Henry Ford: Highlights of His Life

by Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

Men Who Made History

HENRY FORD:
Highlights of His Life

A Publication of
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN

Copyright 1964
The Edison Institute
Dearborn, Michigan

Henry Ford spent his early life on a farm. He was born in a small frame house that stood in a grove a few miles from Detroit, near the River Rouge. On each side of the river were the farms of people who had come to the Middle West to get land of their own. Henry’s father, William Ford, was one of these early settlers.

The elder Ford came to America from Ireland in 1847, the year of the great potato famine in that country. He made his way to southern Michigan where he found work. At first, he labored on the railroad and then at the arsenal in Dearbornville. Later, he was a “hired hand” on the farm of Patrick O’Hern in Springwells Township. Here William Ford settled down. He purchased forty acres of land, and with his employer, Patrick O’Hern, built a farmhouse. In 1861 he married Mary Litogot, the foster daughter of O’Hern.

Henry Ford, the first son of Mary and William, was born in 1863. Soon there were brothers and sisters. Their life on the farm was a round of doing chores, working in the fields, and taking trips to town. In the winter, the children went to the one-room school over at the “Scotch settlement.”

Henry Ford might well have remained on the farm and followed in his father’s footsteps. The soil around Dearborn was fertile, and the products of the land found a good market in nearby Detroit, a busy lake port. Although farming meant hard work and long hours, it was an honorable trade. William Ford was not rich, but neither was he poor. He held a position of respect in the community.

But Henry Ford had other ideas. He wanted to have something to do with machinery. He was interested in the tools of the farm rather than in the farm itself. He also tinkered with watches; at the age of thirteen he was repairing the timepieces of his friends. It was a real thrill for him when Fred Reden, a neighbor, brought the first portable steam engine to Dearborn. Henry was permitted to fire its boiler. On the trips to town with his father, he saw other machines, road engines, carding mills, and grist mills.

When Henry finished school at the age of sixteen, he did what thousands of other farmers’ sons were doing—he left for the city.

Detroit was a bustling town of one hundred thousand people. It was a commercial center for the Great Lakes shipping trade, and it was also an industrial center. It was to the shops and factories of Detroit that Henry Ford came to learn a trade.

His first job, at the Michigan Car Works, lasted only six days, but he soon found another one at the machine shop of James Flowers and Bros., where he became a machinist’s apprentice. In this shop he learned about engines, and about the tools and machines that made parts for other machines. At night he repaired watches in the jewelry shop of James Magill. A few months later, he left the Flowers’ shop to work at the Dry Dock Engine Company where he had greater opportunity to learn about steam engines. When his apprenticeship was over, he became Henry Ford, the machinist.

Instead of continuing to work at his trade in the shops of Detroit, he went back to Dearborn. William Ford lent his son eighty acres of timbered land, and Henry Ford set up a saw mill. During the harvesting season, he operated an engine for a group of threshers. He also found time to travel about southern Michigan repairing Westinghouse portable steam engines.

Henry Ford was also continuing his education. For several months he attended a business college in Detroit, all the while tinkering with machines and learning still more about tools. He had an opportunity to repair, and thus become familiar with, a “gas engine” at an iron works in Detroit. As an apprentice, he had read about such an engine, invented by a German named Otto, which received its power from an explosion inside the cylinder. Several Americans were also thinking about this “internal combustion” engine.

In 1888 he married Clara Bryant, whose father owned a farm near the Ford homestead in Dearborn. After their marriage, the young couple built a “square” house nearby, where they lived for nearly three years. During this time, Henry farmed as well as repaired and operated steam engines.

In 1891, Henry Ford ended his days on the farm by moving back to Detroit, where he was employed by the Edison Illuminating Company, one of several companies that furnished electricity to the city. Detroit was changing—in the days of his apprenticeship, there had been no electric lights for homes and streets and shops. Henry’s new job was to keep the steam engines running at the Willis Avenue power station.

The year 1893 was a good year for Henry Ford, in spite of the fact that it was a hard year of panic for many other people. At the World’s Fair in Chicago that summer, he was able to add to his knowledge of gas engines and “horseless carriages.” Late in the year, his son Edsel was born. Shortly after this, his pay was raised and he was transferred to the main plant of the Illuminating Company. To be nearer his new job, the Ford family moved to 58 Bagley Avenue in Detroit. In the back yard of the new home was a brick shed; here Henry set up his tools and continued his tinkering with gas engines.

