Henry Ford :: essays research papers

Henry cover was born on July 30, 1863 and died on April 7, 1947. Henry Ford was the son of William Ford, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1847 and settled on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan. Henry disliked farm life and had a natural aptitude for machinery. When he was 15 he went to Detroit and trained as a machinist. Henry Ford began to experiment with a horseless carriage in 1890 and completed his first car, the quadricycle, in about 1896. During the following years he tried unsuccessfully to get it into production. In 1903 he launched the Ford Motor Company with a capital of $100,000 of which $28,000 was in cash. By the time he had formulated his ideal of production " The way to slay automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike.He achieved spectacular success with the modelling T Ford, introduced in 1809 and eventually produced in 1903 on the moving assembly line. Henry Ford was a major figure in the worlds automobile industry for the next 15 years. His production methods were intensively study and he also startled the world instituting (1914) the then high wage scale of $5 a day. Ford thus became a figure of legend, the native-born genius that could work miracles. He had considerable mechanical ability but his conclusions were reached intuitively rather than logically. He ran as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1918 and was narrowly defeated. In 1936 he and his son Edsel established the Ford Foundation, to which they bequeathed much of the companys stock.Henry Ford became a victim of his own success in that he clung to the Model T too long, refusing to recognize that its popularity was fading, and consequently lost first place in the automobile industry to General Motors in 1926. He had turned the governing body of the Ford Motor Company over to Edsel in 1919 but never gave Edsel effective authority. Edsel struggled vainly against this situation, and the frustrations of his position undoubtedly contributed to his death at the age of 50. Edsels oldest son was released from the navy and made an executive vice-president.