henry ford

Henry Ford Henry Ford was an American pioneer of the automobile industry and one of the nations many industrialist. Henry Ford was born in 1863. Many people believe that Henry Ford invented the first automobile, which he did not or for that matter invent the assembly line but he was an innovator (para 1,The Henry Ford Resource Guide).Henry Fords first car was the original Model A and it did not sell very well. Innovators don't usually don't invent products or other thing. The first two companies Henry Ford started failed before he decided to start Ford Motor Company (para 2, The Henry Ford Resource Guide.) He didn't just start out making automobiles, in fact he was a very hard worker even before he started Ford Motor Company. He left his family at the young age of 16 years old to work at a machine shop in Detroit and only made $2.50 a week, where he made valves (para 2, Timeline of Henry Ford). Before the Ford Motor Company was started, Henry ford started the Detroit Automobile Company which was financially backed by people were interested and impressed with his first automobile that he designed which was called the “Quadricycle.” The company would fail after the investors got tired of his automobile going nowhere (para 6, Timeline of Henry Ford). Henry Ford reinvented the automobile and transformed America, it had a huge impact on the lives of Americans and people who worked for him. His “You can have any color car you want, as long as it's black,” kept cars cheap and affordable for hard working Americans. His $5.00 a day wage were more than anybody else was paying at the time, after Ford announced the $5.00 a day wage, 10,000 people flocked to Highland Park to apply for jobs. Ford Motor Company was started by Henry Ford and Alexander Malcomson in 1903 and cash on hand was $28,000 that was pumped into Ford Motor Company along with around $21,000 that was to come from private investors(para 8, Timeline of Henry Ford). The first Model A which was produced in 1903 was not very popular and Ford Motor Company did not sell very many cars. This Model A was Ford Motor Companies first automobile that was produced (Vaughan, 2006). Henry Ford had made many cars before the Model T was produced, they consisted of Model A, AC, C, F, K, N, R and S. (para 9, Timeline of Henry Ford). In 1908, Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company start producing the Model T which is his most known car along with the second generation Model A which superseded the Model T. In just a short couple of months, demand for the car is ridiculously high and Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company have to put all the new orders for the Model T on hold because of the high demand (para 10, Timeline of Henry Ford). The Model T was built exactly the same way for every car produced, his car was affordable for most but others could still not afford it.(para 2, PBS.org). As stated before Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line or the automobile but he was an innovator of what already existed. Henry Ford determined to make his cars cheaper he had to make parts the same way each time they were made and not have small differences which would make a certain part not fit the right way in a certain automobile if it was made for a different automobile, he realized that he needed every part to be built the same so that the parts were interchangeable with each other so that every part did not have to be built different, saving time and money with each and every part that came off the line. The parts were originally made by hand which obviously meant that the parts were different each time. After Henry Ford asked Frederick Taylor, who did studies to determine what rate the machines should be ran at, the first moving assembly line in 1913 started to move which Henry Ford got the idea from a meat packing plant in Chicago because of the conveyor belts used (para 4, pbs.org) The Model T proved very successful, Ford Motor Company usually shipped a car every 36 seconds, in the typical 8 hour days. (pg 339, Hughes and Cain). The speed that Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company were producing and shipping cars was astounding, years ago it would take more than a day to make a car let a lone ship a car. When you have interchangeable parts that are made by machine instead of by hand meant that the parts fit each and every car, greatly reducing the amount of time it took to build a car, instead of having to wait for a part to be built for a specific car, all the parts were the same so you could basically plug it into any car and it would fit, something that was not done before the parts were made by machine. It would not be until ten years late that Ford Motor Company and Henry Ford reached their highest level of production which was a Model T every 15 seconds during the day (339, Hughes and Cain). Henry Ford's famous quote, “You can have any car you want as long as it's black,” was not entirely true, but during the time were Henry Ford was pumping out a car out of his factory every 36 seconds and then down to 15 seconds, he needed readily available car bodies ready for parts to be installed and black paint dried the fastest and was the cheapest. Keeping the cars black meant it could also keep the cars affordable so the general population could afford them, during the period of 1914 to 1925, the car indeed only come in black, but after 1925 it came in many different shades of green, red, blue and gray (Kurylko ). The reason Henry Ford had to venture into other colors is because of his competitors that Henry Ford's venture into the interchangeable parts drew interest from other manufactures, Hughes and Cain state that “The American system drew consideriable comment at London's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, where products such as McCormicks reaper, Colt's revolver and Singer's sweing machine were displayed, all of which included interchangeable parts.”(pg340) Henry Ford was also a pioneer in the wage department, in 1913 Henry Ford announced that he would be paying a wage of $5 a day to help with the turnover rate of his workers, it was not so they could afford one of his cars. The turnover rate was so high in 1913 that Henry Ford had to hire more than 52,000 workers to fulfill 14,000 jobs. A lot of the employees that Henry Ford had were tired of the repetitive work that is entailed while working on an assembly line, many of his workers just quit on the spot. As you can see that poses a problem for Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company because if you have workers that quit just on the spot, you have to find somebody to replace them right on the spot or production would be halted and no automobiles would be produced. The turnover was so high that the cost of training was high because of the turnover of workers and the constant delays resulted in Ford Motor Companies cars from being as cheap as he wanted them to be which led to less cars being on the road and less profit in Henry Ford and Ford Motor Companies profits. When workers quit on the spot the assembly line halted costing Ford Motor Company a lot of downtime of the assembly line but training new employees also costs Ford Motor Company money because of the extra time needed to train these employees. As this happened, not every single employee was entitled to the $5 a day wage, you had to meet certain criteria, basically asserting you were a pure “American”. You had to learn English if you were an immigrant and only single women were eligible and men who's wives also worked at a different job were ineligible for the wage increase (Worlstall, 2012). Henry Ford in 1919 stated that he was going to start a different car company that competed against Ford Motor Company but it was just to fool shareholders into selling their shares, Henry Fords brokers bought all the shares of Ford Motor Company back and the family retained control of Ford Motor Company (para 20, Timeline of Henry Ford) As you can see Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line or the automobile but what he did was shape the future of what we have today, Ford Motor Company is still in existence to this day and still owned by the family. Not an inventor but an innovator where Henry Ford took something that already existed and made something better. He not only made the automobile better than it was already being made but Henry Ford put the moving assembly line