His first experiment was not long in the making. With a piece of gas pipe, an old wheel, some wire, and other scraps of metal assembled on a long board fastened to the kitchen sink in the Ford home, he made his first model gas engine. Although it sputtered and jumped, it worked.

During the years that Henry Ford worked on his homemade engines, other men were also experimenting with gas engines, and they were just as determined as he was to make them operate successfully. The fair in Chicago had aroused the curiosity of many people, and the newspapers began to carry stories about “horseless carriages.” From France came word of the exploits of Daimler and Benz with their “road wagons,” and in 1895, New Yorkers saw three Benz “horseless wagons.” Henry Ford traveled East to see them. Late in the same year, the Chicago Times-Herald announced that it would give a $5,000 prize to the winner of a race between these new contraptions. Only four cars were ready at race time, and only two got away from the starting line—a Duryea and a Benz. The Benz won. One of Henry Ford’s friends, Charles B. King of Detroit, was an umpire of the race. Back in Detroit, the two friends probably discussed the merits of the cars that King had seen in Chicago. At any rate, King gave Ford some intake valves for his engines.

Henry Ford continued to add to his knowledge of gas engines. Soon after the race in Chicago, the American Machinist magazine told of an engine invented by E. J. Pennington which, in a day when most gas engines were bulky and heavy, was light and compact. This idea appealed to Ford, and his work took a new turn.

The First Ford Takes to the Road

By the spring of 1896, he was ready to make a trial run with his own horseless carriage. First he had to tear out part of the brick wall of his shed in order to get his machine into the alley. Once in the open, the engine was started, and the car bumped down the cobblestone street and continued successfully on its first short run around the block. A few weeks later, he drove it out to the homestead in Dearborn. His father was not impressed with the contraption.

These first tests meant more labor; hours of changing, adjusting, and repairing were ahead. During the day, Ford was the chief engineer of the Illuminating Company, but in his spare time, he was Ford the experimenter.

The signs of the times were encouraging. The great inventor, Thomas Edison, announced in the newspapers that the horse was doomed. Up in Lansing, R. E. Olds produced his first Oldsmobile. Alexander Winton of Cleveland drove his auto from Cleveland to New York, making what was called a “reliability” run. William K. Vanderbilt bought a car to race. All over the nation, people began to read and hear about the marvels of the new invention, of the men who were building cars, and of the races they held at fairgrounds and parks.

A new field was thus opened up for sportsmen. In Detroit, William H. Murphy, a prominent citizen, heard of Henry Ford’s car. Murphy and his friends saw an opportunity to get into the racing car business; they formed a company, called the Detroit Automobile Company, with Henry Ford as its chief engineer. At last he could leave the Illuminating Company and devote all of his time to automobiles. It was a bold move for a man with a family to give up a good job. Some of his friends and relatives told each other that he should have stayed where he was.

The original investment of Murphy and his friends was not enough. Improvements and changes in the model were made. Even though $68,000 was invested in the company, the hoped for production of many cars never materialized, and in January, 1901, Henry Ford left the Detroit Automobile Company.

Henry Ford went to work on a racer which he hoped would bring him new opportunities to manufacture automobiles. His chance came in 1901. It was announced in Detroit that Alexander Winton would race his world champion car, “The Bullet,” at the Grosse Pointe race track, a few miles from the city; Henry Ford challenged the champion.

When the day of the race arrived, stores and shops closed, and a parade of sixty-eight cars moved out to Grosse Pointe. Three cars lined up for the ten-mile race, but only Winton and Ford got away. At the end of eight miles, Ford was trailing Winton, but then the “Bullet” began to sputter, and it limped to the finish line behind the racer built by Ford. The newspapers the next day reported that Henry Ford was now in the first rank of American “chauffeurs.”

In November, 1901, the Henry Ford Company was organized to manufacture automobiles, but the venture was short-lived, and four months later, Ford was working for himself again. In his small workshop, he went to work on two new racers, the “Arrow” and the “999.” With the help of a draftsman, a mechanic, and a retired bicycle champion, the new cars were made ready for racing.

