HENRY FORD:
DRIVING AMBITION
It may be the most memorable
Automotive designer, industrial process innovator and workplace
reformer, the legendary Henry Ford was one of the most infl uential
and controversial engineers of the 20th century.
quotation to come out of automobile
manufacturing. In his 1922 memoir
entitled My Life and Work, Henry Ford
set out his approach to production:
“Any customer can have a car painted
any color that he wants so long as it
is black.” And although this has entered
the mythology of the industrialised
20th century as an early example of
tyranny over consumer choice, it was in
fact more a case of Ford’s pragmatism.
Black paint dried quicker than other
colours, allowing his cars to roll off the
production lines at such a rate that
by 1918 more than half of America’s
automobiles were Model Ts.
When production stopped in 1927
there were more than 15 million of them
on the road. It is the eighth highest
selling car of all time, while the Ford
brand remains the fi fth largest (by unit
production) manufacturer on the planet.
In 1999 the ‘Tin Lizzie’ became the offi cial
Global Automotive Elections Foundation
‘car of the century’, beating other fi nalists
in the form of the Mini, Citroën DS,
Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche 911.
There are still 50,000 roadworthy Model
Ts in existence.
The man that put the world on
wheels was born in 1863 in Michigan
during the American Civil War. The son
of Irish immigrant William Ford and
Mary Litogot (whose parents had crossed
the Atlantic from Belgium) started life
in one of the most turbulent times in
America’s history: the industrialised
northern states (the ‘Union’) defeated
the agricultural southern states (the
‘confederacy’), and the abolition of
Written BY Nick Smith
HENRY FORD 1863-1947
April 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk 50
engine was the way forward and in 1892
“I completed my fi rst motor car.”
By 1893 Ford’s car was running to
the designer’s ‘partial satisfaction’ and
over the next few years he was to drive
it – the fi rst of three versions he was to
build at his home workshop – more than
a thousand miles. During this phase
of experimentation Ford was in the
employment of the Edison Illumination
Company of Detroit where in 1893 he
was promoted to chief engineer. This
allowed him the time and money to
develop his next self-propelled vehicle
– the Ford Quadricycle – which was
tested in 1896, the year Ford met Thomas
Edison himself, who encouraged further
development. This in turn led Ford to
found the short-lived Detroit Automobile
Company that was dissolved in early
1901. Re-emerging later that same
year under the banner of the Henry
Ford Company, he teamed up with the
engineer C Harold Wills, who was later
to become the chief contributor to the
Model T design. Following a dispute over
interference from his capital investor
William H Murphy, Ford left the Henry
Ford Company. Murphy promptly
renamed it the Cadillac Automobile
Company.
By 1903 the Ford Motor Company had
been established and was working on
what was to become known as the Ford
model 999. It was in this car that Ford,
on 12 January 1904, set a new land speed
record of 91.3mph. With the marketing
assistance of cycle ace and car racer
Barney Oldfi eld, the Ford name became
known throughout the United States.
This understanding of brand promotion
L ate, great engineers
slavery followed. A moment in history that defi ned a nation’s
future, the war ushered in an era of prosperity and industrial
expansion to the north, with rail and telegraph networks linking
all parts of America and providing new markets.
It was against this backdrop the young Henry Ford set out on
the path to becoming an engineer. In 1875 his father gave him a
pocket watch that he was to dismantle and reassemble with an
ease that meant that he was soon the local watch repairer. More
signifi cantly, he was also introduced to a Nichols and Shepard
steam engine, the ‘fi rst vehicle other than horse-drawn’ that he
had ever seen. Ford subsequently experimented on building his
own engines, systematically dismissing steam as too dangerous
for lightweight vehicles, electricity as economically unviable
due to the cost of the copper wire, and storage ba eries as
impractical due to their weight. After repairing a single-cylinder
four-stroke engine designed by the German engineer Nikolaus
O o, Ford became convinced that the internal combustion
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