Model T was still beyond the reach of most workers. But by introducing the moving assembly line to its manufacture in 1912-13 at his fabled Highland Park plant outside Detroit, Ford was eventually able to cut the Model T’s production time by 75% and reduce the car’s price to $260.
The final step in the revolution he instigated was perhaps the most dramatic of all. On Jan. 5, 1914, he announced the $5, eight-hour day--which more than doubled wages and reduced the workday by 90 minutes.
Historian Lewis calls the $5 day the “most dramatic event in the history of wages.” By making it possible for the people who made cars to actually buy them, Ford created the mass market he needed to sustain his company and its products.
“From that day forward,” Lewis said, “Ford became the world’s best-known and most admired industrialist.”
As the decades passed, with growing fame came growing criticism over Ford’s autocratic ways, his spying on his own employees and a series of vitriolic, anti-Semitic stories published by his newspaper in Michigan. Ford was also slow to adapt to changing consumer tastes--such as a choice in car colors and bigger engines--a fault that enabled rival General Motors Corp. to supersede Ford Motor as the No. 1 auto maker. In 1927 Ford finally introduced a newer car, the Model A. While it was popular, the car was outsold by GM’s Chevrolet and Chrysler’s Plymouth.
But among engineers, Ford remains a revered figure who shaped a global industry that today produces 50 million vehicles a year and, indeed, influenced all of modern manufacturing.
Another key contribution was Ford’s introduction of interchangeable parts, said A. Galip Ulsoy, a professor of manufacturing at the University of Michigan.
“The tradition in craft manufacturing,” Ulsoy explained, “was to build one car at a time, methodically fitting one part to another.” Ford’s breakthrough idea was this: If the task was to build 1,000 cars, then you needed 1,000 (or more) copies of every component required, each separately gauged and precision-machined, to maximize efficiency and simplify assembly.
Mass customization, another concept derived from Ford’s ideas, has been embraced by today’s auto makers as they create several models from the same basic underpinnings: one chassis, common parts and mechanical systems, even the same engine. It is this approach that allows Ford Motor today to employ a single platform to build--quite profitably--the Jaguar S-Type, the Lincoln LS and the forthcoming retro-styled version of its hallowed Thunderbird.
Henry would be pleased to know that 96 years after its founding, Ford Motor appears poised to regain the No. 1 spot it ceded to GM long ago. His company today is riding high on energetic new leadership, the arrival of a host of promising vehicles and $24 billion in cash that enables it to indulge a dramatic appetite for acquisitions. Ford Motor’s corporate umbrella now covers not only its namesake brand and its Mercury and Lincoln branches but Britain’s Aston Martin and Jaguar, Sweden’s Volvo and Japan’s Mazda.
It seems only fitting that William Clay Ford Jr., Ford’s chairman, be given the final word on his great-grandfather: “Most people think of Henry Ford as an industrial figure. But there is a social legacy as well. He made cars affordable, and he believed in treating people well. And as we get further away from Henry Ford, that part of the equation fades.”