Ford found a bicycle champion, Barney Oldfield, to pilot his “999” in the Manufacturers Challenge Cup Race at Grosse Pointe. This time his car led the field to a new record, finishing a mile in front of his competitors.

After the race, A. Y. Malcomson, a Detroit coal dealer, became interested in Henry Ford and his automobiles. The two men became partners in a new venture and Henry Ford began work on a “pilot model” for a new car. During the early months of 1903, more investors were found. By spring, a new company was organized to carry out the plans of Ford and Malcomson.

In June, 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated. In addition to Malcomson, the original stockholders included James Couzens, an employee of Malcomson; John and Horace Dodge, the owners of a machine shop; Albert Strelow, a contractor; John S. Gray, a banker; Vernon E. Fry, a real estate dealer; Charles H. Bennett, an air rifle manufacturer; C. J. Woodhall, a clerk; Horace H. Rackham and John W. Anderson, lawyers; and Henry Ford. Together, they had raised $28,000 to start the new venture.

The new company rented a building on Mack Avenue in Detroit for $75 a month and prepared to manufacture its automobiles. The new factory was 250 feet long by 50 feet wide. This was adequate space, since the new company did not attempt to make any of the parts for its cars. The Dodge brothers, who owned a large machine shop, made the Ford chassis, a carriage company built the body, and the wheels were purchased in Lansing. Once the parts were brought together, a dozen men assembled, adjusted, and tested the completed car—the early model A Ford. Soon this car, which sold for $950 f.o.b. Detroit, was advertised as the “boss of the road.” Its two cylinders gave it a maximum speed of thirty miles per hour.

Although Henry Ford’s first two ventures into automobile manufacturing had not been successful, this third attempt showed great promise. At the end of the first year, the Ford Motor Company had sold over seventeen hundred automobiles.

The year 1903, which marked a turning point in the life of Henry Ford, now forty years of age, was an interesting year for all Americans. The first successful transcontinental automobile trip was completed in August. A telegraphic cable was completed across the Pacific to Manila in the Philippines. In Washington, Theodore Roosevelt was clearing the way for the building of the Panama Canal, and in New Jersey, the Edison studios completed the first full-length motion picture, called “The Great Train Robbery.” Finally, in December, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew an airplane successfully at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. During the next few years, those who marveled at progress in 1903 saw even greater changes in their way of living brought about by improved transportation and communication. The twentieth century had started off well.

The Ford Motor Company was also experimenting with changes. Models B, C, and F appeared. When the Mack Avenue plant was no longer adequate to house the activities of the company, a new building was erected, ten times larger than the first one. By 1906, the company announced models N, S, and R, as well as a six-cylinder K. Experimentation went beyond the building of different models of automobiles; for example, a tractor was planned and constructed, but never sold.

During this time, changes were also made in the ownership of the plant. Some of the stockholders sold out, and Henry Ford became the major owner of the Ford Motor Company.

A real danger to Ford and his company during these early years was the threat of a patent suit. Back at the time of the Times-Herald race in 1895, George Selden, a lawyer in Rochester, New York, had patented a “self-propelled vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine.” Although he never built an automobile, all those who did were threatened with infringement suits. This fact made it necessary for the makers of automobiles to pay royalties to the patent holder. The Ford Motor Company refused. The result was a long and involved battle in the federal courts, lasting until 1911 when the case was finally settled in favor of the Ford Motor Company.

The farmhouse where Henry Ford was born in 1863 stands today in Greenfield Village ...

... along with the small brick schoolhouse from the “Scotch settlement” where he began school in 1871.

The interior of the 58 Bagley Avenue workshop where Ford built his first car, as restored in Greenfield Village. The car itself is now on display in The Henry Ford Museum.

The “body drop” at the Highland Park plant of the Ford Motor Company in 1913. The modern automobile assembly line grew from such operations as this. Photo courtesy Ford Motor Company Archives

Henry Ford views his first car and the ten millionth Ford in 1924....

By this time the Model T standing in front of a farmhouse was a familiar sight all over America. Photo courtesy Ford Motor Company